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Judge: State violating law on HIV health care
By: The Associated Press,
Los Angeles, CA - December 5, 2008
The state has violated a 6-year-old law intended to provide medical care to impoverished people with HIV, according to a Superior Court judge's ruling announced Thursday.
The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed last year by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation that alleged the Department of Health Care Services had failed to implement a program expanding Medi-Cal coverage to eligible HIV patients in California.
Before the state law passed in 2002, HIV-positive were disqualified from the Medi-Cal program until they developed full-blown AIDS.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant ordered the AIDS foundation to develop a plan to help the state comply with the law. The foundation is scheduled to submit that plan Dec. 17.
"The ruling is a scathing indictment of the state for not doing anything to comply with this law that went into effect five years ago," foundation spokesman Ged Kenslea said. "DHCS can't pick and choose which laws they follow."
The law required the coverage expansion to be budget-neutral and outlined a plan to move Medi-Cal AIDS patients into managed care and use the savings to provide more coverage for HIV-positive patients.
The state agency argued that federal medical privacy laws prohibited it from contacting AIDS patients on Medi-Cal directly or with mailings.
Norman Williams, a deputy director for the state health agency, also argued that officials met their requirements by performing a cost analysis that showed the plan would not work without additional funding.
In a Nov. 25 decision, Chalfant wrote that the state had "arbitrarily failed to meet its statutory duties" because it did not conduct outreach to recruit AIDS patients into managed care.
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