Welfare, the deserving and the truly needy...

Great Debates
1

I’ve been kicking this issue around mentally ever since I first applied for my Clark County Social Services medical card. I have to go down to the office every couple of months and reapply, with proof of my income and expenses, in order to receive the most basic health care. I need this. I am unable to work more than part-time because of severe chronic back pain, which is from an undiagnosed cause. It"s a lot of fun- there is only one clinic in the entire county which is covered by the county. I have to wait six weeks for an appointment, and right now I’m trying to schedule an MRI- I saw the doctor three weeks ago, and I can’t get scheduled because the person in charge of scheduling doesn’t have my chart yet. I don’t see why, she’s in the same building as the doctor’s office, but I digress.

The thing that appalls me the most about the way the system is set up is that it is on a first-come, first-serve basis. No appointments accepted. This means that a low-income working person or a struggling student will most likely have to miss work or class in order to get any help, and may sit in that office for eight hours. Supposedly, this is to make sure “everyone has a chance”, and to make it as difficult as possible to get help in order to discourage people who might abuse the system.

My feeling is that this set-up biases the system in favor of abusers. The working people, or students, people who are trying to make an honest go of it but are unable to make ends meet often end up giving up and leaving the office, hoping to pick up that extra half-day’s worth of income from work, or not wanting to miss two classes instead of just one. Also, many people are turned away when the daily schedule is filled, so they have to come back the next day, and the next… which makes things difficult for the unemployed who are genuinely looking for jobs- valuable job-hunting time lost while you’re trying to get access to health care, and maybe some help with the rent. This leaves the disabled and the “professional aid-seekers”. I have no problem helping the disabled. But they are in the minority. The people who are most likely to receive help are the ones who have nothing better to do than sit in an office for hours a couple of days each week. By making receiving aid a full-time job, it makes aid most available to people who are willing to make a full-time job of it. And really, it isn’t a full-time job. Sit in a waiting room a few days out of a month, do the same at the food stamp office, the utility aid office… you’re talking maybe “working” forty hours out of the month.

I don’t know much about the federal welfare system, but from what I do know, it seems to be similarly biased in favor of the indolent and irresponsible. A woman who has had children out of wedlock by a man who won’t help support his children can have her education paid for at gummint expense and receive welfare while she’s in school, but someone who has never had kids but can’t earn enough income to make ends meet by working can get a Pell Grant, which will cover tuition, books, and maybe have a thousand dollars left over to help with living expenses (and that thousand doesn’t go far if you live in Vegas, where the cost of living/wage ratio is incredibly skewed), and it is very difficult to qualify for aid such as food stamps. Mom and I both applied, and nada… So, you can’t reduce your hours to accomodate school and the time you need to spend on homework and studying, because you can’t afford to live on less than what you’re making, and someone who is older and doesn’t have the physcal stamina of a twenty-year-old, or, like me, has chronic physical problems that make it difficult to maintain such a schedule, are basically screwed. If I wasn’t living with my mother, I wouldn’t be able to survive. A displaced worker who has been forced to take a low wage job out of desparation and want to try to get an education to enter a new occupation has a much tougher row to hoe than someone who popped out a baby at eighteen, and another one at nineteen… and has been living on the government dime ever since.

I think the whole social services/welfare system needs to be retooled. The “system” should make a priority of giving aid to working people who are having problems making ends meet, and make it easier for working folks to qualify for and receive aid, or to be able to reduce their working hours (maybe even quit work altogether) to receive vocational training so they can enter higher-income occupations, and thus, over the long haul, be able to contribute more in the way of tax revenues. There should be job training and placement assistance easily available for those who are unemployed and genuinely seeking work (and no, I don’t mean the “welfare to work” kick 'em to a minimum wage, no benefits job). It should be more difficult, or downright impossible, for those who choose to make welfare a lifestyle to receive aid.

2

Its a bit different in Cleveland.
You need an appointment and you ge one, though you usually wait a half hour after the time to get seen.

I got on assistance while i was still married, as my husband was on disability.
I got food stamps when i got pregnant(within marriage) and its a big help. me and my son get 250 a month to eat on.

I used to get a check of 297 a month, but that was stopped years ago, because you have to do a volunteer 30 hours a week deal, and none of my workers have ever set me up any appointment (they are the ones who find the place for you to volunteer) for 4 years.

Fortuantely, i live with my father, or we wouldn’t have a home.

No, i am not disabled, i almost wish I was, then I could have income.
As it is, no place (I’ve tried telemarketers and fast food places) will hire me.

As to it being abused by single women “popping them out” as you may have put it, I see some, but that is supposed to be remedied by their having to name the father if they want any help at all, and then they try to get funds from the father.

3

Thea - I am sure you may already have tried this, but Pilates can be an excellent cure for back problems, including chronic ones. Apologies if it’s not appropriate for your situation or you already tried it but it didn’t work for you.

4

Vanilla - What do you do all day? You don’t work, you aren’t disabled, you don’t volunteer (although if you did you would get additional money, but in 4 years you haven’t been able to find a place to do it). Honest question, if you are awake 16 hours a day, what do you do with all that time? I see you have had time to make almost 6500 posts to this board in 3+ years.

5

All modern western welfare systems are still based upon an archaic ‘Principle of Lesser Eligibility’ (coined by Jeremy Bentham when the British ‘Poor Laws’ were being codified).

What this means is that people recieving any sort of welfare benefit should get LESS than those who are the lowest of the working-classes. It is made purposely difficult to ‘survive’ upon such benefits so that there is no incentive for working people to leave their employment to go on welfare.

Your situation with the medical services sounds very much as if it is trying to adhere to the P of LE.

I know it doesn’t help your situation, but it might explain some of the puzzle to you.

Cheers.

6

You have my sympathies for back pain. I hope you get it straightened out (NOT trying to be funny). Good health is EVERYTHING. You might look into the medical benefits available to college students. I think you have to go full time to qualify.

I agree with your premise. I hate paying for full time incubators. Makes me nuts. I don’t have cable or a high-speed modem or a lot of other things because of taxes. My definition of truly needy ends after about 2 years. I’m a mean old bastard who would take welfare kids away from parents who show no promise of self-sufficiency. I keep thinking how great society would be if we only had to help the TRULY needy.

I always read my companies benefit package and mentally add the medical costs back into my wages. The increase over the last 7 years is disturbing.

7

On an episode of Family Guy I believe Peter Griffin was awarded welfare in some obscene amount of money and instead of getting it fixed he went out to buy “fajitas” (pronounced as spelled, not the correct pronunciation)

8

Perhaps the system is biased towards children. You talk about the money flowing to the women who “popped out” kids. Well, maybe the government isn’t rewarding HER but rather showing concern for her children, who are vulnerable. They are more vulnerable, in many ways, than a hard-working, deserving, kept-her-knees-together teenager heading to college.

Predictably, we’re only a handful of posts into this thread, and already we’ve got women put down as “incubators” and lazy breeders who pop out kids so they can suck on the public teat. Lovely.

The “no appointment” time is frustrating. I think it probably comes from a belief that time is not valuable for the poor. If they want help, they can damn well come down and wait for it. It’s another form of punishment. Yes, it works against people whose time is valuable, such as those looking for work. On the other side of it, they might be operating under the belief that requiring appointments and phoning ahead would discourage some people who most need the help. I am reminded of Barbara Ehrenreichs’s little experiment where she called around for food assistance. It took her multiple calls and remarked on how it would take perserverence and confidence that she didn’t think her coworkers would have, to get the right office and talk to the right person. Finally, perhaps another issue is a concern that relying on public transportation and the like might make being in the office at a specific time onerous.

9

I think that’s a great point, Cranky. The alternative is simply taking people’s children away from them (assuming we don’t say: “let them starve!”) and having foster homes, orphanages, and adoption pick up the slack. I, at least, am fairly sure this just doesn’t work.

I believe the welfare system in some places don’t pay the same amount per child. Maybe you get so much for the first two, but the third gives less, and I think eventually you’re still on your own.

Myself, I think about the current wave of telephone service support that is contracted out to people in other countries(!). Certainly we could do much better than that at home. With the internet being what it is, we now have the ability for a great number of jobs to not be done at the office at all. It is an area worth looking into in terms of getting people jobs in Massachusetts when Texas is hiring.

10

I disagree. The act of giving incompetent adult money to raise a child does not, in any way shape or form, benefit a child. It is the cruelest thing I can think of short of starvation. By government decree, I am taxed at gunpoint and the money is given to a person with no strings attached. No qualifications are met and no accounting for the use of the money is made. The cycle of welfare is undeniable. Poorly educated, incompetent, lazy people are contracted by the United States Government to breed, and raise children who repeat the cycle.

You dismiss foster homes and orphanages but the probability of success increases with the skill of the caretaker. Foster homes were tried as a social experiment to save money and presumably to give a child more one-on-one time with an adult. I consider this a failure because there is a lack of situational awareness in regards to the caregivers. That leaves orphanages. We pay teachers to teach our children for 6 hrs a day. We don’ t just teach math in schools, we teach citizenship and job skills. Orphanages take the same concept 1 step further. The same bond teachers are able to establish with a student in a class room can be established in an orphanage. There is also no law that says you can’t use a mix of orphanage and foster home. When I suggest foster homes have failed that isn’t a social failure in itself. We tried something that sounded promising and it didn’t live up to our expectations. We learned something from it just like we learned that wage/price controls don’t work.

When I use terms like “incubator” they are perceived as ugly and stereotyped. It IS an ugly term and it represents an ugly situation. Allowing it to continue is uglier still. Poverty wasn’t created by government, but it is exacerbated by it’s continued funding. The important thing is that responsible, caring adults are available to the children who need it. Instead of continually paying $5 to an incompetent adult we should be spending $30 to a responsible adult who will teach the child to survive in the real world and thus break the cycle. It’s cost effective and more importantly, the right thing to do for a child.

11

This is somewhat off topic but is the reason doctors wont diagnose your back problem because they think you are faking it to get a prescription for painkillers? you said in another post that doctors didn’t take your back problems seriously.

As far as welfare i find problems with it. i had a sociology professor who had to turn down a job offer because taking it would cause her to earn too much money to qualify for welfare. It was cheaper for her to not make more money.

12

Rarely do I ever ask for cites, but if you have any support for this I would love to see it. My personal experience with welfare recipients is ambiguous. Some did everything they could to get out of it, others didn’t seem to care because it would cost them income to work and they were apparently content with the system (I only say apparently because they made no effort to leave it; everyone I asked said they hated it).

13

Oh my, the “taxed at gunpoint” thing again. I remember those exact words from another debate. Here we do again.

Shall we go over this again? What a small percentage of that money taken from you “at gunpoint” goes towards support for the poor? For my part, help me understand what constitutes a “contract” to breed. I’m no lawyer, but even a rudimentary knowledge of what a contract is doesn’t seem to fit here. Or could you be using histrionic language to make up for a lack of hard data? It doesn’t fly here; you know that.

14

I’m still hoping that Vanilla stops by again to answer my questions.

15

Ok, Cranky, what small percentage do you think goes to the poor? The last time I checked (for another thread a couple days ago) it amounted to between 25% and 50% of the budget or 10% of GDP something like that. What do you consider a small percentage?

I’m sure you have never met them, but there are people who have children for no better reason than it will increase the check they get from the government. That is, they accepted an offer of money from the government to perform a certain action. This seems very much like a contract to me. I hope the term “breeder” was not meant to cover the truly needy who find themselve in a bad way, but only to cover those who are clearly abusing the system. If it was used to cover more than abusers, then I agree that it was used inappropriately. If it was meant only to cover abusers, however, then it is an ugly word for an ugly practice.

16

Well, you might want to check again then. Because I don’t think you are even close unless you are defining Social Security and Medicare as money going to the poor. (And, that would be truly a perverse definition.)

You are going to have to come up with a cite with some actual numbers to back this up.

17

I think the problem here is a disconnect between abstracts of welfare recepients and realities. While there are certainly a number of “incompetent” people who are incapable (because of self-chosen limitations, such as incomplete schooling, unwillingness to jump through the standard hoops or flat laziness) of doing anything more than sitting at home and having babies, there are also many people who are turning to government assistance because their opportunities for self-sustaining employment are limited in the communities where they live.

We are finally seeing some job growth in this economy, but not in all areas – especially not most large urban areas, coincidentally enough. We aren’t necessarily seeing growth in the jobs sectors which have high rates of employment for women, who make up the majority of assistance recepients, and certainly not for single mothers of young children, who are the majority within the majority.

So as we talk about the ways to improve the welfare system, it’d be good not to paint recepients with too broad a brush. Looking at the statistics for how many people max out on their benefits nowadays as opposed to those who use the system as it was designed – as a temporary, last-resort safety net when other options have failed – says that the mythological “welfare queen” stereotype rarely applies.

18

Righty ho!

The budget here is broken down into discretionary and mandatory sections. The entitlements are part of the mandatory expenditures. As such, Social Secutiry and Medicare are included with them. All of the mandatory expenditures amounted to 1196.6 billion in 2002. Of this, Medicare and Social security expenses were 253.7 and 453.5 billion respectively. I’m not sure how much money spent by social security goes to poor people, but certainly some of it does. There is a “Total Means Tested” column which amounts to 286.1 billion or 2.8 percent of GDP. This column does not count disability payments, unemployment compensation, and of course midicare and social security.

Now, you could certainly argue that social security does not pay anything to the poor (you’d have to produce a cite). And you can certainly argue that medicaid is not a benifit to the poor either. But it is certainly not a perversion to include them in an analysis of entitlement spending.

19

I agree with this entirely. As long as it goes both ways. Do you have cites to show how the population recieving welfare breaks down?

20

Thee 2003 Federal Budget:

[ol]
[li]Social Security: $475.9b[/li][li]Military: $379b[/li][li]Unemployment & Welfare: $319.7b[/li][li]Medicare: $234.4b[/li][li]Medicaid &c: $231.9b[/li][/ol]

I haven’t been able to find anything on specific numbers for the big programs, ie ADC, Medicaid, and Food Stamps.