From The Hill:
... SSA mailed outreach letters to individuals informing them of potential eligibility for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a program that provides modest cash benefits and access to Medicaid for low-income disabled and elderly individuals. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) forcefully pushed for the outreach during a Senate Finance hearing in 2021.
Wyden’s push and SSA’s actions did much to help impoverished disabled and elderly citizens, with SSA indicating the outreach will increase lifetime SSI payments to these individuals by about $530 million.
The cost of the outreach totaled $32 million, implying the ratio of benefits received by the public to the cost of the outreach is 17 to 1. Mailing informational letters, part of SSA’s Equity and Outreach initiatives, proved to be a highly efficient mechanism to help individuals in poverty. ...
SSA’s outreach was targeted to Social Security beneficiaries who had very low Social Security benefit amounts and, therefore, might qualify for some SSI benefits. ...
Here's a link to Social Security's report on this project.
A huge number of those letters went to people that were clearly ineligible for SSI (and many to people who had already been formally found ineligible for SSI).
ReplyDeleteIn the end, a waste of resources that could have been used more responsibly in other areas.
1.4million fliers mailed to T2 beneficiaries receiving a low amount. Almost 3.5% of those resulted in approved SSI claims. That's good for the nearly 50K new SSI recipients but 3.5 % seems like a low return on investment.
ReplyDeleteWonder how they calculate the cost. Is that just the postage? All the gvernment employees are salaried so their costs shouldn't count. It is surprising that a lot of people with small DIB checks woudl not know to apply for SSI. And that has a hoist of problems with all its red tape. Well it is job security.
ReplyDelete@5:57pm,
ReplyDeleteThey just pull the numbers out of their arses like they normally do on this type of stuff and inflate them to make them sound impressive.
Most of the letters I saw with low T2 benefits had previously been found ineligible due to receipt of things like VA pensions/compensation, private LTD benefits, and SSI ISM and resource issues. Also, a disturbingly significant number were also ineligible due to entitlement to other T2 benefits such as DAC/spouse/widow on non-combined records that, for some reason, were apparently just not screened out.
Maybe to make the outreach attempt to look to be far bigger to Wyden than it actually was to get him to shut up about it??