Topic: Public Policy
In June 2004, journalist Carolyn Feibel, then a reporter with the Herald News of Northern New Jersey wrote a two-part series Disability City- “Special Report: Disability City” and “Disability benefits more attractive than welfare for just getting by”, which exposed the 'culture of disability' in Paterson New Jersey, the city with the highest disability rate in the nation with 35% of working aged adults in Paterson on Disability- either SSI or SSDI.
Both articles can be accessed online through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine website: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php by pasting the original article URLs onto the Wayback Machine homepage. There is some sort of quirk whereby clicking on a typed link of these 'Disability City' Wayback pages (from a source such as this article) won't always take you to the proper Wayback archive webpage. Instead you'll reach an error page. I'm not sure why this glitch occurs, but that's why I suggest you CC&P the old NorthJersey URLs into your browser, then go to the Wayback site. You can then successfully save the archived articles's URLs directly to your bookmarks file for future reference without further accessing difficulties.
Special Report: Disability City. The Herald News. http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk1NyZmZ2JlbDdmN3ZxZWVFRXl5NjU0MTY5OCZ5cmlyeTdmNzE3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTI=
Disability benefits more attractive than welfare for just getting by. The Herald News. http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkyJmZnYmVsN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2NTQxNzAx
These now largely forgotten but insightful articles offer some food for thought regarding the public policy implementation of social service and medical care safety nets for two very distinct and sometimes overlapping groups- the chronically ill/disabled and the disadvantaged poor; and how both groups are often being failed miserably by the system. I'll be starting off this blog by examining some of these issues in greater detail.
