The Disabled Adults of Tennessee are being neglected, abused, exploited, injured, and discriminated against by health plans, healthcare facilities, doctors, police, and state and federal agencies. Disabled Adults in Tennessee don’t have rights, because the laws which protect our rights are not being enforced.
Who I Am & What’s Happening
How Society Injures Itself As It Harms Disabled Adults
Some of the Key Issues
What is the Solution?
Help Me Hold UnitedHealthcare and TennCare Accountable
Who I Am & What’s Happening
My name is Sean Smith. I’m a 38 year old disabled adult male. I’ve had health issues since childhood and have been disabled my entire adult life. My lifetime of disability is primarily caused by my underdeveloped jaws compromising my airway, which causes Obstructive Sleep Apnea, a jaw disorder (TMD), MSK dysfunction, chronic pain, dysautonomia, MCAS, psychiatric disorders, and other comorbid complex health conditions.
In 2014 I realized that my doctors and the healthcare system had failed me. I would have to find answers myself. I dedicated myself to years of personal research and education. By 2016 I had a partial answer. By 2018 I understood I am disabled by treatable, even curable, health conditions. In 2019 I figured out I cannot access the rehabilitative care I need due to the misconduct of health plans, facilities, and providers.
Due to not being able to get the care I need, and am statutorily entitled to as a disabled adult medicaid recipient, I suffer injuries, experience periods of incapacitation, and have become more severely disabled over time. I am, quite literally, being physically and psychologically tortured. These issues affecting me are affecting many others like me, both children and adults. I am a class of persons, not just one adversely impacted individual.
I’m tired, exhausted, and traumatized. I want to stop suffering, and I want justice. I haven’t been able to find anyone in Tennessee who will Defend The Disabled from these problems I describe. The care I need exists, but I’m deprived access to it.
How Society Injures Itself As It Harms Disabled Adults
The misconduct of TennCare and its MCOs creates an environment that reimburses its providers for helping TennCare neglect and abuse its plan members. Tennesseans allow their tax dollars to be used in this manner, through their inattention, indifference, and inaction.
TennCare has a $14b annual budget. If 5-15% of their budget is lost to this waste and fraud of disabled adult neglect, abuse, exploitation, and discrimination, that is $700m-2.1b a year.
TennCare has 1.4 million recipients. For every 1000 people like me, who are disabled but don’t have to be if we get care, TennCare’s misconduct costs the SSA program $110m a year. If there are 10,000 people like me, it costs the SSA $1.1b a year. TennCare’s misconduct costs the SNAP program (food stamps) $220k per every 1000 people like me, and $26.4m per 10,000.
Stop the abuse, hold them accountable, and we can use these tax dollars for roads, schools, community health programs, or any other number of societal needs. We could also save the soul of our society, by putting an end to the atrocity being perpetrated against disabled adults in our community.
https://defendthedisabled.org/2024/10/19/tennesseans-defrauded-for-billions-every-year-by-tenncare/
https://defendthedisabled.org/2024/04/04/fix-osa-and-save-the-u-s-a-150b-1t-a-year/
There are so many other harms TennCare’s misconduct causes. What this pamphlet covers isn’t even the tip of the iceberg.
Some of the Key Issues
• Medicaid recipients (children, pregnant women, disabled adults) need access to rehabilitative jaws-airway care. Jaw and Airway issues compromise gestational and childhood development, causing children to grow into disabled adults. Rehabilitative jaws-airway care is the key to effectively preventing and treating many physical (diabetes, stroke, heart attack, chronic pain) and mental (bipolar disorder, depression, PTSD, dementia, etc) health conditions.
• The laws protecting Disabled Adult Medicaid Recipients need to be enforced. In TN I have not been able to find any private attorneys, legal aid societies, nonprofits, or law school programs which will litigate this area of law.
• Disabled adults cannot acquire the funds needed for private litigation or to pay for care due to the restrictions SSI and Medicaid recipients have on unearned income and total assets. TennCare’s misconduct makes disability programs an abusive and deadly trap.
• Disabled adults struggle or are unable to manage their own care, let alone write and file complaints, or pursue legal action. The people that should help us don’t. We need to 1) make sure that people are doing what they’re supposed to, 2) when a disabled adult does manage to file a complaint people actually investigate and protect us, 3) if they fail to, can be sued with no punitive damages cap.
• Tennessee’s state agencies need to be investigated for their failure to protect disabled adults and the fraud they’ve facilitated against Tennesseans.
• Doctors in Tennessee need to become better educated on how jaw and airway issues influence health and disability. This includes doctors at academic centers like UTHSC, Regional One, and even Vanderbilt.
What is the Solution?
I’m not sure what to write here. I understand the problems. I can describe them, and the solutions to them. Medically, Legally, Socially, Societally. I know enough to know what needs to be done. I know with the right people and resources we could Defend The Disabled. That I could get care and be a functional member of society. But I also know these problems exist because people not only do not want to deal with them, but refuse to pay enough attention to be aware of them. Tenneasseans have become comfortable and complicit with the disabled adults of their communities being “commoditized like cattle”. But there is a way.
Help Me Hold UnitedHealthcare and TennCare Accountable
I need help finding attorneys who will help me refile my pro se lawsuit in federal court. I need help funding this litigation. I need help getting media attention to build a platform to gather people so they can organize and collaborate. I need to find people to work with, and get the resources required to work with them.
https://defendthedisabled.org/2024/12/12/help-me-hold-unitedhealthcare-and-tenncare-accountable/
Defend The Disabled 