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Health insurance executive sues John Oliver over ‘out of context’ remarks about toilet hygiene

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,” and might leave bits of feces behind, 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.”

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