Zachary Karmen, DSS Chief Welfare Attorney (Retired) (Part I)

Posted on February 9, 2011 by annecwoodlen

In October 2005, I received a letter illegally kicking me off Medicaid transportation, signed by Zachary Karmen, Chief Welfare Attorney of the Onondaga County Dept. of Social Services.  That was the first I’d ever heard of Mr. Karmen.

Medicaid transportation was, at best, substandard and, at worst, grossly corrupt.  I had worked my way through the Dept. of Social Services and the County Legislature in an attempt to rectify the problem but nothing had been done so I filed a substantial and lengthy complaint with the NYS Dept. of Health.  I expected my complaint to be held in confidence but instead, within hours of it being read in Albany, it was sent back to Onondaga County.

Dept. of Social Services Commissioner David Sutkowy discussed it with Attorney Zachary Karmen—Karmen said so—and then, again within hours, Karmen kicked me off Medicaid transportation and told me I had to take the bus.  Medicaid transportation is authorized based on a doctor’s order, not a lawyer’s pique—except in Onondaga County, where we do things differently.  Clearly, I was being terminated to send a clear message:  I was to shut up and be subservient.

I suppose the brothers Sutkowy and Karmen figured that would be the end of it:  deprive a poor, sick Medicaid recipient of services and we’ll never hear from her again.  The king has spoken.  Unfortunately it was me, Annie, they were dealing with and I was heavily invested in right, truth, justice and not getting screwed, so I filed for a fair hearing.  It was a violation of Medicaid regulations to change the level of services without thirty days written notice and notification of the right to a fair hearing, but that’s what the brothers had done.  It is also a violation of the Constitution to deny someone government services because she has exercised her right to speak freely and criticize that government but they had done that, too.  This is Onondaga County.

So I got a fair hearing, which Chief Welfare Attorney Zachary Karmen prosecuted.  He has a staff of paralegals who do this stuff for him but he did mine himself.  Why would he do that?  An opposing attorney said Karmen only did fair hearings once or twice in a decade, so what was so important about my fair hearing that he did it himself?  Why did he need to make sure this one went away?  Was it because my complaint to the NYS Dept. of Health was so substantial and legitimate?  It was a complaint against Wayne Freeman, doing business as Medical Answering Service, and Kathleen Hart, doing business as the Medicaid director of Onondaga County.

So there was a fair hearing with Zachary Karmen prosecuting and me defending because I couldn’t get a lawyer.  Poor people usually can’t get lawyers in New York State and oh, by the way, Legal Aid was under contract to the Dept. of Social Services with Zachary Karmen as the contract officer.  So I lost the fair hearing and had to take the bus.  Case closed—well, not quite.  Medicaid transportation was still screwed up, so I filed a complaint with the NYS Office of the Welfare Inspector General and told a Medicaid transportation vendor I had done so.  He sent my email to Karmen, who wrote an email in which he identified himself as my enemy, accused me of being “a one-woman conspiracy,” and said he would contact the Inspector General.  This was not business as usual; Karmen had it in for me.  Consequently, no state investigation took place.  (And what’s with the one-woman conspiracy thing?  Karmen went to law school.  Didn’t he learn that it takes a minimum of two people to conspire?)

Well, maybe I did conspire, which is to say, I had a long talk with myself and came up with a new strategy.  In January 2007 I took my complaint to Senator David Valesky, who got it placed with the newly formed NYS Office of the Medicaid Inspector General, which sent two investigators to sit by my bed and listen to my story of intimidation, retribution and generally bad-assed victimization all because I said something was not right with Medicaid transportation and it should be fixed.

Medicaid transportation vendors bill the state about $8 million a year.  The dispatch contract, which was held by Wayne Freeman and Russell Maxwell, doing business as Medical   Answering Service, was worth about a quarter of a million dollars.  And Freeman and Maxwell had gotten the contract without submitting a bid.  And who was the contract officer?  Chief Welfare Attorney Zachary Karmen.  The contract never went anywhere near the Division of Purchasing, which is charged with making sure that the Onondaga County government is doing a good job of spending the taxpayers’ money.  The Dept. of Social Services, under David Sutkowy with Zachary Karmen presiding, is doing its own purchasing.

At this point my health got a whole lot worse and my doctor sent in a new application for Medicaid transportation.  I got the transportation—for two weeks, then it was canceled again, this time with nothing in writing.  I filed for and got another fair hearing, with Zachary Karmen again prosecuting.  This makes no sense to me.  The Dept. of Social Services is spending more on prosecuting me than it would cost them to transport me.  What is the motivation behind this?  The county isn’t trying to prevent a rich woman from stealing services—it’s just poor, sick, middle-aged me in a wheelchair—so I figure this must be about Freeman and Maxwell, and protecting them.

Why would the county be so heavily invested in defending the screw-ups who run Medical Answering Services?  Why are they protecting a bad subcontractor?  Why don’t they just ditch them?  (To be continued)

About annecwoodlen

I am a tenth generation American, descended from a family that has been working a farm that was deeded to us by William Penn. The country has changed around us but we have held true. I stand in my grandmother’s kitchen, look down the valley to her brother’s farm and see my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Hannah standing on the porch. She is holding the baby, surrounded by four other children, and saying goodbye to her husband and oldest son who are going off to fight in the Revolutionary War. The war is twenty miles away and her husband will die fighting. We are not the Daughters of the American Revolution; we were its mothers. My father, Milton C. Woodlen, got his doctorate from Temple University in the 1940’s when—in his words—“a doctorate still meant something.” He became an education professor at West Chester State Teachers College, where my mother, Elizabeth Hope Copeland, had graduated. My mother raised four girls and one boy, of which I am the middle child. My parents are deceased and my siblings are estranged. My fiancé, Robert H. Dobrow, was a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps. In 1974, his plane crashed, his parachute did not open, and we buried him in a cemetery on Long Island. I could say a great deal about him, or nothing; there is no middle ground. I have loved other men; Bob was my soul mate. The single greatest determinate of who I am and what my life has been is that I inherited my father’s gene for bipolar disorder, type II. Associated with all bipolar disorders is executive dysfunction, a learning disability that interferes with the ability to sort and organize. Despite an I.Q. of 139, I failed twelve subjects and got expelled from high school and prep school. I attended Syracuse University and Onondaga Community College and got an associate’s degree after twenty-five years. I am nothing if not tenacious. Gifted with intelligence, constrained by disability, and compromised by depression, my employment was limited to entry level jobs. Being female in the 1960’s meant that I did office work—billing at the university library, calling out telegrams at Western Union, and filing papers at a law firm. During one decade, I worked at about a hundred different places as a temporary secretary. I worked for hospitals, banks, manufacturers and others, including the county government. I quit the District Attorney’s Office to manage a gas station; it was more honest work. After Bob’s death, I started taking antidepressants. Following doctor’s orders, I took them every day for twenty-six years. During that time, I attempted%2
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