News Story (Tennessee)
Holly Meyer
Tennessean, The, Tennessee Justice Center
March 11, 2016
READ THE FULL STORY HERE
Tags: Access to Justice, Justice for All
DETAILS
ohn Neil Howell’s options were bleak. At one point, the father and truck driver from Fayetteville, Tenn., thought he’d have to cut the operable tumor out of his kidney himself or die from it.
Howell didn’t have insurance. When he went to apply, he discovered that he made too much money to qualify for TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program, but too little to qualify for subsidies on the federally-run exchange. The situation was dire, but a phone call to the Tennessee Justice Center ended up helping save his life.
The Tennessee Justice Center, a non-profit, advocacy law firm in Nashville, helped Howell and his wife, Jennifer Howell, sort through the red tape of TennCare last fall and decipher the maximum number of hours he could work in order to qualify for the program. The surgery was a success. Howell is one of the thousands the organization has helped in the past two decades.
“I couldn’t have done it without them. There’s no way. It’s impossible,” Howell said. “There’s so many laws and so many rules about all this stuff and unless you’re just a deadbeat that does absolutely nothing, I don’t know how you get covered without these people.”