MARYLAND HEIGHTS, Mo. – A Maryland Heights family with a special-needs daughter turns to the You Paid For It Team for help getting the benefits she’s entitled from the Missouri Department of Mental Health. Our team gets results for them.
Since 2017, Amy O’Grady and her husband Gary have been fighting to get the help for their 15-year-old daughter Shannon, but they’ve had no luck.
Amy says she just keeps getting the runaround from Missouri officials on getting what they need to make their lives easier and make a big difference in Shannon’s life.
“It allows us to pay for a person assistant the state would pay for,” said Amy. “They would pay for all kinds of things. They would pay for modifications to our home if we needed them, modification to our vehicle if we needed it.”
Amy says they continuously run into roadblocks from the state.
“The state and the department of mental health is the problem,” said said. “They take all your information, and then you don’t hear from anybody. When you do hear from them, your information got lost, or they have no record of you, or there are 15 other forms that you need to fill out that nobody ever told you about.”
Gary O’Grady is just as frustrated as his wife. ”It’s hard enough dealing with the day-to-day challenges of a special needs child and everything that’s involved with that to then also have to fight the people in the state of Missouri that are supposed to be there to help you,” he said.
Recently, the family called the You Paid For It Team. Elliott Davis got a hold of the Deputy Director of the Missouri Department of Social Services, which oversees the mental health department.
Elliott got back an email from Deputy Director Adam Crumbliss saying, “I have made a couple calls to the department of mental health. I will follow up later today with a status update.”
After a week went by with no word, Elliott contacted DSS again. This time, he got an email saying, “I haven’t heard back from the folks on your request, but have forwarded to the public information officer.”
But then, good news. The Mental Health Department wrote the O’Grady’s telling them everything they wanted for their daughter had been approved.
Elliott went back to talk to Amy O’Grady. Shannon had been approved for Medicaid. The family is now trying to hire people to help us with her and putting some other things in place so that she can get the things that she needs.
“And I’m so, so thankful for you and for Fox 2 for helping us, but sad that that’s what it took,“ said Amy.