Suit Challenges New Law Requiring More than 50 MillionPeople in Medicaid to Document Citizenship
Families USA:
A lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Chicago challenges the validity of a new law that requires 50 million Medicaid recipients to prove their citizenship with passports, birth certificates, and other special documents---or lose their public health coverage.
The new law goes into effect on July 1 and may cause millions of low-income U.S. citizens to become uninsured.
"Under the new law, American citizens are about to have their health coverage denied for unconstitutional reasons," said John Bouman of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs.
"The new law will cause enormous harm to people who can't produce the special documents, even though there is no doubt that they are American citizens."
Binion was given away as a small child and raised by a great grandmother in Mississippi.
"I do not have the energy or the time to search any more for evidence showing that I was born in the United States."
Until the new law was passed as part of the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) this year, documentary proof of citizenship was required only of people whose citizenship was in doubt.
The DRA, however, changed that by requiring Medicaid beneficiaries to provide special documentary proof of their citizenship status.
