NPR Reporter Puts Old SSI for Children Myths in New Bottle

No one, I think, was surprised when some Fox News talking heads decided to gin up outrage over former workers who are receiving Social Security Disability Insurance benefits.

But a reporter for NPR’s Planet Money?

True, Chana Joffe-Walt didn’t actually call the workers “moochers” or “takers.”

But her post previewing her This American Life broadcast on SSDI and Supplemental Security Income benefits for children came pretty damn close, though the “takers” in the latter case are very low-income parents of very disabled kids.

I’ve got a lot to say about what she says (and doesn’t). So I’m going to tackle her relatively brief excursion into SSI for children here and deal with her skewed account of SSDI is a separate post.

I’ve written before about the recurrent attacks on SSI for children. Since then, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof took out after the program on the basis of a couple of stories he’d heard on a trip to a poor town in Appalachia.

Parents, he alleged, wouldn’t let their children participate in early literacy programs because they feared they’d lose their SSI benefits if the kids learned to read.

So, he concluded, Congress should cut funding for the program and and put the money saved into “early childhood initiatives” that promote literacy — and marriage.

Swift, smart responses from policy analysts and advocates who actually know how the program works, including a lengthy memo to the Times Public Editor by attorneys Jonathan Stein and Rebecca Vallas at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia.

And the Public Editor ultimately agreed that Kristof had “made assertions based on too little direct evidence” and over-simple interpretations of “statistical information.”

Yet Joffe-Walt virtually replicates Kristoff’s core argument and methods.

Look at all those kids getting SSI benefits — and so many of them with “mental or intellectual problems,” rather than physical disabilities that are obvious to any observer.

Look at this one appealing kid. If he “starts doing better in school, overcomes some of his disabilities,” his family’s livelihood would be threatened.

And here’s this one mother who said she didn’t want her teenager son to work because the family would lose their disability checks.

Thus, “the disability program stands in opposition to all … [the] aims” we’d agree on for poor disabled children and their parents.

Not a whit of evidence that the kids’ parents wouldn’t agree on them too. Not a hint that school performance isn’t the sole measure of a child’s eligibility for SSI — or that the teenager’s earnings might have no effect on his disability benefits, since they’d stay the same unless he earned more than $1,640 a month, assuming he stayed in school.

Ira Glass, who hosts This American Life, has defended Joffe-Walt’s report in a response to a documented point-by-point rebuttal, with documentation, posted by Media Matters.

The report, he told the International Business Times “was fact-checked line by line” by an outsider and the editor, as well as by Joffe-Walt herself.

No one to my knowledge, however, is disputing the specific facts in the part on SSI for children, i.e., that more children are now receiving those benefits than in years past, as we’d expect given, among other things, population growth and the rise in child poverty.

It’s the conclusions — both explicit and implied — that prompted Media Matters to call the portion on children “error-riddled.”

Perhaps in addition to talking to some people in Hale County, Alabama, Joffe-Walt might have thought to talk with some of the experts whose work Media Matters cites — and others whose work on the issues she could readily have found with a Google search.

I rather doubt she’s comfortable with the uses Fox Nation and other right-wing media have made of her report.

But if she’d done her homework, she’d have known that she was perpetrating oft-debunked myths intended to undermine a critical source of support for low and moderate-income families, who struggle to cover the costs of raising children with severe disabilities.

NOTE: NPR also broadcast Joffe-Walt’s report on Planet Money and All Things Considered.

House Republican Group Targets Benefits for Severely Disabled

Seems that SSI (Supplemental Security Income) has become the latest candidate for block granting — and safety net slashing.

Under the latest House Republican Study Committee plan, SSI funding would be capped at about 31% less than last year’s spending level and “returned” to the states.

They’d have to use their own revenue if they wanted to sustain the relatively small cash benefits SSI provides. Or they could manage with what they’d get by cutting those benefits and/or tightening the already tight eligibility standards.

We need only look at the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to know which choice they’d make.

The RSC trots out the usual rhetoric about inordinate caseload growth — in this case, especially the part of the caseload consisting of children with mental, behavioral and/or learning disorders.

Cites discredited allegations by the Boston Globe, which took out after SSI for children two years ago in a series tellingly entitled “the other welfare.”

Ah yes, another instance of fostering dependency. More low-income parents gaming the system. Etc.

What seems to have gotten the Globe going — and subsequently the RSC — is the high percent of children on SSI who have mental, rather than physical disabilities.

There’s nothing new about this, as the Bazelon Center for Mental Health reports. The percent has been about the same for more than 10 years.

What has changed is how the disabilities are classified. There are indeed higher percentages of children who receive SSI benefits due to conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and language-related developmental delays.

At the same time, a much smaller percentage of children in the program are classified as intellectually disabled — or, in earlier days, mentally retarded.

This apparent shift in the caseload obviously reflects progress in medical research and clinical practice.

Children who were once all lumped together — and viewed as minimally trainable, but not treatable — are now diagnosed differentially. Related advances have produced an array of treatment options that can be individually tailored.

It’s important to note, however, that far from all children with mental disabilities can qualify for SSI benefits.

Only those who meet a stringent test for severe disability can — and then only if their family income and other countable resources, e.g., money in the bank, both fall below set maximums.

If House Republicans want a real explanation for the reason more children now receive SSI, they should look to the large increase in the number of children whose families are poor enough to fall below the official poverty threshold.

As I’ve said before, SSI benefits can partially offset the extra costs parents incur when they’re raising a disabled child. But the estimated average costs exceed even the maximum SSI benefit.

Not surprisingly then, 62% of families with one child who receives SSI benefits experience at least one material hardship, e.g., severe food insecurity, inability to pay rent and/or utility bills.

The hardship rate rises to 74% for families with two or more children in SSI.

SSI reflects a major positive shift in our society’s approach to severely disabled people, including children.

Many used to be shunted off the institutions, which was not only harmful for them, but costly for state governments, as a new brief for the Center for American Progress notes.

Then states began shifting from institutionalization to family-centered and community-based care — some considerably faster than others.

SSI replaced an uneven patchwork of benefits administered by states and partly funded by them to support this shift. Rather like the welfare “reform” that gave us TANF in reverse.

The support clearly isn’t strong enough — at least for many families with severely disabled children to care for.

It’s still the case, however, that the likelihood of a family’s income falling below the federal poverty line drops by nearly 11% once their child is enrolled in SSI.

You’d think the family values folks would cotton to a program that helps parents care for their children — and empowers them to decide how best to do that.

But the prospect of more radical cost-cutting — except, of course, for defense — apparently trumps everything else.

House GOP Finds Savings in Program for Doubly Disadvantaged Children

Well, you’ve got to hand it to House Republicans. Takes guts to go after poor children with disabilities. But that’s apparently what they have in mind.

The budget resolution they recently passed would cut funding for the Supplemental Security Income program by $3.5 billion over the next 10 years. These savings would be achieved by reducing benefits to families with more than one child enrolled in SSI.

And adding insult to injury, the Budget Committee’s report falsely claims that advocates have, in the past, supported such a proposal.

Some Basic Facts and Figures

SSI provides modest cash benefits to low-income people who are elderly, blind or otherwise severely disabled. For adults this means, among other things, “unable to do any substantial gainful activity.”

Children, of course, can’t do substantial gainful activities — unless their parents find work for them as models or actors. So the SSI standard for them is different.

They must have “a medically determinable” physical or mental disability that “result[s] in marked and severe functional limitations.” Only disabilities expected to last at least a year or to be fatal count.

Children meeting this standard can receive SSI benefits only if their families have less than $3,000 in resources, except for certain specified assets, e.g., a car, a home, a burial plot.

Benefits are modest — a maximum of $698 a month this year. Most children get less.

The benefits partly offset the additional costs parents incur when their children are severely disabled, e.g., lost income because a parent has to stay home or work less to provide care, transportation to and from doctors and therapists, out-of-pocket expenses for aids, special foods and the like.

Note the “partly” here. A recent research review found that direct and indirect costs of raising disabled children averaged $10,830 — $3,440 less than the average income support SSI provides. And not all families included in the cost average had children with disabilities severe enough to qualify for SSI.

Not surprisingly then, more than a third of children with SSI benefits live in families below the poverty line. Many more live in families that experience material hardships, e.g., food insecurity, utility cut-offs, inability to keep up with the rent.

House Budget Committee Proposal

The House Budget Committee justifies the proposed SSI cut on the basis of the benefits model “typically” used by other “welfare” programs.

Some indeed, as its report says, provide benefits on a sliding scale. The scale often weights benefits toward the neediest.

But household size is sometimes a factor. For example, the maximum food stamp benefit for a family of four is less than four times the maximum benefit for a single individual.

This makes some sense, as we shoppers know. A gallon of milk costs less per ounce than a pint.

It’s absurd to think that a parent who has two or more children with disabilities could achieve some comparable economies of scale.

Last time I checked, pharmacies don’t give discounts if a parent fills prescriptions for more than one child. Nor do the day care centers that provide the intensive, specialized care that children with severe disabilities need.

Perhaps the House Budget majority thinks parents can achieve efficiencies — for example, rotate use of a wheelchair between two children with mobility impairments.

Set aside for a moment the effects on the kids. The idea itself implies that all disabled children in a family have identical needs. You don’t have to be an expert to know this is wrong, even when the children have disabilities with the same clinical name.

More likely, the Republican majority is going after SSI because it’s “welfare.” Not only that, but an entitlement — the worst kind of federal spending, if it aids low-income people.

False Claim of Support

What’s truly beyond the pale is the Committee’s claim that advocates have supported a sliding scale. To exemplify, it cites a remark Jonathan Stein made during a 1995 hearing.

Stein, General Counsel at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, allowed as how there should be some sort of cap or sliding scale of benefits “for very large families” — this in response to a hypothetical about a family with eight disabled children.

To rope him and his organization into the current proposal is fundamentally — and knowingly — dishonest.

Maybe the best the Committee could do because it’s hard to justify the cut otherwise.

NOTE: I am deeply indebted to Rebecca Vallas, another attorney at CLS, for helping me get up to speed on this issue. What I’ve written reflects some of the many documents she shared and her answers to my many questions. The political analysis (and any errors) are entirely my own.