Flawed Public Policy- Pitting the Chronically ill/Disabled Against the Disadvantaged/Undereducated Poor
Topic: Public Policy

One of the obvious problems with the use, or misuse, of the way Disability eligibility is determined can be seen in Carolyn Feibel’s “Disability City” articles, and this is a flaw that is very much present here in New Jersey- the SSA Disability Program has been transformed from a safety net for the chronically ill/disabled from all backgrounds into a version of Welfare II for the disadvantaged poor.  

While there are genuinely ill and disabled people from poor urban and rural areas on Disability, clearly others wind up in the program because it’s a stop-gap measure, a way to provide undereducated and unemployed people with an income, food, housing and basic medical care, without state, county and municipal governments actually bothering to put in the time and effort to help fix the problems found in poor urban and rural areas. 

Why bother doing anything to improve economically depressed areas and their people when you can dump them on Disability instead?

The problem is these recipients don’t all belong on SSI or SSDI, and would actually be better served with a combination of local healthcare programs, job training and job placement programs, financial aid programs for continuing education- be it in a trade or vocational school or a community college- and community based healthy lifestyle and mental health counseling programs.

Only a finite number of people are going to be granted Disability in a given year, and when these ranks are being filled by people who really don’t belong there, this is done at the expense of the genuinely chronically ill/disabled who very desperately need the healthcare and economic safety nets the Disability programs provide.  

Unearthing 'Disability City'
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.

Welcome to Junco's blogworld

This blog will be dedicated to examing socio-economic, health care and daily life issues, and public policy implementation concerns in relation to chronic illness, and the chronically ill and disabled.