From The Hill:
… Recently, the Social Security Administration (SSA) began publishing statistics on beneficiaries by race. There are approximately 260,000 Black children receiving survivor benefits from Social Security. With nearly 1 million orphaned Black children in the country, a natural question policymakers should ask is “Where are the missing beneficiaries?”
Black children may miss out on survivor benefits because of eligibility requirements, such as the parent not having sufficient work in Social Security-covered employment. Policymakers should acknowledge the reality on the ground and ask whether those eligibility requirements need to be updated.
Black children also miss out on survivor benefits because of mistakes by SSA, a lack of awareness of benefit eligibility, and budget cuts to SSA’s administrative budget. …
7 comments:
If Congress actually cares about this, provide SSA with funding to launch a real marketing campaign. Not the usual useless public affairs outreach that won’t really push the needle.
There are no survivor benefits for people who die that are not currently insured or fully insured. I would expect other ethnic groups to have orphans that are not eligible for benefits too.
What eligibility criteria would you update to make children payable on recited switch little to no work?
Highest rate of uninsured status by race goes to black people.
Highest rate of not being able to determine paternity goes to black people. Not knowing who the father is results a loss of eligibility. The mother? Was she on SSI-DI where there are no child benefits?
Probably most relevant, the race that often feels the most targeted by government is black. Under reporting of race on SSNs means that they agency is going to be less able to conduct outreach to certain vulnerable populations.
Because of the above I would have SSA be reactive instead of active. I would also put this more on county and state agencies than SSA. When the children are taken in, why do they continually refuse to hand over documents for the child (i.e. SSN card, BC)? Why do they not receive information about applying for survivor benefits?
SSA employees are not social workers. They have to know enough already to do their job -and with people such as Charles and other news outlets never seem to be satisfied if one mistake is made. The burden is going to have to fall elsewhere unless someone is going to pony up the monies.
The burden of proof for out of wedlock children (216h3) is too high. A paternity test should be enough. The policy was written for another day and age.
I'll make this comment race-neutral, because damn getting into all that.
The problems I most often see when it comes to surviving child applicants, are:
1. Father not on birth certificate/numident. Very occasionally it's a death prior to the child's birth, but far more often the kid is already several years old and neither parent has bothered to make it official.
2. Parents never married. Even without being on the numident or BC, marriage between adults means the kid's paternity is legally presumed. But I honestly cannot ever remember a case where the dad wasn't on the BC, but the parents were married.
3. No court-established paternity. Even when the father was always absent, there is no court records establishing paternity. In about 70% of those cases, it's because the mom saw no point (ie squeezing blood from a stone, the father was either incarcerated, permanently jobless, or in the wind). The rest of them are usually because mom and dad had an informal arrangement, which of course is never written down because otherwise they could use:
4. No written acknowledgement of paternity. Seriously, folks. Just a piece of paper with his signature. Put it on paper. But nope.
There is some hope upcoming with #4, as recent legal opinions have established that in some cases social media posts can be used as proof of acknowledgement of paternity. But we still largely have no rules governing this.
5. Caregivers didn't even know there was a survivor benefit. This sucks, but happens a good bit.
6. Kids lost in the system. I've noticed that for kids put into the foster system or in DHR custody, the applications come much later, if at all. Might just be a failing in our geo area, but I doubt we're alone.
The only real fix I can see here, beyond some combination of public outreach, and better coordination with local/county/state agencies, is tying child numidents to their parents' SSNs. Considering how (polite cough) challenged our information systems people are at automating even simple tasks, it might not even be possible. And if it does happen, it would take years to become commonplace enough to have an impact.
anon@1:32am,
Problem is, other than the Federal 216(h)(3) rules which can be applied to children born in any state, paternity established under state law involves applying 50+ different (and often contradictory) sets of intestacy laws. In some states, "well, he/she looks just like him" is evidence (and you'd be shocked at just how often that is submitted). Other states have requirements that match (or even exceed) the strictness of the Federal 216(h)(3) standard (i.e. written acknowledgement, court order of paternity or support, or living with and or proof of support). Most states prospectively apply inheritance rights, while a few do it retroactively (but only under certain circumstances).
And, even in cases where parents intermarry after the child's birth most states require some sort of additional acknowledging act by the father establishing that the child is his. In some states, statements made by the father to friends/family claiming paternity is enough, while in many other states the intestacy laws want some form of concrete acknowledgment in writing or from a court that the man is the father in addition to the intermarriage.
And, don't get me started on SSA's DNA rules. A copy of the DNA test is insufficient - the evidence must also include the same chain of custody documents for the test samples that would be submitted to a state court for a paternity case. Of course, they never have those. Once the DNA lab gets paid, they usually loose all pretense of cooperating with the mother. And it is often a fight to even get state child support agencies to provide the chain of custody documents. Then you get into straight DNA testing, siblingship DNA testing, grantparent DNA testing, etc. Every state has different rules on what is accepted and what is not.
In short, paternity in this country is an absolute flipping legal mess.
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