In the twelve-month stretch from October 2022 through September 2023, 30,000 people died while waiting for federal disability determinations, according to Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley. Martha asked Harris what she would do as president for people, like herself, who are waiting for disability decisions while in desperate need of health insurance.
Delays in those decisions, driven in part by understaffing and a Covid-related rise in disability rates, have driven the typical wait time from four months in 2019 to seven months today, often coupled with the need to appeal an initial rejection, which can take years. The processing times represent a mounting crisis for the more than 1 million Americans who apply for disability in a given year.
The entire disability system in the USA is built to hurt people, top to bottom. It forces people to live in perpetual poverty and often struggle to afford the help they need for their disabilities. They can’t get married without their benefits being cut, because now they have family who is expected to care for them.
This is just another symptom of a system designed to prevent as many people from collecting benefits as possible. If someone dies while waiting, that’s no money that needs to be paid out. It’s a “win” in terms of the budget, because it’s reducing costs by denying benefits.
The USA is truly run by fucking vultures, and while the Republican party is responsible for most of the horrific messes, there are a not-insignificant number of congresspeople who are “Democrats” but may as well be Republican, like Joe Manchin.
It really pisses me off that we treat people like this. I wish this country actually believed everyone is entitled to dignity and worked to provide it along with a basic standard of living. We easily could. But we don’t because billionaires need their tax cuts and corporations need their handouts.
Dignity isn’t profitable, that’s the basic problem.
The Republican Party project is to make sure things get worse, and the ‘Responsible Moderate Democrats’ make sure things don’t get better.
I am medically qualified for disability but instead I have a job and work just enough hours to pay rent because that’s easier than jumping through all the hoops to get disability
So a bit more info on this … if you look up the average of the demographic that tries to game a system it usually sits somewhere between 2-5%. Unfortunately the powers that be have decided that even tho 95-98% of people follow the rules, everyone has to be vetted (and often denied) so the ‘bad’ ones can be filtered out.
Untold b/trillions are spent doing this, far surpassing what it would cost to just have basic vetting where people in need would be able to access funds/services within 30 days.
Edit to add – This is ONLY good for individuals. All corporate entities should be held to a minimum wait of 6 months to be completely vetted.
That’s because our government, from top to bottom, has a punishment-based attitude when it comes to any and all violations of any rules or laws. And instead of precision strikes, they use flamethrowers.
Problem is the rules aren’t enforced on everyone. Just us peons face the full extent of them.
Reminds me of… I want to say Florida requiring drug tests for welfare. They probably spent orders of magnitude more than they saved.
This is one reason im a basic income, universal healthcare, etc person. I have found the beuracracy that is put in place can usually be navigated by the gamers because that is what they do but it blocks the folk that could use the help and if they got it sometimes can be productive and even pull themselves out of the situation.
I managed to get on SSDI after fucking years, before Covid, and guess what, I still can’t afford anything beyond roach motel / slum lord housing (which of course have bad water and mold and dust, and because these places don’t have a 3x rent as income requirement)…
…, and I can’t actually access medical care, as I can’t afford a car and public transit is basically non existent, and even if I could, it would take me a year of referrals and tens of thousands of dollars to access the PT care I need.
Its literally 100x easier and less expensive for me to just learn the PT I need to do from reading studies and watching youtube videos from actually qualified people.
If you get on SSDI, if you make more than about 1500 dollars a month, for 9 consecutive months, then your SSDI benefits go away, poof, all gone, until you have 0 income for another 9 months.
During which time you will be evicted and likely die on the streets as a disabled homeless person.
Until Democrats fall out of love with means testing I don’t see this changing quickly or at all, unfortunately. But try getting people to accept that means testing almost always costs more than just making the programs open with few/no strings attached and watch the meltdowns start.
That’s nothing to do with Democrats in particular.
Republicans aren’t getting rid of means testing and Democratic leadership for the most part doesn’t want to. Also, means testing for welfare was a huge part of Democratic campaigning in the 90s and has been embraced within the party since then.
Any evidence that means testing is popular among the Democratic party these days? The '90s is a long time ago now.
Are you asking whether it’s popular among Democrats in washington? I think we can see that by the bills that they bring to the floor, and by the speeches that they make.
Are you asking whether it’s popular with Democrat voters? That’s a different question.
Did you miss the whole “if we did universal student loan forgiveness that means we’d be giving money to millionaires too, so that means we can’t do it at all 😏” song and dance? If you did I envy you because it still pisses me off.
Buttigieg himself used this reasoning in the 2020 primaries, and it’s not like there was a real outcry about it. Getting rid of means testing for anything other than children’s school meals isn’t even on the table.
And as Harris has so succinctly put it, do you think the Democratic Party of today fell out of a coconut tree? It’s the result of policies made by people in the 90s, many of whom are either still in power or have died in office only within the past few years. The policies of the 90s have a direct bearing on the party of today.
I wouldn’t support the handwaving away of it being a long time ago as a reason to overlook the dismantling of welfare for political gain for Democrats any more than I would if Republicans did it.
