In the UK it’s quite common to hear stories of people who showed up to a meeting about their disabilities and were denied benefits because they were able to show up.
Guess what happens if you don’t show up?
Yup. The standard legal fee (in NY) for an attorney’s assistance in completing a disability application is 50% of your first check. The approval process takes over a year, and your first check will include up to a year of retroactive payment, so your attorney will get up to 6 months of your disability benefits.
Wait, seriously? I had a lawyer help with mine here in Aus, but she was a disability advocate and the service was free, it was a charity…
We have a Social Services office that will provide all of the forms and explain the process. That’s 100% of the free support available in the US.
I mean this wasn’t a government service, don’t get me wrong. So it’s kind of really gross to me that lawyer’s take a cut rather than doing the work pro bono. She only worked with the charity 3-4 days a fortnight.
Welcome to the United States!
And plenty of people are happy to do it. Makes more sense to give up six months of benefits than to never get any at all.
Lawyers have to pay off those college loans…
I’m not sure we’re happy about it, but it’s the only option if we want a chance at a first round approval. Otherwise you’re playing the appeal game back-and-forth, missing out on monthly benefits anyway.
I was being a bit sarcastic. Half a loaf is better than none, but everyone still wants the whole thing.
[off topic]
Great old movie, “The Fortune Cookie.”
A crooked lawyer and his patsy are trying to get a giant settlement. The insurance company calls in an expert to prove the dupe isn’t injured.
[Heavy German accent.] “Bah! In the old days we didn’t bother with tests. If someone said he couldn’t walk we threw him in the snake pit. If he climbed out we knew he was lying.”
“What if he couldn’t get out?”
“He’d die. But we knew he was honest.”
That sums up the current system except instead of “knowing he was honest” after death, they would blame the death on “mental health issues” or whatever it takes to ignore the systemic issue that led to it.
Doesn’t sound too dissimilar to some stories coming out of the DWP here - for example, assessment centres being at the top of stairs. If you manage to get there, denied for being able to climb stairs, if you don’t, denied for missing the appointment.
“If you can climb stairs for 5 minutes, you can obviously work 40 hours a week.”
Burden of proof should be on the government to show you are not disabled!
In the case of being too disabled to apply yourself, yes.
I’m medically disabled enough to get benefits but because of when my disability occurred I hadn’t worked enough time to actually get benefits. I also can’t get SSI because we make too much money from my wife’s benefits.
Gotta love the marriage penalty
Another fantastic bit was insurance made us apply for SSI for our oldest son again recently. He qualified medically before but we made too much money with my wife’s disability benefit. I guess they changed those resource calculations a bit because he got approved this time.
Anyway the payments started and the change in income triggered our income based rent to go up and our SNAP benefit to go down which together amounted to all but like 32 dollars of what they’re giving him in SSI. At least NY isn’t as restrictive about assets for people on SSI than some other states are.
That’s absurd.
It’s all so damn broken
I’m lucky to have my wife and father to deal with all of that. From what I do catch a glimpse of it’s an uphill battle of sending multiple parties for different reasons multiple copies of shit they should have themselves.
