How would you suggest it be ordered differently? I don’t know how we reliably help everyone who needs help if they’re unable or unwilling to seek help. “Moar social workers” isn’t a thing - even with funding, the people don’t exist to scale to the size of the need.
UBI etc seem like basic solutions but doesn’t really help them get help, just helps them not need help to some baseline.
It's an poverty/low income trap. If you're on disability/welfare you should still be incentived and rewarded for making money outside of your government payment.
It could be a constant thing like UBI or a gradual reduction like income tax brackets where more money earned is always more money in your pocket.
This has been an inherent flaw in our legal system since the inception of our country. We do not have a right to equal representation. The right to have representation at all is barely even a thing. There has even been some mumbling about ending the right to an attorney...
I'm not sure that's the case here. It's a matter of knowledge transfer.
Lawyers know things. People with money can afford to get knowledge from lawyers. People without money cannot afford to get knowledge from lawyers.
It's not a problem with the "system" that mathematicians know more about math than the general public, and that people who have the money can hire a mathematician to do math for them.
It's a knowledge transfer problem. How do you solve that? You can't give every person a massive book of every law when they're born. It's impractical to store, and they'd be outdated the next day. All of the laws are online for anyone to read, but who has the time?
A step towards equal representation would start by heavily subsidizing law school making them accessible to everyone. Also, we would need to fund the creation of more law schools. In addition we should fund public defenders an order of magnitude more than we currently do.
https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-law-school#:~:text....
Cornell's Legal Information Institute, for instance,
hasn't had the easiest time getting funding although it is produced on a shoestring and clearly delivers a huge amount of value for what goes into it.
State legislators and vendors have long tried to make people pay for access to the law, it seems in the long term courts have come to realize that there is no excuse, access to the law is not for high paid lawyers, but can and should be free because it is not expensive to provide in the electronic age and since you have to follow the law they don't need to give you the excuse that you can't afford to read it.
One of the historical high watermarks in legal history is the existence of the twelve tables, a highly condensed, shortened version of roman law which was prominently displayed in public market places and other easily accessible fora - specifically to allow non-patricians to understand and have access to the law.
Other moments in legal history have ruling classes enacting legislation in languages which the common-folk don't even speak.
We exist along a spectrum between 'everyone knows and understands' to 'nearly no one knows and understands', but don't take the difficulty of fixing the issue with the idea that it isn't a problem in the first place. It is a problem, and it's a large one.
I just don't see how a person without family resources (i.e. most mentally ill patients) could ever qualify and I'm sure that's by design.
Conversely I've known many people who come from lower class or middle class families that have hit hard times who are seriously mental ill (e.g. addicted to cigarettes but so thought disordered that it takes three hours to smoke a cig after waking up.) It strikes me as unfair that somebody who is "lawyered up" can find loopholes to protect their income whereas for many disabled people the process of applying for disability is like going to the moon or becoming a Navy Seal.