TIICANN - Title II Community AIDS National Network

Tom McCormack Bio

Thomas McCormack serves as TIICANN's Public Benefits Policy Consultant, handling advocacy and policy for those benefits which supplement ADAP and other Title II Ryan White programs----Medicaid, Medicare, VA health care, the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), state health insurance risk pools, state premium payment and alternate health coverage initiatives, SSDI, SSI, TANF (welfare), food and housing programs and health coverage for those returning to work.

McCormack, a Vietnam Era Air Force veteran who grew up in Northern Virginia, graduated from the University of Virginia and attended the University of Baltimore Law School. He served as a Washington editor for CCH's respected Medicare-Medicaid Guide and Social Security Law Reporter; as a District of Columbia and Virginia welfare worker; Medicaid, Medicare, welfare, SSDI and SSI eligibility policy staffer with the federal Department of Health and Human Services; client benefits advocate with Washington's Whitman-Walker Clinic and the Maryland Disability Entitlement Advocacy Program; a benefits and insurance policy consultant with the National Association of People With AIDS and Affording Care; and a hospital indigent patient financial counselor.

His AIDS Benefits Handbook (Yale University Press) was honored as one of the year's ten best books by the New York Public Library in a Lincoln Center ceremony. His work on benefits has appeared The Journal of the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care, POZ, Positively Aware, PWA Newsline, Body Positive, HIV Alive!, WORLD, Clearinghouse Review and The Voice of TIICANN.

McCormack represents TIICANN on the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities' Social Security, Work Incentives and Health Task Forces and spent recent years advocating for the Medicare prescription drug benefit bill that was finally enacted in late 2003. He was a key leader in pressing for the low cost sharing protections in the bill for limited income Medicare patients, as well as for strengthened formulary and appeal protections. He compiled and updates a detailed data report on states' many variable Medicaid eligibility categories and rules; monitors and reports on state Medicaid eligibility cutbacks; and prepared advocacy materials on reforms to allow states to economize on, and enhance federal funding for, Medicaid, ADAP and other health programs rather than cut eligibility or services.