There’s a tension in all countries with the resources to have social benefits, between the idea everybody should have to bust their hump just for the right to be alive, and the idea simply being alive entitles you to a certain bare minimum standard of life.  Most people aren’t going to believe fully in either of those extremes, but fall somewhere in the middle.  Being far closer to the latter than the former, I can feel resentful toward those responsible for gatekeeping social benefits.  Less the bureaucrat at the crowded dilapidated office full of squalling babies and unfortunate-smelling people talking to themselves, than toward the politicians who grandstand on arbitrary beliefs about how this should be done, and vow to stick it to the freeloaders when they get elected.

I got curious and looked at how the US Social Security Administration decides whether you’re disabled enough to receive benefits.  Right up front there’s a line drawn on the basis of whether you busted your hump enough.  There are two different disability programs administered by that agency.  The one they talk about at the link is Social Security Disability, and to qualify for that you need a certain minimum amount of recent work history.

Worked hard for twenty years and then had a slow decline in health which kept you from knowing you needed to apply for disability until you lost “insured” status?  Fuck off.  Worked hard at unpaid labor like raising children?  Fuck off.  Never able to work in the first place because you’re too mentally ill to function?  Fuck off.  Supported a family business by working unpaid for years?  Fuck off.  The disability benefit these people might qualify for is called Supplemental Security Income, which is a vastly more restrictive, petty, cruel, wildly inadequate, and ruthlessly policed benefit.  I saw a post once, roughly “Did somebody scam SSI into giving them a benefit they didn’t deserve?  Good for them.  They just pulled off the most elaborate demeaning and time-consuming con ever, for a benefit that is not enough to survive on anywhere.”

SSI is that benefit you hear about where you lose it if you get married, and since your eligibility for Medicaid (need-based health insurance) in most states is tied to eligibility for SSI, you also lose medical care.  Strictly speaking, marriage doesn’t always cut off SSI altogether.  Depends on how much money your spouse makes, how many kids you have, etc.  I guarantee that math is at least as cruel and petty as you’re imagining.  And if two people who get SSI get married?  Both of them have their SSI significantly reduced, on the assumption their pooled resources make up the difference.  That might be true if SSI was more than $967 in most states, but it isn’t.  Double that and you’d still be living in wretched conditions, with rent as high as it is these days.

Back to SSDI, Social Security Disability.  Not as many restrictions, but you gotta understand them well.  People often get bounced from that program with a retroactive effective date, making it so they not only have no benefits but also suddenly owe the government like fifty to a hundred thousand dollars – potentially subject to the Treasury Offset Program which can jack your tax refund and any other money the government might owe to you, as well as garnish your wages if you manage to work through the pain.  As much as SSDI is more generous than SSI, it still averages less than the cost of rent in most places – while still just high enough to keep you from qualifying for Medicaid or food stamps!  That sweet spot where you can be thrown to the wolves in other ways.

I meant to be talking about the criteria.  Word on the street is that regardless of what’s happening, you are always denied the first time you apply for disability.  Is that true?  I don’t know.  But even getting to that decision – possibly a denial – SSA says takes an average of 230 days currently.  I’ve heard of it taking much longer than that as well.  The appeal process commonly stretches things out to two years, five years, or even more.

What is a disability?  A condition that is expected to last a year or longer or result in death, that prevents you from engaging in “substantial gainful activity.”  There’s a dollar figure on that – currently $1620 per month.  Higher than the cost of a one bedroom apartment in most of the USA, you say?  Yes indeed.  Considering how long it takes to get a decision, better make sure you’re not making more than the SGA figure during the application process, or you’ll get denied on those grounds.  But hey, if it looks like you’re intentionally limiting the amount of work that you’re doing to stay under that figure, does that mean you are actually capable of making more?  Might still get denied, depending on who’s making the final decision and their own personal biases.  Better to have a couch you can surf for the years it can take to get approved, rather than risk working.

Let’s say you have Down’s Syndrome but managed to get a part time gig and have been making a lil money while also drawing SSI.  Consider your paycheck halved basically, because for every two dollars you make over $65 bucks, one dollar comes out of your SSI.  But you’re also earning your way toward insured status for Social Security Disability by earning taxed wages.  Problem.  A requirement of SSI is that you have to apply for any Social Security type benefit you could possibly receive.  Get SSDI and all but twenty dollars of it count against your SSI amount.  SSI goes away, so does your Medicaid – and you don’t get on Medicare until you’ve been on SSDI for two years, so hope you don’t need medical help in the meanwhile.  That’s for “the Healthcare Marketplace” aka Obamacare, which is not great.  Not that any of it is great in this motherfuckin country, but even so, the difference between the cost of meds on Medicaid vs. Marketplace can be the difference between affording them or rationing them or just going without.

What happens when you get old?  The Social Security Administration must never have heard of intersectionality because disabled old people get no special consideration at all in the amount of money or medical coverage they receive.  Benefits are on the basis of age or disability, not both at the same time.

Of course, some people have a disability that leads to them being unable to face the withering scrutiny of being considered for a disability benefit in the first place, no matter how meager that benefit is, so those people must do without altogether.  This is the sort of thing that would be covered by a UBI program and massive expansion of rent control or low income housing, but eh…  We’re living in the world we’re living in, for now.

The internet is drowning in misinformation and no small amount of that is specifically about Social Security benefits – clickbait to get sad desperate people to look at shitty advertisements.  No, there is no plan to increase this or make any of these benefits at all less cruel and pathetic.  There’s often legislation proposing such, dying slowly in congressional committees year on year.

And many of the people who need these programs the most were told that firing Mexicans into the sun would save the government so much money that they could be showered with love and beneficence.  They bought that, they voted for corporate fascism, which aims to break these programs down to rubble and replace them with the kind of corporate schemes that have given us the worst healthcare in the developed world*.  Shit makes me tired.

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*I still can scarcely believe how evil UHC is, how the supposed “death panels” an industry shill ass-pulled against obamacare are actually a real life motherfucking existing thing, under capitalist medicine.  Buck buck buck.