Day: January 13, 2018

withasmoothroundstone:

bittersnurr:

clatterbane replied to your post: “Finally got in to see a new PCP. They told me they don’t treat chronic…”:

I think “losing” applications is SOP, unfortunately. Not just the SSA, I lost food stamps and Medicaid coverage for at least 2 or 3 months a year over that. Every year. Existing file? They never heard of you before. Sorry you got that, and the rest

I’ve actually never had issues with medicaid I don’t think but I did lose cell service because I have a subsidized phone and they screwed my application up (I lost my phone number too)

This is my second denial for ss they apparently didn’t use the old files or the new files so i have no idea what the fuck they were even doing for the last 6 months. I get to talk to my therpist/social worker on monday and hopefully they can help me avoid it happening again

I lost Medicaid this year because of bullshit like that.  I got it back and got retroactive Medicaid for the time I was without it, which is good because I’d never have been able to pay the hospital bills without it, not in a million years.  But it was a serious hassle, and all happened for really stupid reasons.  I’m just glad I have a case manager who was capable of doing all the legwork to get it back, because I’m not even remotely capable of dealing with Medicaid bureaucrats.

In my case, also, Medicaid has tried to deny me on the grounds of income before, even though I’m in a protected category of people (in my case, Disabled Adult Children, there are other categories treated the same as well) who are supposed to be considered equivalent to SSI recipients for Medicaid purposes (meaning that I have no income limit for Medicaid).  I would call them up (back when I could use the Internet for relay purposes, before they required all kinds of bullshit to be able to do that) and tell them “Turn to page ____ of the Medicaid manual” and they’d just repeat at me “You have too much income.”  No matter how many times I told them to just open the frigging manual and what page to open it to.  Then I got Legal Aid’s lawyers to call them and tell them the exact same thing, and it was fixed with one phone call.  That happened to me at least twice.

This time though it was something related to a change of address or something like that.  But it seems like they’ll drop you for practically any reason.

And I’ve found that any bureaucracy whose basic goal is to save the government money by shutting as many people out of the program as possible, will do blatantly illegal things, including losing files on purpose (or pretending to have lost files), basically hoping that you won’t fight back.  And then half the time if you fight back even a little they’ll cave in.  They’re just banking on the fact that, statistically, most people aren’t going to have the time, energy, knowledge, and/or ability, to fight back, so they can save a lot of money by just ignoring people’s applications until they send in the equivalent of Legal Aid. 

California’s Regional Center system is notorious for pulling stunts like that.  In my case, for instance, they simply did not notify me when I was accepted as a Regional Center client.  The time for the notification came and went and they simply did not return phone calls asking if I was accepted.  The moment my mother sent them a letter by way of Protection and Advocacy, they suddenly sent me a letter saying I’d been accepted.  They were just hoping that we’d give up and go away when we didn’t get a response out of them.  And that’s because a large number of people wouldn’t know to contact P&A, and would either continue making fruitless phone calls, or give up assuming they’d not been accepted to begin with.

People tell me it’s too cynical to believe that places like the Regional Center exist in order to save the state money by denying people services, but that really seems to be their actual role in the world, as seen by themselves.  And Social Security, Medicaid, and the like are no different that way.  They’re all about making it as hard as possible to get benefits.  And that includes people who absolutely do qualify, who are even acknowledged by the state as qualifying, who simply aren’t told that they qualified in the hopes that they’ll assume they didn’t and go away.  And for things like Disabled Adult Child benefits and Medicaid, in states where DAC recipients automatically get Medicaid no matter what our income… they’ll basically pretend that they don’t know the law, because it’s so easy to pretend given how small and obscure the groups are that qualify in this way.

All of which adds up to a nightmare for anyone trying to get any kind of benefits or services anywhere, whether they technically were approved or not.

A little more context, in case anybody missed that link in the last post.