Share
|
Rafael Del Castillo is a lawyer who follows his
conscience. The Honolulu attorney
has been working as much as fifty hours a week for free since January 1.
His clients are twelve families appealing health insurance
company denials of services for their children with disabilities. Many of the denials are
life-threatening, as the children, ranging in age from 4 to 19, are medically
fragile.
He is working for free because a new law went into effect
that destroyed appeal rights patients had had for a dozen years which
reimbursed them for any legal fees in their appeals.
Del Castillo is running for Congress, for the seat in the
U.S. House of Representatives being vacated by Mazie Horono. His web site details his positions
better than I can here, but I am writing this because I believe actions can
speak as eloquently as words.
I can think of no higher recommendation for a politician
than someone who will follow his conscience as Del Castillo has been doing.
My medically fragile daughter Hannah is one of Del Castillo’s
clients. Over the past couple of
years, I’ve come to know some of the other families who rely on Del Castillo to
keep our children safe, at home, and as healthy as possible.
The law depriving our children of a level playing field
against a $110 billion a year Wall Street giant actually covers all 270,000 or
so people in Hawaii enrolled in Medicaid.
The law was intended to be the final step in the effective
block-granting of Hawaii’s Medicaid program. Cutting off access to lawyers was a simple way to deny
270,000 people access to the protections of federal law. It gave the state ultimate power
over how federal Medicaid funds are spent, accomplishing overnight what the US
Congress has blocked for the past thirty years.
What neither the state nor the health insurance companies
planned on was Del Castillo continuing to represent his clients, whether he
would be paid or not.
The law was introduced by Hawaii’s first Democratic Governor
in eight years, and passed within his first seven months in office. In a meeting with the families last
August, the Governor admitted the law was intended to save the insurance
companies money on legal fees.
The company saving the most from the law immediately was
Unitedhealth. At the time, Del Castillo
had over a dozen cases just against that company, and a record of winning 90%
of all cases. By May 2011, Del Castillo
was estimating Unitedhealth’s legal costs defending its unreasonable denials of
care at around half a million dollars for the year to date.
Ironically, Unitedhealth’s Medicaid and Medicare operations
in Hawaii had been under some form of federal or state oversight since April
2010 for violating the legal rights of these same children. Federal Medicaid
and Medicare laws were broken every time Unitedhealth denied services to the
children that their doctors had prescribed as “medically necessary.”
So the Governor knew Unitedhealth was violating federal
regulations by cutting services for our kids when he told us point blank that
he was “a failure” if any of us needed a lawyer.
The Governor was also aware the services are not being
denied because the state lacks the money to pay for them. They are being denied so Hawaii’s two
for-profit Medicaid managed care companies can sustain twenty percent operating
profits.
After all, what does a $9.4 billion “savings” from its
federal Medicaid and Medicare contracts mean to Unitedhealth compared to a few
hours of nursing care here, or a speech therapy session there?
Del Castillo has been so busy working for our children for
free that he has done little fundraising for his Congressional campaign. That was one of the reasons cited by
Hawaii’s biggest media outlet in their refusal on Friday to include Del Castillo
in their upcoming Congressional debate.
For years, the media has blackballed Del Castillo. Over a decade ago he was told the
health insurance companies had linked pulling their advertising with news
coverage of Del Castillo’s work on behalf of patient healthcare rights. Unlike, apparently, the Governor, he is
not willing to play ball with one of the state’s biggest federal contractors.
Government needs to be taken away from the corporations and
given back to the people. Public
health funds need to go to the public, not Wall Street.
This is why I support Rafael Del Castillo for Congress.
