Tricia Perry of the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights spoke with Jane Perkins, Legal Director at the National Health Law Program (NHeLP), about the Salazar v. District of Columbia case regarding Medicaid provisions. Listen in as Perkins discusses the ongoing legal battle to ensure access to health care for children in low-income communities.
Perkins tied up the interview by reading part of a previous decision in the Salazar case:
This case is about people-children and adults who are sick, poor, and vulnerable-for whom life, in the memorable words of poet Langston Hughes, “ain't been no crystal stair”. It is written in the dry and bloodless language of “the law”-statistics, acronyms of agencies and bureaucratic entities, Supreme Court case names and quotes, official governmental reports, periodicity tables, etc. But let there be no forgetting the real people to whom this dry and bloodless language gives voice: anxious, working parents who are too poor to obtain medications or heart catheter procedures or lead poisoning screens for their children, AIDS patients unable to get treatment, elderly persons suffering from chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease who require constant monitoring and medical attention. Behind every “fact” found herein is a human face and the reality of being poor in the richest nation on earth.
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