The grifters you have mentioned are painfully easy to identify. Many of the literally told you that they were faking it. They do not nearly justify the incredible difficulty involved in the process of actually getting approved.
You can be fully, provably disabled and you will get denied. People who judge your case often ignore evidence collected from everyone from family members to doctors to deny people. The reasons they give that you can keep working display a stunning amount of ignorance to how disabilities actually work or are intentionally attempting to deny people the tiny pittance of money given to people who desperately need it for basic survival.
The average approval time in my state is 21 months. Nearly two years going without what you desperately need to survive. If you try to earn some money in that time just to keep yourself alive it will be used as evidence against your case. No matter how damaging that work is or how unsustainable it is in the long term. For this reason many disabled people are forced into illegal and dangerous work simply because they cannot survive for two fucking years without any help, such as sex work. If they get caught trying to survive it will be used to deny the claim.
Now one might think that you could maybe save up before hand and make it through the process that way. Not so. With only a few exceptions, if you have at any time in the process more than 2000 dollars to your name it will be used as evidence against you. This 2000 limit will continue indefinitely as long as you are receiving benefits, and the government will monitor your bank account at all times so if it goes over your benefits will be canceled.
They will frequently demand for you to justify how you survived in the intervening period. How did you pay rent? How did you buy food? They will use your answer against you when they make your decision.
The amount of pointless, redundant, and difficult paperwork involved is another major barrier. Of course while they may take upwards of 6 to 9 months each step of the way, but you might receive a piece of mail that you have to respond to within days or it will be used against your case, or your case may be denied outright.
The form I had to initially fill out was 21 pages long. My wife and I both had to fill out another 14 page long document. I had to fill out details on the make and model of my car, because apparently people are worried that I might be driving a sports car. If you car is too nice they will use it against you. You are only allowed one car ever even if practically you really need two.
I attempted to apply for disability a few years ago. I messed up a couple questions because I did not understand them and it was used to deny my claim. I had to start from scratch, including resetting that 21 month waiting period.
The fact that I am a stay at home mom taking care of my daughter best I can is used against me.
The entire process is so strict and difficult to navigate that there are successful businesses called “disability advocates” that are practically required for a successful case. Fortunately their are laws that say they can only get paid if the claim is successful, and there is a cap on how much they cost so its nothing to lose. Of course this involves filling out even more paperwork, communicating with people, more work and more effort.
You need medical professionals to back up your claim or it will almost certainly be denied. Only Doctors are good enough. Mentally disabled and can’t afford several weeks of sessions? Physically disabled but you can’t afford a specialist doctor? Your chances of approval just dropped like a rock.
If at any time you act in such a way that isn’t stereotypically disabled there is a significant chance it will be used against you. The minimum capabilities required to go through the process are practically evidence against your case as well - for example, being capable of a coherent explanation of your symptoms and difficulties, Even if you broke down crying during the interview for a half hour because it is so difficult, is seen as proof that you are “capable of communication”, which was the exact reason given for my last denial. In the minds of the people making the determination I was capable of communication, which meant there had to be some job somewhere I was capable of performing.
If you have good days that fact will be used against you. If you go to an interview and don’t show glaringly obvious symptoms there is a good chance it will mean you will be denied.
The entire process is designed to discourage attempts. It is split into three stages. The first stage has only a 30% approval rate. The people you are talking about above never get far enough to even count against that approval rate. There is evidence in the form of leaked documents that people who do qualify are rejected instead simply to lengthen their approval process and discourage people to get them to drop out of their attempt. The first appeal has around a 10% approval rate. Only at the third stage, an actual court hearing with a judge, is there an approval rate in your favor at just over 50%. These three stages each may last between 6 and 9 months, which is why the approval process takes nearly two years.
At every step you will have to fill out more redundant paper work.
Those approval stats, by the way, are assuming you got one of those disability advocates. If you didn’t your chances drop significantly at every stage.
Almost all of these things are so strict in the name of “catching frauds” who may not absolutely need it.
The process is extremely difficult, humiliating, is difficult to survive, and is likely to fail. Almost no one gets approved their first time attempting the process, even if they plainly on the face of it absolutely need the benefits , because the process is so difficult. So a fraud would have to go through that entire painful process and succeed. So what do they get?
It will be around 700 to 800 dollars a month at most. Not enough to really live on, your going to be making hard choices between medicine, food, and shelter. You wont ever have nice things or live comfortably. And it comes with major restrictions that will force you into poverty and keep you there as long as you are part of the program. Any reasonable attempt you might make to better your own situation will be used to take your benefits away, you are not allowed to lift yourself out of a painful, difficult life of poverty. Many disabled individuals have to continue dangerous and illegal work, like sex work, in order to make ends meet.
By the way, if someone is doing sex work on the side and is caught, that will be reported as “fraudulent” abuse of the system. There are a good deal of other types of “fraud” claims used to deny benefits to people who need them and inflate the reported fraud numbers to justify these harsh screening methods.
This is what is meant by the original post. The screening process is so impossibly over the top and the benefits so little that the idea that fraud is a real problem on any scale is laughable. But it continues to be something people are obsessed over. Obviously we would not like actual frauds, but the entire structure of disability benefits is built around the obsessive attempt to prevent even one fraudulent case no matter how many actual disabled people suffer and die for it. “Fraud” is first and foremost an excuse to deny disabled people the tiny amount of help they desperate need just to survive.
So if somehow in some extremely rare case a person actually goes through that entire extremely difficult process just so they can live in poverty and pain with a pittance of survival money then I literally do not give a single fuck and neither should you. Stop obsessing over the minuscule chance of fraud and start recognizing that the insane screening process and laws in place are not due to supposed fraud attempts, it’s due to a desire from those who put those laws and screening process in place for us to just die because they see us as nothing but a drain on society.
Statistically speaking your “extremely rigid” docs are most likely denying tons of legitimate cases because they do not understand disabilities, which is extremely common (far more common than not), and using these honorable mention cases as justification for how good they are at clocking ‘fakes’. They are the reason we have to perform humiliating stereotypes of disability at every turn or be denied. They are virtually certainly one of the biggest parts of the problem.
So no. Fakes do not actually hurt us.
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