Spouse of John Doe v State of Florida

Outcome: Reversed a denial of benefits from Medicaid.

Description: First reported case in Florida reversing Florida medicaid's refusal to allowed a patient in a nursing home to retain his income to pay for his own private insurance - which allowed the patient to obtain better medical coverage and choice of physicians. Florida had ignored Federal law which requires the state to allow a patient on nursing home medicaid to use his own income to pay for private insurance. This made many people drop their private insurance and rely on less flexible coverage under medicaid. We took the matter on administrative appeal and got a ruling allowing the patient to use his money for extra insurance coverage. The client had better choice of physicians. We repeated these appeals for many clients, which laid the ground work for a later class action suit (by other counsel) against the state to change their policies to comply with Federal law.