Coping With Welfare Equals Losing 13 IQ Points

[daredtowork]

42. Thank You

I've already turned in a major corner because of the Affordable Care Act. The minute the 1 year wait time dropped for specialists, I was able to see specialists for complex conditions beyond the few available through the county hospital, and I was able to get access to medications, my condition started to improve. Rapidly. Which meant it could have improved years ago.

In fact, I was feeling well enough not go on to SSI (and just hoping I could make the case for SSI to cover the time to pay back my welfare "loan&quot on a new medication, though it's still not clear whether it's going to hold up. I've been trying to make that leap though. If you click on my sig, you can see what happened when I attempted to work and follow all the legal requirements of "welfare". I'm still hanging in there, though. I'm working with the Department of Rehabilitation (though they are famously slower than just about any other department of government). I was looking for a job for myself via an employment program I was going to. But then my attention and energy was completely tanked by what Social Services did to me regarding that first work check and my fight to get that addressed and politically noticed. Trying to fight Supervisor Keith Carson's wall of silence is really sapping the energy that I had so recently gathered.

And again the medication I'm on is unstable. The last batch did not work at all. So I have to be determined and just have faith now that there's a better picture of what my medical problems are, that corrective measures will happen, and I *will* be in a condition to work, and I should just keep looking for a job (good luck to myself explaining the enormous gaps in my resume) and trying to move forward and trust it will all work out.

Regarding SSI: they should be investigated like the VA. While people go through their years of appeal processes, they sink into welfare and it makes their medical conditions worth. I imagine if they have a mental health condition, that would become much worse. The delays and the panic and desperation it causes ends up enriches ambulance-chasing lawyers because people think that's the only way they can get SSI: then the money that should properly go to them goes to the lawyer.

Note how all the incentives are on the side of Deny - for the abstract, unilateral government and against the weak, poverty-ridden individual:

1) Both Social Services and SSI will set people without insurance up with medical evaluators who do cursory exams and seem disposed toward ruling "able to work". They focus on strict mechanical limitations only.

2) Doctors in the medical system face penalties for fraud if they misdiagnose someone in a way that helps them get on welfare or SSI, but they face no penalty if they leave someone to suffer while they are unsure of the diagnosis or would rather not deal with the government.

3) The State automatically stop payments which the welfare recipient's survival depends on at the first whiff of a problem - and they face no penalty for doing so when they've made a mistake. They set short deadlines of three days for ridiculous reams of paperwork all the time. But when it comes to rectifying paperwork or doing things for people, the State takes it's precious time from months to years.

The VA scandal showed how people actually die because the bureaucracy defaults to its own convenience rather than to what would cover the individual's needs. The welfare system certainly drives people to homelessness instead of helping lift people out of it. I would argue that genocide of the poor is an indirect consequence if not a direct consequence of these policies. But if "genocide" is too conspiratorial a term, I hope it's clear that this is torture, and the entire nation has been complicit in allowing it to go on for so long.