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I cannot express how useless the $2000 limit on assets is when you’re on disability. I’ve been seriously considering it for a while but my rent is about $1340 right now and could easily hit $2000 soon (and that’s not counting the fact that I need to move to a more accessible flat). But if I can’t save more than $2000, how am I supposed to pay that rent and also eat? How?
Plus I need to have a hell of a lot more saved than that if I want to get my doctorate.
US halts some Medicaid payments to Minnesota, alleging fraud
Story by Andrea Shalal and Ryan Patrick Jones • 5d
"This has nothing to do with fraud," he said in a post on X. "This is a campaign of retribution. Trump is weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota."
New data show how one federal safety net program has been out of reach for thousands of children who need it most
The Trump administration wants to use Facebook and other social media to help identify people who are receiving Social Security disability benefits without being truly disabled.
Unbelievable.
“The US government is now looking in to further eroding disabled people’s privacy by evaluating their social media when determining disability. This is highly unscientific and invasive to disabled people, who just want to be able to pay their rent and have access to healthcare. Disabilities are diverse in nature and some people have invisible disabilities or chronic illnesses. Photographs and social media posts do not show a full picture of what a person goes through to live.”
If Your Neighbor Gets Disability Benefits, You Should Know the Payments Are Modest
A massive government program like Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) can be an easy target for politicians who want to talk tough about making budget cuts.
After all, in 2019 Social Security expects to pay $149 billion to more than 10 million workers with disabilities and their family members.
But don’t let the political talk and the big numbers turn you against your neighbor, friend or family member who relies on Social Security Disability benefits to survive.
On the individual level, people aren’t getting easy handouts—or big windfalls of money.
In fact, Social Security Disability benefits are notoriously hard to get. Most applicants are denied. By the time you appeal a denial and finally win disability income, it can be months or years after you first applied. And this is for someone who can’t work and is desperate for financial help.
Then when you receive benefits, the payments are only enough to help you cover basic needs for survival.
Here’s what the numbers look like in late 2018:
Average SSDI benefit for workers with disabilities: $1,199.91 per month.
The maximum benefit allowed by Social Security: $2,788 per month.
Average Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefit for people with disabilities who lack work histories: $551.37 per month.
The standard SSI amount set by Social Security for an individual: $750 per month
The reality is that more—and faster—help is needed for people whose lives get disrupted by severe medical problems. It can happen to any of us. Social Security numbers show more than a quarter of all workers will develop a disability before they reach retirement age.
So rather than judging people facing difficulties in their lives and receiving disability benefits, let’s demand a system that does a better job helping more people hold on to their dignity when they can’t work.
If you or anyone you know needs help with a disability claim in Houston, contact the experienced disability lawyers at the Makris Law Firm.
ENJOYING THE GIFTS OF LIFE IN SPITE OF METASTATIC BREAST CANCER
New Story has been published on https://enzaime.com/enjoying-gifts-life-spite-metastatic-breast-cancer/
ENJOYING THE GIFTS OF LIFE IN SPITE OF METASTATIC BREAST CANCER
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but the reason for my silence is all good! My 28-year old daughter (and only child) is getting married on June 2nd and life has been a lot busier lately. She stresses out easily and my main role has been that of chief “voice of reason” as she suffers anxiety over every little wedding detail!
One of the things I do to help me in my own journey with metastatic breast cancer is to facilitate a 4-week workshop at the cancer center at which I am treated. The program is called “Writing About Cancer” and includes 8 topics. The group (including myself) writes about 2 topics each week. Regardless of how many times I facilitate the workshop, I always come away from it with a cathartic realization about my own journey with breast cancer.
Following our writing about a specific topic, each person reads what they have written and the group discusses it. Last week, I wrote about being diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer at age 35 when my daughter was 5 years old and in kindergarten. I never looked at my survival in terms of 5 years, 10 years, etc., etc. My goal was to see my daughter graduate from high school. Of course, after the first 5, then 10 years, that thought came into my brain less and less as I was moving along with life and the fear of recurrence diminished with each passing year. In 2002, I was asked to say a few words at our hospital’s Cancer Survivor Day (I work in the public relations department). Of course I said yes then gave absolutely no thought to what I was going to say. When the microphone was handed to me, I told a totally off-the-cuff story about how my daughter was 5 when I was diagnosed and all I wanted was to see her graduate from high school. Then it hit me – she was graduating that Saturday – just 3 days after the Cancer Survivor’s event at which I was speaking. It came out of my mouth like a revelation. Everyone started clapping and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Even my oncologist came to me for a teary-eyed hug!
Writing about and relating this story all these years later in the writing workshop left me with an incredible sense of thankfulness and joy. Here I am, now dealing with stage 4 breast cancer, but in a few weeks, I will be dancing at my daughter’s wedding! How lucky am I? Yes I have metastatic breast cancer, but so many of my metsisters will not live to see their children graduate from high school, let alone see them get married. Just a few weeks ago, we lost Alicia from CT. I met her only once, but she had 3 young daughters who she cherished. Alicia will not see them graduate from high school. She won’t be dancing at their weddings.
The on-line support group to which I belong (BCMETS.ORG) has post after post about women just like Alicia. Some have young children and aggressive disease. Some are single moms. Some wonder how they will pay the bills until their disability payments start. Some wonder if they will see their children even begin high school, let alone graduate. The stories are heartbreaking and only the hardest hearted would not be moved. The stories bring out feelings of anger, sadness and helplessness that I struggle with for many reasons, not the least of which is that I know how blessed I am that regardless of where my breast cancer journey takes me going forward, I have been able to be a part of my child’s life – something many women are robbed of by this insidious disease.
I can be sad over many things metastatic breast cancer may rob from me in the future, but for me, for now, I have been given an amazing and wonderful gift. In spite of what may lie ahead for me. I will dance at my daughter’s wedding!
Everyone Should Have A Guaranteed Basic Income for Life
Everyone Should Have A Guaranteed Basic Income for Life
I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for a while, ever since i first came across the notion who knows when. In fact, i always wondered, even as a child, why this was considered so impossible and the answer given was that “people would become lazy…” to which i had not enough life experience to respond adequately or…
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Generations, disabled
By Terrence McCoy, Washington Post, June 2, 2017
PEMISCOT COUNTY, Mo.--The food was nearly gone and the bills were going unpaid, but they still had their pills, and that was what they thought of as the sky brightened and they awoke, one by one. First came Kathy Strait, 55, who withdrew six pills from a miniature backpack and swallowed them. Then emerged her daughter, Franny Tidwell, 32, who rummaged through 29 bottles of medication atop the refrigerator and brought down her own: oxcarbazepine for bipolar disorder, fluoxetine for depression, an opiate for pain. She next reached for two green bottles of Tenex, a medication for hyperactivity, filled two glasses with water and said, “Come here, boys.”
The boys were identical twins William and Dale, 10. They were the fourth generation in this family to receive federal disability checks, and the first to be declared no longer disabled and have them taken away. In days that had grown increasingly tense, as debts mounted and desperation grew to prove that the twins should be on disability, this was always the worst time, before the medication kicked in, when the mobile home was filled with the sounds of children fighting, dogs barking, adults yelling, television volume turned up.
And so went another morning, loud and chaotic, right up until the moment someone dropped the puppy.
As it fell the four feet to the ground, the trailer suddenly quieted. The four children stopped fighting. The two adults stopped yelling. Then the weeks-old puppy hit the scuffed linoleum floor, whimpered softly, and events, no longer suspended, began to unfold again.
“It’s dying,” Dale said, looking at the cocoa-colored dog, which had gone limp. “It’s dying. It’s dying.”
“It might have snapped its neck,” Kathy said.
William looked at the puppy, then at the medications collected above the refrigerator, then at his mother, Franny, who wasn’t saying anything.
“Mommy, give him some medicine to keep him alive,” William said.
“He’s dead,” Dale said.
“Give him some pain medicine!” William said.
“Your puppy just died,” Dale said.
“Give him some pain medicine!” William said again.
Talk of medications, of diagnoses, of monthly checks that never seem to cover every need--these are the constants in households like this one, composed of multiple generations of people living on disability. Little-studied and largely unreported, such families have become familiar in rural communities reshaped by a decades-long surge that swelled the nation’s disability rolls by millions before declining slightly in 2015 as older beneficiaries aged into retirement benefits, according to interviews with social workers, lawyers, school officials, academics and rural residents.
How to visualize the growth in disability in the United States? One way is to think of a map. Rural communities, where on average 9.1 percent of working-age people are on disability--nearly twice the urban rate and 40 percent higher than the national average--are in a brighter shade than cities. An even brighter hue then spreads from Appalachia into the Deep South and out into Missouri, where rates are higher yet, places economists have called “disability belts.” The brightest color of all can be found in 102 counties, mostly within these belts, where a Washington Post analysis of federal statistics estimates that, at minimum, about 1 in 6 working-age residents draw disability checks.
As the number of working-age Americans receiving disability rose from 7.7 million in 1996 to 13 million in 2015, so did the number of households with multiple family members on disability, climbing from an estimated 525,000 in 2000 to an estimated 850,000 in 2015, according to a Post analysis of census data. The analysis is probably an undercount.
A separate Post examination of census data found that households reporting at least one disabled adult are three times as likely to report having a disabled child, too, although most households affected by disability report only one disabled member. Multigenerational disability, The Post found, is far more common in poor families.
“I’ve been aware of it my whole professional life,” said Michael L. Price, a demographer who retired from the University of Louisville in 2013. “In eastern Kentucky and other rural areas, you’re more likely to have intergenerational households, not just two but three generations. You have grandparents, very young grandparents, living together with grandchildren or in close proximity. And families don’t separate, so it sets it up not only for the next generation, but for two generations, that ‘This is what’s there, this is what you’re dependent on.’”
Other experts, however, say the phenomenon has little to do with generational dependence. “I hesitate to use a term like ‘culture.’ It’s not a specific, measurable metric,” said Kathleen Romig, an analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who studies disability in the United States. “Certain things like toxic stress or nutrition or preterm births or parental depression or genetics” offer a more revealing context for understanding generational disability.
And yet others say it’s about money.
Ruth Horn, director of social services in Buchanan County, Va., which has one of the country’s highest rates of disability, has spent decades working with profoundly poor families. Some parents, she said, don’t encourage their children academically, and even actively discourage them from doing well, because they view disability as a “source of income,” and think failure will help the family receive a check.
“It’s not a hard thing to limit a person,” Horn said, adding: “It’s generations deep.”
For this family in Pemiscot County, crowding around their dazed puppy, the momentum was beginning to waver. The boys, who started receiving benefits after their premature birth, had recently lost them as the government stepped up its periodic reviews, which rose from 925,000 in 2010 to 2.1 million in 2016. Now their grandmother and mother, certain the twins were autistic, were trying to convince the government that it had made a mistake.
Kathy set the puppy down on the kitchen table, and it took a wobbly step, then another.
“I’m going to name you Miracle,” she said softly. “Because it’s a miracle you’re alive.”
