1Fall 2014

Despite the recent roiling within the U.S. Department of Veterans Af-fairs, third-year law student COL

Noel Christian Pace, an Equal Justice Works (EJW)/AmeriCorpsJD Fellow in the Health Rights Clinic has been in-strumental in helping veterans fight for their health care rights. As featured in the Miami Herald, NBC 6 Miami, LawDragon.com, and Miami Law Mag-azine, he represented an African-Amer-ican Army Veteran who was told by VA officials that his leukemia was not caused by his military service. “I researched my client’s day-to-day duties in the Army

and learned that he had worked as a printing press operator/repairman and typewriter cleaner/washer from 1978-1981,” Pace said. “When I realized the types of chemicals my client was likely to have been exposed to and the poten-tial effect on his health, I felt I was gain-ing ground.” Pace discovered that The National Institute of Health reported that chronic or prolonged exposure to ben-zene, used extensively in printing press operations, has been linked to bone marrow degeneration and leukemia. “With that, we put forward an ‘On the Record Review,’ which received a fully

favorable ruling from a Federal Admin-istrative Law Judge. In addition, we are currently challenging the VA’s determi-nation that his leukemia did not result from his service.”

Building on the success of Hosea Smith’s case and other veterans cas-es, for 2014-2015, the Health Rights Clinic has commenced its new Veter-ans Rights Project, which includes two EJW/AmeriCorps Attorneys, four EJW/AmeriCorpsJD Fellows, and has estab-lished an official relationship with the new Student Veterans of America, Mi-ami Law Chapter—in an effort to help Miami Veterans get the care and ben-efits they earned and deserve.

ClinicianThe

VOLUME 3 FALL 2014

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI SCHOOL OF LAW HEALTH RIGHTS CLINIC

ARMY COLONEL SECURES WIN FORARMY VETERAN WITH LEUKEMIA

10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION SPRING 2016

Attorney Ryan Foley, Veteran Hosea Smith and COL Noel C. Pace.

Hosea Smith

2 The Clinician

On September 11, 2014, 3L Colonel Noel C. Pace an-nounced the formation of the Student Veterans of America (SVA), Miami Law Chapter. Pace who is a Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, Iraq campaign Veteran, and former intern in Miami Law’s Heath Rights Clinic and now EJW/AmeriCorps JD Veterans Right’s Fellow said this official chapter of the SVA national organization at Miami Law will bring veteran law stu-

dents and non-veteran law students together for fellowship, education, and service in the common goal of advocat-ing for Veterans rights. In addition, the new SVA Miami Law Chapter students for the clinic’s Veterans Rights Project. On September 29, 2014, LT Ashley George, 2L and Florida Na-tional Guard Officer-Vice President, and Tara Irani, 2L-Secre-tary were elected to the first SVA Executive Board. COL Pace was elected President. The SVA, Miami Law Chapter has events planned for the remainder of the year starting with a “Lunch & Learn” regarding Veteran’s Law on October 23, 2014. All Miami Law students, staff, faculty, and alumni are welcome to join the SVA Miami Law Chapter. To become a SVA member or to learn more about SVA, or to RSVP for our upcoming events, please visit the SVA, Miami Law Chapter’s UM OrgSync page at: https://orgsync.com/97634/chapter.

The Student Veterans of America, Miami Law Chapter is an official chapter of the Student Veterans of America. More infor-mation can be found at www.studentveterans.org.

First Official meeting of the Newly Formed Student Veterans of America (SVA), Miami Law Chapter.

STUDENT VETERANS OF AMERICA,MIAMI LAW CHAPTER ACTIVATES!

Student Veterans of America

MIAMILAWUNIVERSITY OF MIAMI SCHOOL OF LAW

99Secured in

benefits

Lawful Permanent Resident Adjustments Approved

NaturalizedFood StampCases Granted

$2MILLION

IMMIGRATION ADJUDICATIONS

ApprovedSSI CASESOver

Legal Service HoursCompleted by Law Students

Over

Students Trainedto Become Lawyers

133

103,000

Over

FELLOWS RECOVERED over $750,000 in benefits for DISABLED VETERANS.

3Fall 2014

Ariel Gonzalez woke up the morning of January 15, 2014 feeling sick. Within hours he was doubled over in pain, had a severe headache, and was vomiting. He rode his bike, his only means of transportation, twenty minutes to the local clinic, Flor-ida Community Health Centers, Inc., where he was diagnosed with abdominal pain and sent home with some medications and instructions to go to an emergency room if his condition worsened.

Later that same day, feeling much worse, Gonzalez got a friend to drive him to a local public hospital ER where he was found to be in acute kidney failure. He was then rushed by am-bulance to Lawnwood Regional Medical Center, in the next county, for emergency dialysis and hospitalized for a week.

Had Miami Law’s Health Rights Clinic not stepped in and advocated on behalf of Gonzalez, a 35-year-old undocument-ed farmworker without a primary care physician or health insur-ance, he would have not seen the end of the Florida growing season.

Gonzalez endured six weeks of 90-minute round trips to Lawnwood and was admitted only if he was in kidney failure, as the law students were frantically pushing to get him approved into a clinical dialysis program. On top of that, the condition left him listless, weak, and unable to go back to picking oranges and the majority of the medical instructions, both in writing and spoken, were in English, a language he doesn’t understand, read, or speak.

Aside from only treating him when he was in kidney failure, the hospital’s other solution for Gonzalez’s life-threatening con-dition was to offer him “medical repatriation” —sending him back to his border town home of Matamoros, Mexico at the hospital’s expense. Even if Gonzalez survived the trip, he would be faced with certain death with no access to dialysis treat-ment in his hometown.

What Gonzalez didn’t know – because the patient naviga-tor contracted by the hospital didn’t know – was that he quali-fied for federally funded Emergency Medicaid. This is when Health Rights Clinic students, Kanchi Doshi, Jenna Feldman, Re-becca Greenfield, and Nicole-Suzette Velazquez sprang into action and began firing off letters demanding the hospital and other agencies follow state law and apply for Emergency Med-icaid and provide three-times-a-week dialysis for Gonzalez.

That process would take 20 days of round-the-clock advo-cacy by the students, paralegal Vanessa Alpizar, clinic adminis-trative assistant Albert Arguello, and the clinic’s two supervising attorneys, JoNel Newman and Melissa Swain.

What the Health Rights Clinic students found was that not one of the agencies charged with securing emergency care for people like Gonzalez had the slightest knowledge of the benefits available or the protocol and process to apply. Lawn-wood Regional Medical Center didn’t know how to apply for the aid, and Florida’s Department of Children and Families, charged with administering the state’s Medicaid program, was grossly unaware of their own process.

The Health Rights Clinic has become adept at the process through their work with the immigrant community in Miami, through their advocacy at Jackson Memorial Hospital and public health clinics.

Today, Gonzalez is receiving thrice-weekly outpatient di-alysis at the Big Lake Kidney Center, just 10 minutes from the house where he lives with more than six other farmworkers. The process takes about forty hours a week, leaving him unable to work, even if he had the strength. His many roommates in the tidy, but run down house with a dirt yard, have allowed him to stay on in exchange for cleaning, cooking, and other chores.

“If you think about the number of hours just our clinic ex-pended on this one case, you can easily realize that hundreds

2L CLINIC STUDENTS SAVE THE LIFE OF UNDOCUMENTED FARMWORKER AND WIN HOPE PUBLIC INTEREST INNOVATIVE SERVICE AWARD

Jenna Feldman, Professor JoNel Newman, Ariel Gonzalez, Rebecca Greenfield, Associate Director Melissa Swain, Kanchi Doshi And Nicole Velazquez

4 The Clinician

of farmworkers in Florida alone are dying because of lack of access to care,” said Swain. “We need to figure out how oth-ers can get access without this kind of intervention. Hospitals, clinics and agencies are not talking to one another. We know there is a problem. As law professors, we are training our stu-dents to answer the question: How can we make this system work?”

But throughout Florida, says Newman, the process is “locked in a drawer somewhere…We took this one case to test wheth-er the system created in 2010 was working,” said Newman. “We learned it wasn’t. This is an enormous and life-threatening hole in our public health safety net that needs to be plugged.”

Word of Gonzalez’s success story spread rapidly. The clinic started receiving a multitude of requests for information re-garding how they were able to do the seemingly impossible. What became increasingly apparent was the lack of under-standing and communication that existed among the various players in the Emergency Medicaid arena. The clinic reformed their goals to address this concern, which led to the beginning of their advocacy efforts.

The clinic enhanced and transferred their newly acquired individual client advocacy skill set to advocate for statewide reform. The team analyzed their steps to their successful out-come and developed a step-by-step policy guideline for fu-ture use to help the many other members of this neglected chronically ill population. This statewide advocacy became a multi-level outreach effort to implement a standardized, streamlined process.

“Working at the Health Rights Clinic has made me increas-ingly aware of how limited access to health care is in this coun-try,” Greenfield said. “I have also become more aware of how many people are actually left out of the safety net the Afford-able Care Act was supposed to create.”’

Throughout this experience, the clinic discovered the lack of understanding and knowledge of the policy has rendered the policy virtually obsolete. The team hopes to create a rule-making petition to make the policy more readily accessible to DCF workers, community partners, and the public at large. The clinic’s tireless efforts and continued policy work has truly been groundbreaking. It has taught its members that patient advo-cacy at both the individual and policy levels is the ultimate tool for changing inefficient and unjust agency practices. It is evident that the team’s innovative work will have a lasting impact on health care access to this vulnerable and under-served population.

Gold also interned at the Third District Court of Appeals and with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, U.S. Army, in Wash-ington, D.C., and at the American Civil Liberties Union. In addi-tion, she was a staff writer for the Jerusalem Post, conducting interviews on everything from business to arts in Hebrew.

As a result of their efforts, the clinic students – Doshi, Feld-man, Greenfield, and Velazquez – were awarded the Innova-tive Service in Public Interest Award, a recognition given by Mi-ami Law HOPE Public Interest Resource Center to law students.

HEALTH RIGHTS EQUAL JUSTICE WORKS AMERICORPS LEGAL FELLOW SCORES BIG

WIN ON BEHALF OF VETERANSAlissa Gold, JD ’13,

worked in Miami Law’s Health Rights Clinic as an Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps Legal Fel-low. Working exclusively with veterans, she won two disability claims with Social Security for two of her clients in her last two weeks on the job.

One client, Lori Davis, was the victim of PTSD stemming from a rape while serving in the mili-tary. When Davis’s final award is tallied, she will likely receive $20,000 in back disability benefits and just under $2,000 a month going forward from the Social Security Administration.

“I was about to be homeless,” said the single mother of two and Navy veteran. “I had been missing work, then had to stop. I was given short-term disability but the employer was

not very understanding and they even stopped that. I kept getting denied food stamps.

“And then I met Alissa. Everyone respects the fact that you have an attorney. I was intimidated by the system and, in my situation, I would never be able to afford an attorney, even on a contingency basis. Alissa stepped in and every-thing turned around. Even when I would hit a wall, she was always reassuring me that we could handle it.

“Now I can pay bills, feed my family, and cover the ex-penses from my medical conditions. She changed every-thing. Even my outlook is ‘I can do it!’ Alissa was so encourag-ing; I am profoundly grateful to her and the program.”

Another client with advanced diabetes, Elias Santos, was awarded $20,000 in back benefits and will receive $1,555 a month going forward.

“Alissa handled the worrying for me on my case,” said the 59-year-old Puerto Rican veteran. “I was desperate and de-pressed; I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t working and I had expenses. I was in a bad situation where I could not go on when my case was taken.

“My disabilities have not changed but financially I have assistance. I am grateful for everything that Alissa has done for me,” he said.

Gold served as Editor-in-Chief to the Psychology, Public Policy, and Law Journal at Miami Law, chaired the Communi-cations and Outreach Committee of the Public Interest Lead-ership Board, and was a Miami Scholar. She served as a law

By: Catharine Skipp

Alissa Gold at Miami Veteran’s Affairs Hospital.

5Fall 2014

clerk with the United States Coast Guard where she drafted a lawful general order prohibiting the use or possession of “bath salts.”

“Working with my veteran clients this past year was an incredibly rewarding experience. I learned so much about the trials and triumphs of military service, and the difficulties of living with chronic conditions in a world that is not built to accommodate them,” said Gold. “It’s an amazing feeling to get a call from a client who just got their first Social Security check and, for the first time in a long time, doesn’t have to choose between continuing to work a job they are no longer

physically able to do and feeding their family. No person who served our country should ever have to make that choice.”

“I know that my years at Miami Law, both as a student and as an EJW AmeriCorps Legal Fellow, have well prepared me to continue to pursue my interests in public health and administrative law as I start my new position as Regulatory Counsel at the Food and Drug Administration,” said Gold.

“I was honored and humbled to be able to help these incredibly brave veterans get the benefits that they so de-serve.”

HEALTH RIGHTS CLINIC TEAM 2013-2014

HEALTH RIGHTS SUMMER CLINIC TEAM 2014

Back L to R Erin Hoover, Jason Hayet, Kanchi Doshi, William Mueller, Casaundra Johnson, Niki Velazquez, Rebecca Greenfield, Alissa Gold, Noel Pace

Front L to R Lisandra Estevez, Bethany Bandstra, Alexis Mena, Krystle Diaz, Jenna Feldman

Back L to R Andres Zornosa, Vanessa Joseph, Edgard

Cespedes

Front L to R Ivana Alvarez, Brenda Corrales

6 The Clinician

ALU

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Leah Weston is a lawyer and Equal Justice AmeriCorps Fellow with the Health Rights Clinic who provides pro bono legal assistance to veterans seeking VA Disability Benefits, So-cial Security disability benefits, Public Benefits, Permanency Planning, and other legal mat-ters, where appropriate. Born and raised in Mi-ami, Leah is a double ‘Cane, receiving her B.A. summa cum laude in 2008 and her J.D. magna cum laude in 2014 from the University of Miami. During her time in law school, she was a Miami Scholar and worked for the Community Justice Project of Florida Legal Services, a unique com-munity lawyering practice that provides legal representation for grassroots community groups at the forefront of social change in Miami. When not engaged in public interest lawyering, Leah is an avid cyclist and was a radio personality on WVUM 90.5 FM (DJ Swanky), both as a law stu-dent and an undergraduate.

Ryan Foley (J.D. 2013) is now in his second year as an Equal Justice Works Ameri-Corps Legal Fellow. Foley was a member of the Health Rights Clinic as a third year law student and during his time in the Clinic he worked ex-tensively with low-income and disabled veter-ans. He served as the Student Attorney Team Leader of the clinic’s operations at the Miami VA Medical Center where he helped manage legal interns and provided direct legal assis-tance to veteran clients.

His experiences in the Clinic pushed Foley to look for a way to continue his work on behalf of vet-erans after graduation. In July 2013 the Health Rights Clinic was awarded a grant to fund two Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps Legal Fellows dedicated to providing legal services to the South Florida veteran community. The opportu-nity to return to the Clinic in this capacity was too good for Foley to pass up. Foley began the Fellowship in September 2013 and after a suc-cessful first year where he secured over $600,000 in benefits and remains just as passionate about his mission to help our nation’s veterans as when he started. Foley credits his involvement in the Health Rights Clinic as his inspiration for wanting to make a positive impact with his law degree.

VETERANS RIGHTS PROJECT

7Fall 2014

The HEALTH RIGHTS CLINIC is a Medical-Legal Partnership operated in collaboration with the Miller School of Medicine. The Clinic primarily represents underserved client populations and works on cases pro bono.

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The Clinic is one of the first Medical-Legal clinics in the country to offer diversified support for underserved populations with a focused, coordinated care model targeting unmet legal, medical, psychiatric and social support needs.

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