When a Lincoln family had nowhere else to turn, they called Legal Aid of Nebraska. “When you’re falling through the cracks, and you feel like nobody else will help you, and you don’t know where to go — Legal Aid was there,” said Angie.
Her children, Carter and Zander, both suffer from an extremely rare disease and their medication was no longer available to them due to changes in a Medicaid waiver program. She and her husband were beyond devastated. “I begged, I pleaded. I wondered, ‘Where can I get help?’”
Then she met her Legal Aid attorney. “She was the first person that said, ‘I’m going to help you. I’m going to try my best to help you get what you need,” Angie said she couldn’t even begin to describe the enormity of the task her Legal Aid attorney took on. “But she did it. She knocked it out of the park.”
Legal Aid helped by appealing the Medicaid waiver denial to the District court; the Court overturned the administration’s denial. With this ruling Legal Aid was able to help secure the assistance they needed to access the medicine that Carter and Zander need to survive. Angie said, “The fact that my Legal Aid attorney was willing to listen to me and to try and help me was amazing. Not only did she try to help — she won the case for both of my kids.”
Nebraska residents are helped every day through Legal Aid’s Health Education & Law Project (HELP), which offers legal assistance to patients in need through a partnership with Nebraska hospitals and federally qualified low-income health care providers.
“Just even knowing that there was somebody there for me, I felt hope. There is no way to ever repay them — ever,” Angie said, “If they hadn’t helped, I do not think my children would be walking this planet.”
Image: stock image used to protect the client's privacy.
