According to the UK government’s own figures benefit fraud makes up 3.9% of the total amount paid out (N.B. this includes all types of benefits), and 75% of people rejected for disability benefits are successful on appeal. It seems pretty obvious that this is an ideological policy of penalising people who can’t work because people’s value as human beings is seen as equivalent to the amount of work they can do.
The funding available will be divided equally by all eligible people.
Then fraud becomes not the taxpayers problem, but the problem of other eligible people. Those people will get more if they can reduce the fraud rate.
Obviously for this to happen, the eligible people need to be empowered to do something about it - and a good way to achieve that is to give the money to a charity for the blind to distribute to the blind, rather than directly to the government's list of blind people. Obviously you need to make sure the charity has suitable governance, but there are already regulations to ensure that.
The process took us about a year and required us to bring back the same forms and supporting documentation over and over and over again. Of course this all has to be done in person so I hope your disability doesn't make it difficult for you to get transportation and accommodations during business hours!
You're told by Alice at the SSA that you need Form A with supporting documents. You bring back the documents the next day and find out that Alice is not there and you have to speak to Bob. Bob tells you that you actually needed Form B so he refuses to process what you brought in. A few days later you get a scary letter saying that because you didn't get Form A processed in time, your application has been denied. So you have to meet with Alice again who tells you that Bob was wrong, and they restart your application.
Not only is this frustrating but it proved to be critical when it came to calculating back pay. If you don't know, when you are approved for SSDI you receive backpay starting from the date you first applied, minus a few weeks or months. Well because our application kept getting unfairly denied, we didn't receive any backpay for over a year of trying to get approved.
When large sums of public money are given to a company, there seems to be implication that the company is better at allocating this money than the government is. There is the idea that giving money to companies in the form of grants or contracts or even tax rebatea is 'investing in the economy'
However when pennies are given to individuals, this is immediately cause of suspicion and derision. As if individuals upskilling and bettering themselves isn't fundamental to the economy.
Is this like a weired form of self hatred?
... or possibly "due to the layers of fraud paranoia, the fraud rate is absolutely minuscule". Difficult to know, I would think?
I know this is a subjective statement, but as I go through this process it just feels way, way, way over the top.
We could probably do with a lot less. We could probably make the process kinder. The experience is so humiliating and we do it to people who are already suffering.
Edit: Imagine, hypothetically, that the process were twice as kind but bumped the fraud rate to 1.5%. I would be totally OK with that. Maybe it’s worth spending a little extra public money to treat people with dignity.
I wish you the best of luck.
It’s like a lot of policy stuff: our congress critters have a very black-and-white approach to a problem that only comes in shades of gray.
And, thank you. I have a good support system these days and I think everything will eventually be OK. There’s just an unspecified amount of stupid stuff between here and there. :-)
Even experienced disability attorneys sometimes mess up.
From 2017 to 2019 they rapidly progressed from episodic to chronic. In 2019 I could no longer hold a job longer than a few weeks because my work was being interrupted too much. It was a sad year: I started the year in a VPE position but couldn’t hold a junior SE job by the end.
I am now in one of the phases of migraine (prodrome, headache, postdrome) virtually all of the time. My treatment plan is optimized at this point, there is no non-experimental intervention that is likely to improve the situation.
Extensive medical testing has provided no clue as to underlying physical phenomenon triggering these migraines. As far as physical medicine can tell, I’ve reached the “wait and hope” stage.
I am holding out hope in one area: I am in therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (and the reason for that is something I will not share because it is deeply personal). Research is showing increasingly that emotional trauma can have some strange physical side-effects and I’m really hoping that processing trauma will eventually reduce my migraine frequency and intensity.
You've said you want to work so I hope you can at some point. I feel fairly confident that if you made an "Ask HN" post about your situation, someone could help you out with a very accommodating gig. Good luck
I’ve tested my ability to work four times since 2019 and three of the four have ended up being a burden on the employer (the third was a wash; it didn’t work out but I decided to write off the invoice). I’ve been on the other side of the table and I can’t do that in good conscience.
My thesis is that I should focus solely on feeling better until I can start doing some sort of sustained work; from there I can work my way up until I am able to do rewarding things with my skillset again.
The problem is that (coming back around to the article) our benefits programs have a welfare trap. These systems should be designed to help people who can reach some level of rehabilitation get there and protect the people who can’t.
One of the first pieces of advice that I received in this process — and boy is it a process! — was, “don’t ever say anything that implies that you might want to or be able to go back to work someday.”
I mean, of course I want to go back to work someday! I don’t want to spend the rest of my life sick and below the poverty line, not to mention being sick is incredibly boring. I really want to be well and working and I feel like the vast majority of people in SSDI must be in the same boat.
Criteria for SSDI (paraphrasing) are that you must be disabled such that you can no longer do your job, are unable to do another job with your skills and level of ability and you’ll be in this situation for at least a year.
Even so, expressing even the desire to return to work someday beyond a year from now is apparently a sign that you can work right now to some examiners.
The entire process is wrapped in layers of fraud paranoia, even though the fraud rate is absolutely minuscule.