From Ari Ne’eman writing for the New York Times:
... Looking at the mess facing S.S.I. recipients who try to work, one feels that a terrible mistake has been made. But history tells a different story: this Kafkaesque nightmare was a deliberate choice. ...
In the [Social Security Act’s] early years, federal officials, including the Social Security Board’s chairman Arthur Altmeyer, feared that generous state public assistance programs would build momentum for replacing Old Age Insurance with a more progressive alternative. ... Critics wanted equal benefits for all, financed by a redistributive payroll tax. ...
To protect against this possibility, Altmeyer made getting public assistance as unpleasant as he possibly could. States were told that they could not receive federal money unless they conducted intrusive investigations of every applicant, reducing benefits to those who received food or shelter from family or friends. Programs that permitted beneficiaries to work and save were told to adopt more restrictive eligibility standards or be denied funding. ...
[Despite criticism] Altmeyer’s vision remained largely intact. Public assistance maintained an aggressive means test. When disability and aging programs were federalized into the Supplemental Security Income program in 1971, these restrictions came with them.
Today, economists refer to Altmeyer’s strategy as an “ordeal” — a burden imposed on those receiving benefits that yields no benefit to others. The purpose of an ordeal is not to help the beneficiary or others in society. Instead, ordeals deliberately make a program or service worse in order to discourage people from using it.
It also ties up a lot off SSA staff time and makes the rules and regulations too complex for many claimants and beneficiaries to understand. Result: more overpayments, more SSA staff time lost, and major disruptions to the lives of the effected claimants and beneficiaries. Here's to hoping that one day those rules can be reformed to provide the support that impoverished elderly and disabled people need, while doing away with the ridiculously complicated and onerous scheme of income and resource test rules.
ReplyDeleteSSI is complicated but it is welfare and taxpayers don't like giving money away to folks that are not deserving. Quite a few people lie to get on and to stay on SSI. Many survivor cases I see that involve an SSI person involve fraud such as not reporting a marriage, not reporting living with a spouse, etc. Simplification would be great but it may mean less people qualifying since there would be less loopholes for certain income and resources.
ReplyDelete@1:50
ReplyDeleteThat's odd, OIG reports a remarkably low single digit rate of fraud in SSA programs. Is it perhaps more likely that instead of having fraudulent intent, the beneficiaries you encountered were confused or uninformed due to the fact that there are literally hundreds of published rules for income and resources in the SSI program?
@1:50
ReplyDelete1. SSA presumes a 1/3 reduction due to in-kind support and maintenance. While that's absurd, I suspect it makes any subterfuge as to living arrangements pretty irrelevant as to that fact alone (marriage is another issue, see point 3 below).
2. If it is a surviving child, then those benefits would be established either prior to, or concurrent with an SSI claim (usually the former). If it is a surviving widow or widower, there isn't a spouse, so I'm confused where fraud would arise, at least during the course of a claim.
3. As to lying about marriage to stay on SSI during a claim, I suppose that is technically a risk, although I suspect any case which proceeds to a hearing would have enough medical evidence where the fact that an individual is married would be established in record evidence. Certainly failure to report life changes while on benefits is a problem, but that's a problem for all claims, and it seems like a far simpler solution for the states and feds to communicate better. When someone applies for a marriage license, have that fact communicated to SSA. If the marriage is never actually gone through with, that's a simple explanation from the recipient. SSA could even automate it, with a message being mailed to the recipient "We believe you may be married. As explained in every notice we send you, you need to report these changes. We will assume if you do not respond you are married and your benefits will be suspended." Seems like a pretty simple solution. Or SSA could continue to expending administrative costs investigating and enforcing overpayments well in excess of what is actually recouped.
When I was trained as an SSI CR, the baked in hostility of the program was evident. Just the premise for getting help was essentially "If you are not a pauper, go away, and if you say you are, we are going to get into your life in a way you've never thought of before. Still wanna apply?" You see it in the comments above "it's welfare, and only the deserving should get it". Not sure the internal message boards still exist, but prior in this decade when they did, it didn't take long to find SSI CRs whose view of the SSI claimant and recipient was essentially hostile. Guilty until proven not a cheat. And sadly to say, that mindset is common but a lot of it is just a logical extension of, as the article posited, the "ordeal" that the system bakes into the process.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, that message board was the saddest thing we ever did, it let people vent and who knew so many people in the field offices hate the public they serve? And were pretty open about it?
No one says just write checks, give away the store, but the program needs to change at its core to stop treating individuals as liars and cheats as part of its DNA. As it stands, it was designed to dehumanize people and play morality games about "the deserving" poor. One can avoid fraud and opening up the checkbook without being so petty about it.
@1:50 You obviously are against any kind of program that gives something for nothing.
ReplyDeleteThat's cool. Just make sure you never endorse food stamps, AFDC, Pell grants, Stafford student loans, farm subsidies, etc. Oh yeah, also hope you did not cash the stimulus check because that would be something for nothing.
"something for nothing... food stamps, AFDC, Pell grants, STAFFORD STUDENT LOANS, farm subsidies, etc."
ReplyDeleteOne of these things is not like the others.
OIG doesn't investigate very many fraud cases that are referred to them.
ReplyDeleteSome incorrect payments are due to errors, such as being just over the resource limit. Telling SSI you don't live with your spouse or you aren't even married (who would make you ineligible if you were living together) and then telling SSA you were married and living together the whole time is not a mistake.
1/3 in kind income isn't absurd when someone is not paying any rent or buying their own food. Why should they receive the same as someone who is independently living?
Why would SSA establish someone is married for a disability hearing?
Counties reporting deaths to SSA makes sense because that is frequently going to mean benefits will end. Most marriages, even for SSA and SSI programs, don't mean benefits will necessarily end.
Welfare should go to deserving folks. Not sure what the argument there is.
@2:24
ReplyDeleteI suspect I recently encountered a person like one you describe. I repped a refugee who won his SSI disability case at ALJ. The local office case worker threw up every possible obstacle, repeatedly “lost” income and resource documentation sent in, etc. It took several in-person local office visits, multiple repeat evidence submissions, and multiple conversations with supervisors over six months before they grudgingly paid the poor fellow.
For people who aren't aware of how complicated it is, take a simple-sounding idea: income rules for SSI. Here's a link to SSA's table of contents for SSI income rules that its local offices use. https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/subchapterlist!openview&restricttocategory=05008
ReplyDeleteStart clicking on a few links in that long list and reading them. I'll give you a spoiler before you get to the end...yeah they're all that complicated. Especially concepts like deeming and in-kind support and maintenance. The closest analogy I can give is a minefield. Lots of those rules are just waiting for the unsuspecting elderly and disabled to step on them and then boom! Their benefits are gone. Were they relying on that SSI every month to pay their rent, buy food to eat and afford medical treatment for their disabling medical conditions? Doesn't matter. It's gone, and too often for reasons the beneficiary didn't even understand.
@7:32 It's a conundrum. Someone above spoke to "deserving" folks, which implies existence of undeserving folks. It's not that they are deserving, as that is a moral view, but that their situation qualifies, which is less moral and more technical. So how to be "fair" in qualifying people? It's not fair to "give" everyone money as if they are the same, but it is simple to administer. So you add rules. Now if the rules are set up to be an ordeal, you go down one path, if they are set up to be fair and balanced, you likely get another path. Go to the POMS references above on income to see the result of that path.
ReplyDeleteTelling a parent of an adult with Down's that they do not deserve SSI because a legal document to set up a trust was written wrong has nothing to do with deserving and everything to do with qualifying.
Trying to focus your benevolence onto a certain group (only people really poor, only "deserving", only those willing to put up with the required humiliation) results in very complex rules, often arbitrary and capricious, as that is the dna or an ordeal. Add in decades of OIG pushing for better enforcement of rules that are skeevy to start with and you get even skeevier rules.
CRs in the field know this, because they have to apply these rules to living people. Systems folks working on MSSICS know this because trying to program these rules often raises the issues in analysis. Then add in the exceptions, the oddball legislatively driven rule (how many decades to automate windfall offset?) and you get a mess that serves no one well, which is why it's likely to never get really fixed. Too many folks will scream about costs, about "deserving" and welfare and strangle such efforts in politics. I mean, $2,000 in the bank in 1984 is equivalent to almost $5,000 today. Will we see that limit change? Hah.