Opinion ID: 786208
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Meaningful Hearing

Text: 92 The district court concluded that Plaintiffs were not allowed to show an existing medical condition that makes them unable to obtain health insurance. 93 Defendants argue that Plaintiffs were not denied meaningful hearings because they were represented by counsel, obtained significant discovery from Defendants, and were given the opportunity to raise legal challenges to the TennCare coverage eligibility criteria which resulted in the denial of their applications. We disagree. 94 Although Plaintiffs timely appealed the denial of their first applications, the TennCare Bureau continued to deny Plaintiffs coverage because Plaintiffs failed to indicate on their applications that they had been denied health insurance and failed to attach insurance denial letters to their applications. When the TennCare Bureau received Plaintiffs' subsequent applications with attached insurance denial letters, it treated the applications as separate applications for coverage as uninsurable individuals. Plaintiffs' subsequent applications, filed before their requests for reassessment, were ignored by the TennCare Bureau for purposes of reassessing their first applications. In sum, because Plaintiffs stated on their first applications that they had not previously been denied health insurance, Defendants disallowed them from demonstrating at a hearing that they had existing medical conditions that made them unable to obtain health insurance, thus evidencing their uninsurable status, before denying coverage under the original application. See Friedrich v. Sec'y Health & Human Servs., 894 F.2d 829, 837 (6th Cir.1990) (finding that the touchstone of procedural due process is the fundamental requirement that an individual be given the opportunity to be heard in a meaningful manner). We therefore hold that Plaintiffs were denied a meaningful hearing in violation of procedural due process. 95 The dissent's dismissive suggestions that a ruling in Plaintiffs' favor would make a constitutional issue out of every bureaucracy's faulty paperwork, is only partly true. Because statutory language bestows legitimate rights upon an individual, and those rights are entitled to procedural due process, only those bureaucracies which engage in practices that violate an individual's rights, procedurally or otherwise, will have themselves created a constitutional problem. 96