Social Services Retaliation in Oakland, CA
This is cross-posted from General Discussion. Someone originally questioned it as a conspiracy theory, so I want to state up front that this post records a direct action taken by Social Services, not a "theory". Social Services registers welfare recipients for Medi-Cal in California: they do not determine eligibility, but they can apparently slip you into a "denied" category that cuts you off from all Medi-Cal services. This factually happened to me.
Of course you can call my interpretation of the motivation of a "theory", so please hit me with your alternative interpretations as to why my Social Services case worker wandered over to his computer and switched my Medi-Cal status to "denied" at this time when I am raising a huge fuss about Social Services - including a matter that could have been mitigated if my case worker had bothered to return phone calls from his clients.
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For the last few weeks I've been tryng to raise awareness of how Oakland's Welfare policy punishes work, undermines housing, and is, in sum a convoluted mess that drives people to homelessness instead of doing anything to help them. And I've been calling out the politicians who are doing nothing about it by name.
Today I got my first taste of Social Services retaliation. They kicked me out of the Medi-Cal system. I had to cancel medical appts and I can't refill my meds. A clinical trial I was trying to enroll in is at risk because it relies on imaging done exactly a year ago. I may have to cancel the regularly scheduled injections that were saving my eye sight. I wonder if I will get DTs from the gap in my meds before this is fixed.
I also wonder how else Social Services plans to give me a "hard time".
Bastards.
= new reply since forum marked as read
This morning Social Services called to tell me Medi-Cal was finally restored. Interesting how that finally happened the day after there was a very speedy October court date assigned to this issue.
I spent half this morning making calls to restore appointments. Just now I called the pharmacy to see if my medications were there. I saved that for last since I would have to go out to pick up the meds, and I don't have a cellphone, so I wouldn't be able to take care of the other business.
Then the other shoe dropped.
Medi-Cal may be fixed, but in California, Medi-Cal is managed by HMOs. There are many layers of "system" here. Once Medi-Cal was cut off, all those database entries became "invalid". I now have to wait for the Medi-Cal processing to catch up with each system. Apparently the HMO is now in my ball court to deal with. I'm wondering how many of the phone calls I made this morning I'm going to have to re-make when the various billing departments discover my HMO ID number is "invalid".
I'm not sure if we're talking about days or weeks of processing here. 
a person becomes ineligible for something - but it takes those same systems hours/days/weeks to realize when an eligibility is restored or a mistake corrected... 
Congratulations on the bit of progress, anyway!
I now have Medi-Cal back, and I've cycled back up to the right dosage of all my medications. I'm already feeling better, though it will take time for some of it to build back up in my system.
The last few days have been a hell of bureaucratic time suck. After going back and forth between the pharmacy and my medical clinic about why I couldn't get my meds, I had to go to call the HMO that administers Medi-Cal (Alameda Alliance). That's around a 45 minute call wait time. But I eventually got that fixed.
Then I immediately rescheduled my eye injections that had had to be skipped because of the Medi-Cal disaster. But I realized that there wasn't enough run-up time to arrange for a ride through Alameda Alliance. I really need a ride home after this particular appointment. This ride situation is already unnecessarily and absurdly bureaucratic - it involves calling Alameda Alliance and going through their time-consuming procedure, and then calling Paratransit and going through their procedure, observing two separate arrangement time windows. Anyway, I realized I couldn't meet the time window for Alameda Alliance, so I called to ask if I could get some emergency consideration.
At that point I found that my profile had been thrown out all together because of the Medi-Cal situation, and it would take 24 hours to put back together. So it was a good thing I had called the Rides number to discover that. But they couldn't help me with the emergency situation - I had to call the Alameda Alliance customer service number for that. Dang another 45 minute wait.
I initially had bad luck with the customer service number because the person I talked to couldn't seem to fit my situation into her worldview and was checking my story against her rehearsed reasons to order paratransit. Then she wandered away and left me on hold for 20 minutes. After I asked to talk to her supervisor, she found out that it was possible to offer me an emergency ride. She took all the information for it. She said the ride (paratransit or a cab) would show up on the day of my appointment, and I didn't have to do anything else. She took a super long time to take down my information. Dealing with all this took all morning and the better part of the afternoon. I had to skip a morning appointment, and a lot of other stuff got juggled to take care of this.
By the way, that appointment was today. The ride did not show up. When I called the Rides number, they said it wasn't in their database. By the time I started to get worried, there was no point in calling the Alameda Alliance customer service number because their wait time is 45 minutes, and the appointment was in half an hour. I waited for my ride until the time of the appointment and then I call the ophthalmology office to explain what happened. Luckily they said I could come in late if I could make it in an hour and a half. That was an iffy prospect that depended on buses coming exactly when I needed them. However bus karma was with me, and I got there on time.
After the injection, no ride home showed up either. I had asked the staff to keep an eye out since I was so late. If we could get the name of the company involved - whether it was paratransit or a cab - at least we could request that they come back later. But no one ever came for me. After the injection I went across the street to what proved to be a very nice donut shop. I used my bus money to buy a cup of coffee and waited there 4 hours for my eyes to heal. Tomorrow I expect to talk to Alameda Alliance again, after a 45 minute wait time. The bus/coffee money spent here would normally have gone to pay my phone bill, so this screwed me up in a lot of ways.
Medi-Cal immediately denied one of my referrals, so I have to go through the hassle of rounding up doctors and trying to figure out the language that needs to be used. Grr.
Also, there was the whole odyssey of getting a therapist. This hasn't been high on my priority list. The social workers at my medical clinic have wanted me to see a therapist because my life is obviously overloaded with bullshit and they think crisis counseling would help. Perhaps it would, but it's also one more appointment in a life filled with too many damned appointments. Because I was ambivalent already, I waded through the bureaucratic obstacles very slowly. The outside contracting firm that manages "behavioral health services" for Alameda Alliance features yet more long phone wait times. And half the time when I call them, I get some real estate company instead. First this consulting firm kept bouncing back the referrals from my medical clinic. Then they made me go through "screening" multiple times. And there is some confusion caused because they have 2 profiles for me in their system. And after all that, all they do is list random therapists in my area. I'm the one who has to call them and play phone tag with them. Half of them don't have open slots even though they are listed in the system as accepting new patients. I don't have a cellphone, so I'm hard to reach by phone during the day if I have to go out for appointments - because of this it had taken my months to arrange for a first appointment with a therapist. My first appointment was in September. It had to be rescheduled because of the Medi-Cal debacle.
When I tried to reschedule that first therapist appointment, it turned out that the Medi-Cal problem had affected my status in this Behavioral Health system, too. When the therapist called to check on my Medi-Cal status, they insisted that I call to go through "screening" yet again! I called, went through the phone wait time, and boy when I got on the phone was I ever an irate customer! The people seeking therapy services are presumably already under a lot of stress. To continually put them through this bureaucratic process is ridiculous. I actually prevailed on this one. They agreed just to call my clinic and expedite doing whatever was best for me, and to reactivate me in their database.
I also had second thoughts 5 minutes into the appointment when I was presented with a notice that said a $70 fee would be charged if I missed an appointment and Medi-Cal doesn't pay for that. Fascinating how that one piece of paper just put my issue with the whole system in a nutshell.
So this has been my week. Unraveling one long continuous bureaucratic clusterfrak. Because I don't have a cellphone, I've had to stay at home most of the time. I've had to call a number of places with unreasonably long phone wait times. Not just Alameda Alliance. Also my medical clinic appointment line, social services, the scheduler line for that referral before it was rejected. Another annoying factor has been that the alerts for my Yahoo email stopped working. Because I don't have a cellphone, I refer people to email to get most of my business done. Yahoo alerts allow me to respond to that email instantly. But now that the alerts are down, I have to just keep checking for new email. I tried calling email for help. After a TWO HOUR wait time, the person I spoke to filed a ticket for me, and I haven't heard anything since. Anyway, I've just been on the phone all week trying to get the broken stuff fixed.
Is this summary of my week tl;dr? That's exactly how I feel.