Lawsuit: State fails to pay bills for disabled | www.myajc.com

The state isn’t paying all the money it owes to private providers of care for disabled Medicaid patients, forcing some providers to cut services, a lawsuit contends.

According to the suit, two state agencies allowed hundreds of millions of unspent dollars to “lapse” into the state’s general fund, leaving the agencies without enough to pay providers the full amounts owed.

The suit accuses the state of breach of contract.

“There’s a deal that’s been broken,” said Eric Taylor, the lawyer for the four providers and five patients who are plaintiffs in the suit.

The Department of Community Health and the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities, the agencies named in the suit, declined to comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit, filed this month in Fulton County State Court, demands that the state pay all that is owed to providers of technical schooling, physical therapy, food assistance, transportation, residential care and one-on-one care for people with disabilities such as cerebral palsy, mental retardation, seizure disorders and blindness.

Taylor has asked the court treat the lawsuit as a class action case so it will apply to all the estimated 12,000 people in Georgia with profound intellectual and physical disabilities along with the more than 300 providers.

via Lawsuit: State fails to pay bills for disabled | www.myajc.com.