A health insurance executive who was lambasted on TV by John Oliver is suing the comedian-turned-talk-show-host for allegedly misconstruing his remarks about the level of care disabled Medicaid recipients should receive after using the toilet.
Dr. Brian Morley “thinks it’s okay if people have s**t on them for days,” Oliver said on the air last year, referring to previous comments by the former AmeriHealth Caritas medical director about the necessity and frequency of in-home nursing visits versus the cost of such services.
“[F]**k that doctor with a rusty canoe,” Oliver said on the air. “I hope he gets tetanus of the balls.”
This, according to a federal defamation lawsuit filed Friday, subsequently damaged Morley’s “reputation and personal well-being.” Morley “did not equate wiping poorly with leaving anyone sitting in their own feces for days,” and actually “testified to the opposite,” the lawsuit says.
According to Morley’s suit, he never said that it is “‘okay’ or medically appropriate for individuals wearing diapers or who are otherwise immobile ‘to have s**t on them for days,’” nor did he say that it is “‘okay’ or medically appropriate for anyone to sit or lay in their own feces, for days at a time or otherwise.”
Instead, the suit contends, Morley was trying to explain that there are everyday people who “may not wipe perfectly,” but that “they’re mobile and they’re not laying in it.”
“It was [Oliver] who knowingly and falsely conveyed that Dr. Morley testified that ‘it is okay’ to leave someone who is incontinent, wears diapers, or otherwise sits in their own bowel movements in their ‘s**t for days.’”
Morley’s attorneys declined on Monday to comment, and told The Independent that Morley left AmeriHealth Caritas “several years” ago.
A lawyer for Oliver and his production company, who are named as defendants in the case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In an April 2024 episode of Last Week Tonight titled “Medicaid,” Oliver told viewers that “there was a nearly 900 percent increase in members being illegally denied services or care and some of the cost cutting was absolutely enraging.”
He then showed video footage of a wheelchair-bound cerebral palsy patient in Iowa named Louis Facenda, Jr., who had gone for six weeks without medication or daily nursing visits — during which the 25-year-old would be bathed and have his diaper changed — after AmeriHealth Caritas, a so-called managed care organization advising the state’s Medicaid program, halted payments for the crucial services.
“He wasn’t getting changed like he would normally get changed two or three times a day,” Facenda’s mother said in the snippet.
Oliver then ran an audio clip of AmeriHealth Caritas medical director Dr. Brian Morley testifying during a 2017 administrative hearing about a “similar patient,” 32-year-old policyholder Nathan McDonald. AmeriHealth Caritas had cut McDonald’s in-home visits by nurses who helped him bathe and get dressed, from twice-daily, down to five times a week, the Des Moines Register reported at the time.
“People have bowel movements every day where they don’t completely clean themselves, and we don’t fuss over [them] too much,” Morley testified, according to the Register and audio of Morley’s testimony played by Oliver. “People are allowed to be dirty… You know, I would allow him to be a little dirty for a couple of days.”
Although McDonald was unable to “fully wipe himself,” according to the Register, Morley’s suit takes aim at the notion he was “similar” to Facenda, alleging he “was not confined to a wheelchair, was not incontinent, did not wear diapers, independently toilet transferred, was independently mobile, could change his or her own clothes, bathed him or herself, and did not require in-home diaper changing or assistance to bathe generally.”
Morley’s suit insists he was referring to “the average individual who is independently mobile but may not wipe perfectly — not someone who is wearing diapers or otherwise laying in their own bowel movements.”
In this “hypothetical,” Morley’s suit goes on, “if feces are left on the skin for several hours, or even a day, and the feces are removed the next day in someone that’s mobile and is not confined to a bed, then it would just be a matter of washing the feces off.”
Morley, according to the lawsuit, believed it was necessary for Facenda to have multiple in-home visits per day, but did not think McDonald needed everything he was asking for.
He explained, according to his lawsuit, that there are “likely people running, you know, walking around in society today that have, you know, bowel movements that aren’t clean and they have feces on their skin for whatever reason, but they’re, you know, for the most part, they’re mobile and they’re not laying in it like someone who might be elderly, who’s immobile with concomitant medical problems like diabetes.”
In that case, “someone who is incontinent or immobile (i.e., wearing diapers) would develop skin breakdown if feces were not promptly removed from their skin,” it states.
Yet, the suit continues, the producers of Last Week Tonight “knew, contradicted, and otherwise failed to disclose that Dr. Morley did not testify, at all, that it is ‘okay’ or medically appropriate for individuals wearing diapers or who are otherwise immobile ‘to have s**t on them for days.”
McDonald and Facenda later won their appeals and their full nursing services were restored.
Morley is demanding a retraction, removal of the episode from all platforms, and compensatory damages, special damages, and punitive damages to be determined by a jury.
