By: Antonia Sequeira, Associate, Mountain View
Fenwick & West and Facebook have been teaming up at the monthly Legal Aid of San Mateo County’s Share of Cost Clinic to help low-income seniors and disabled adults qualify for affordable health care coverage. Seniors and disabled adults with incomes just above the federal poverty level typically come to the clinic after receiving a notice that they will now be responsible for paying a major share of the cost of their medical services before the California Medical Assistance Program (Medi-Cal) will provide any health coverage. Clinic attendees are often very worried and are unsure how to interpret the complex rules of Medi-Cal coverage.
Under Medi-Cal, seniors and disabled adults with monthly incomes that rise above $1,203 ($1,621 for couples) are forced out of the Medi-Cal Aged and Disabled Federal Poverty Level program and into Medi-Cal’s Medically Needy Share of Cost program. That first program covers substantially all of the client’s medical services, while the Share of Cost program covers far less. Under the Share of Cost program, low income adults are expected to cover food, housing, and other non-medical living expenses on $600/month ($934 for couples). Beyond this “maintenance need” amount, the rest of their monthly income is required to go to payment of medical bills to meet their share of the cost of their medical care. Medi-Cal will only begin to cover their medical bills after they have accrued enough medical expenses themselves in a month to meet this share of cost amount. For low income adults with substantial medical issues or frequent care needs, this requirement can be devastating.
As a result, seniors and disabled adults often come to the clinic facing the likely prospect of having to simply do without any medical care, even though they are dealing with problems like diabetes, cancer, severe mental disabilities, dementia, or other problems for which skipping treatment is life threatening. At the clinic, our teams sit down with each client, listen to their concerns, review their paperwork, and try to help them find a workable solution that will allow them to get affordable health care coverage.
In recognition of our contributions to seniors and disabled adults, earlier this month the Legal Aid Society jointly awarded Fenwick and Facebook the Guardian of Justice Award for our longstanding partnership and contributions to the Share of Cost clinics. Fenwick and Facebook have been participating in those clinics for years, and have jointly donated a total of 627 hours of pro bono legal assistance since the beginning. For both of our legal teams, this program has been an extremely rewarding opportunity to work together and use our legal skills to interpret the Medi-Cal rules and provide much needed help to low-income individuals.
Fenwick participants recognized by the award include Lynn Pasahow, Lisa Kenkel, Patrick Premo, Claire O’Callaghan, Michael Egger, Greg Hopewell, Frank Yang, Dawn Belt, Derek Huoth, Evan Johnson, Pauline Farmer-Koppenol, Jane Kim, Zach Jones, Larissa Neumann, Christopher King, Dan Ko Obuhanych, Andrew Hilger, Helen Li, Ayyappa Vemulkar, Edgar Perez, Kevin Kim and Antonia Sequeira. Facebook participants recognized include Colin Stretch, Kelly Huffman, Jennifer Gross, Justin Gurvitz, Kat Johnston, Gilbert Wong and Mike Yaghmai.
Antonia Sequeira, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, is an associate in the Intellectual Property practice group at Fenwick & West LLP. She focuses her practice on patent prosecution, counseling, analysis and litigation. Her technology focus includes medical and biotechnology device, digital health/health IT, laboratory automation, bioscience, biopharmaceutical, software, and Internet areas. Before school, Antonia worked in diverse medical environments, including in a clinical laboratory as a certified phlebotomist. A former researcher on the Drosophila Genome Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Antonia has experience in DNA sequencing techniques, bioinformatics tools, and high-throughput laboratory automation.
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Part of the reason there are health care problems among the poor is that they cannot afford better foods. Cheaper foods have sugar, bad fats, and carbs and this leads to various health problems.
Posted by: Cheryl | 03/09/2018 at 05:39 PM