Indiana’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has sued the Family and Social Services Administration over Mitch Roob’s privatization and automation efforts. The problem appears to be that people who are entitled to welfare benefits under our system are being thwarted in their efforts to gain access to those benefits by the automation of the system.
In one case, a woman with hearing problems and other disabilities lost her Medicaid and food stamps after being told she could not meet in person with a state case worker, the lawsuit alleges. In another, a mother of two lost her food stamps and subsidized health care for her children when the tax return she provided didn’t include one attachment.
“There are a thousand of these stories,†Gavin Rose, an ACLU of Indiana attorney, said Monday. “I’m sure there are cases out there where people are quite literally facing a life-or-death situation.â€
. . .
Rose said that automation creates obstacles for people with mental disorders and other disabilities, or those with limited schooling, further complicating an eligibility process with dozens of hurdles for each of Indiana’s 1.1 million welfare recipients.. . .
Before privatization, Indiana welfare clients had individual case workers who closely monitored a household’s eligibility for benefits and intervened when necessary, Rose said. Now, a household’s welfare records are stored electronically and available to any case worker in the state.
The lawsuit claims FSSA denied or terminated benefits to each of the plaintiffs when the agency was missing some document such as a birth certificate or a medical record – documents that the plaintiffs had delivered previously. In each case, benefits were cut off with a letter citing “failure to cooperate,†with no further explanation.
“You cannot deny someone for ‘failing to cooperate.’ They get this letter, and they have absolutely no idea what they did wrong,†Rose said.
It looks like they’re using sort of an insurance company model where you create layers of bureaucracy, shift a lot of compliance burdens on to the potential recipient of benefits, and deny the benefits not because the person isn’t entitled to the benefits under the stated criteria, but because the person didn’t successfully navigate the system.
For the bureaucrat interested in the bottom line and not interested in whether people actually get help, it’s win-win. You save money on one end by eliminating customer service types and on the other end by denying claims for people who can’t navigate the paperwork.
Yep. After our son’s autism diagnosis, we tried to enroll him in First Steps. The Perry County office had been closed by the government in a downsizing move, with Tell City now being served by the Corydon office. We were put on a waiting list for services, which is unacceptable for that diagnosis where early intervention is the key.
We ended up having wife and son move in with my parents in Richmond, four hours away, to receive the same services more conveniently.
It gets better. Once our deductible was met this year, we continued to receive bills despite having submitted our insurance info. Our insurer needed to be billed directly for the therapy services but wasn’t being billed by the provider. It took my wife three hours on the phone over two separate days to find out what private company does the billing for these state services. First Steps had no idea who did their billing, or how to reach them.
In our case, we were lucky we could afford a longterm relocation for wife and child. We lucked out that we have family in a better served area. We even lucked out that my wife doesn’t have to work and can spend hours tracking down basic billing info. What does everyone who isn’t so fortunate do in that situation?
The insurance company model has the virtue of being a demonstrable success in the free market. Furthermore, what Mitch Roob has done is inherently virtuous, as it constitutes “privatization” and therefore a weakening of dreaded state power.
T, as a former laissez-faire capitalist, I apologize to you on their behalf that none of their exemplars on this blog showed up in this thread to cheer in your face at the moral superiority of Mitch Roob’s FSSA.
(No doubt, if my message provokes a response, it will be to tediously point out how the privatization of FSSA was “imperfect”. Remember, privatization cannot fail. It can only be failed by the miserable, flawed humans who implement it.)