Any survivors of the US "social safety network" know well that to actually access and acquire a benefit, you must undergo a trial by humiliation, frustration, degradation, and endurance. My friend Will, who earned about $5000 a year at Target and received $800 a month in SSDI - his only sources of income - was not on the food stamp program. This was baffling to Kevin, a fellow activist and friend, and I, because many others in the Intermittent Supported Living Arrangement at the organizations to "help" persons with disabilities that Will had been a part of for 20 years had "LINK" (foodstamp) cards - why not Will? The Organization employed a full time "benefits coordinator", but if she ever actually coordinated a benefit, it was news to me.
I called Caitlyn, the overconfident and undertalented supervisor of the program.
"Why doesn't Will have a LINK card?"
"Well, he was always one of those marginal cases - he usually earned too much money to qualify," she claimed.
Perhaps when he was working full time (earning minimum wage) but that hadn't been the case for a number of years. Will's presence in The Organization was intended to bring them income and any benefit to Will was purely coincidental, so I wasn't shocked - though I was indeed appalled - to find out that they'd done nothing to help him obtain this much needed benefit. In the fall of 2009, shortly after he had returned to part time work after completing Interleukin 2, Kevin and I took Will to the local Department of Human Services office. We'd been advised to show up there a half hour before they opened - to "get in line". Fortunately, it was a fine fall day and Will was still well enough to stand. Many people were already in line - outside in the parking lot, which was located in the back of a run down strip mall. Hidden from view, we stood with the others - a varied crowd, that included young people, mothers with crying children, and representatives from every age range and ethnic group.
When the building finally opened, we stood in line to sign up to - well, stand in another line. Only this time we could sit down and wait. There were two doors on either side of the back of the waiting room. They'd open - sometimes simultaneously - and a name was called. If you couldn't hear your name above the cacophony of crying children and general noise, you were out of luck. We waited two hours for Will's name to be called, while we filled out paperwork.
Many of the questions were redundant. It drove Kevin mad. "I feel like telling them, for the answer to question 57, refer to question 28!" he fumed. I rapidly answered endless queries about Will's income, expenses, and employment situation. We'd brought paystubs and Medicare cards with us; we had, we thought, all the facts we needed.
Sitting in DHS offices ranks somewhere up there with spending time in unemployment and DMV offices for sheer hell. Will grew edgy; I tried to reassure him. Since his cancer had spread, he found hours spent waiting in unpleasant surroundings harder and harder to tolerate. Perhaps he sensed that time was running out and he didn't want to waste in on plastic chairs in grimy waiting rooms. Or perhaps he was, like most people, well aware of the stigma attached to applying for benefits and had simply had enough of being stigmatized. Time crawled. I knelt on the floor next to him, rubbing his back. At last his name was called, and like a motley band of gypsies, all three of us trudged back to the tiny cube that contained his "case worker". She was less than charming. I never could decide the "chicken or the egg" calculus on social service workers. Do some become rude and arrogant and condescending because they are overworked, underpaid, and the system is woefully underfunded? Or do they start out that way, and simply perpetrate a degrading attitude towards those they serve? In any case, she told us we'd get a reply in three to six weeks.
It turned out there was another hoop to jump through, more copies of paystubs were needed. Will and I drove to Target, and I hand delivered the paperwork, marked carefully with the caseworker's name. Follow up calls revealed it had never made it's way from the front desk to her cube, though, and more copies were needed. Finally, the letter arrived, Will was entitled to $126 worth of food stamps per month. It had taken almost two months between applying and receiving the benefit; I am not sure what people who don't have friends and family to help them would do in the interim. The food pantries tried, but they were not easy to use or access. Will was still in good physical condition and we could simply drive to the grocery store - but in the DHS office I saw one man on oxygen and another who arrived in what appeared to be a hospital style gurney.
Once you actually get the coveted LINK card, there's more to endure - in the US, the poor are punished endlessly. Smaller groceries stores - and in the town we live in, the only grocery store in walking distance is one such smaller store - have signs posted that LINK cards are not accepted. Will and I drove to a large chain store, and he made his selections. Nutrition was especially important for him; he was fighting stage four cancer and had just endured one of the most toxic treatments survivable in an effort to put it in remission. Many common items are not covered by food stamps - items like soap, shampoo, and toilet paper. We understood that. But using the LINK card is often an ordeal - that was a new experience for me.
The cashier rang up his order and he swiped the newly minted LINK card and entered his pre-selected PIN number. It wouldn't work. The cashier, eyeing the long line behind us, grew annoyed. "Can't you use another payment method?" she asked.
"NO!" I said, growing angry. We tried again. Same results. I called the number on the back of the card - his card had been properly activated and there were $126 available for food. The cashier called a manger. Eventually, we were able to use the card to pay, but I found that the cashier's attitude was not unusual. Using food stamps carries a stigma, and God forbid the stigmatized aren't properly reminded of this. We encountered this over and over, at various stores, so it wasn't an anomaly of this particular chain. Will, whose disability sometimes made it difficult for him to communicate technical information easily, would have likely given up and just paid for the groceries out of his other income - income he badly needed to cover other necessities. Nutritious food, so vital for his health, was often more expensive than "junk". The more affordable types required cooking skills that far exceeded what most people with developmental disabilities had been able to master. The already stacked deck tilted further away from their favor, and in Will's case, no one in the private organization (funded almost entirely with public dollars) who was profiting richly from his presence in their program bothered to assist him in either obtaining or using the benefit. They were happy to take credit for it, though, and on his monthly summary sheet, "planning and shopping for food" was checked off weekly, and The Organization was reimbursed by the state for this "service". From August 2009 through March 2010, they claimed they were helping him with these life tasks, and not once during this period did they provide any assistance whatsoever.
Six months after receiving his LINK card, Will was notified that he needed to reapply all over again. Illinois was in a budget crisis. By this time, his health had declined to the point that he could no longer wait in lines and sit in offices for hours, and Kevin and I tried to do it by proxy - he signed power of attorney papers allowing us to help him. When the state finally awarded him his "new" benefit, it was $16 a month. We appealed. He died in October 2010, the situation still unresolved.
Will had two experienced and determined activists fighting for him to assist him in obtaining benefits. He was diagnosed as developmentally disabled, and fighting stage IV cancer. No hammock sitting going on.
This is the state of the social safety net in the United States. It's a cruel joke and to claim otherwise is absurd. Yet the entire GOP and many Democrats do just that.