Lawsuit seeks to help VA pension beneficiaries wrongly purged from Medicaid rolls

Lawsuit seeks to help VA pension beneficiaries wrongly purged from Medicaid rolls

By Adam H. Beasley, Miami Herald
In Print: Tuesday, August 30, 2011


Irene Czajkowski, 84, is the widow of a military veteran, living in a St. Petersburg nursing home with a fixed income of roughly $20,000 a year.

Apparently, she's too rich to qualify for Medicaid assistance. The Department of Children and Families recently notified Czajkowski's brother Michael Buckley — who has power of attorney — that it planned to remove her from the long-term Care Diversion Program.

But in a lawsuit filed in federal court late Friday, attorneys argue that Czajkowski is one of an untold number of Veterans Affairs pension beneficiaries, living in nursing homes across the state, who have been wrongly purged from the Medicaid rolls, in violation of a 1987 injunction spurred by the lawsuit Mitson vs. Coler.

"Shockingly, the State of Florida has failed to comply with the Court's permanent injunction, and class members have suffered, and continue to suffer, injury as a result," according to the motion to reopen Mitson, in which the state's Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services was ordered to review Medicaid qualifying standards.

read more here