A Booster Shot of Fairness for Ill Children

Oops, the Clinton administration made a big mistake. Actually, more than 100,000 mistakes, but not to worry; it just hurts disabled kids, and how many of them vote?

In its zeal to implement the draconian welfare reform passed by Congress and signed by the president last year, officials of the Social Security Administration sent out instructions that quickly kicked 142,395 kids off supplemental security income. The SSI program provides an average of $100 a week to help poor families cover the extra cost of caring for kids suffering from problems like diabetes, mental retardation, AIDS and serious learning disorders.

Although physicians and other health care professionals had previously verified that these kids were afflicted with serious physical and mental disabilities, they were excluded under the new tougher guidelines. Not that the children were reexamined--their names were plucked from files by state officials who decided that the dyslexia, cerebral palsy or asthma in question was not severe enough to warrant special care.

Fortunately, volunteers from the American Bar Assn. stepped in to monitor this welfare “reform,” much touted by the Clinton administration for a yearly saving of $800 million, or one-third the cost of a B-2 bomber. The ABA volunteers discovered that in most cases, parents were denied knowledge or access to the appeals process that was their right. It was discovered that benefits had been withdrawn in error in the vast majority of cases.

Benefits were restored to children in 100% of the cases appealed in Illinois and Michigan and in the majority of instances in other states. Had the ABA volunteers not stepped in, those children would have permanently lost their benefits.

“Social Security clerks are manhandling these people,” Dee McKinsey, an ABA spokesperson, told the New York Times. “We are seeing a definite pattern around the country. Parents get no information or misinformation about their right to appeal or to seek benefits pending appeals. They are told, ‘Your child no longer qualifies for benefits, so it’s stupid for you to appeal.J”

“There is no uniformity from one Social Security office to another. It’s a mess, an absolute mess,” reports Emily C. Jones of Texas, another of the ABA’s state bar volunteers monitoring the SSI program. In Texas, fully 79% of SSI kids had their benefits terminated before appeals were entered.

In the name of welfare reform, Social Security agents have come to accept the president’s notion that the highest service to the poor is to shred the safety net that has helped to support them. The poor, even children with severe physical and mental disabilities, are now defined as the enemy, officially labeled as inveterate malingerers. These children have become sacrificial pawns surrendered to the ideological obsessions of the conservatives who seized control of Congress and a president who abetted this war on the most vulnerable.

Shame on those conservatives who all these years have so proudly proclaimed their love for those children when they were only fetuses but ignore their needs once born. One such hypocrite is Rep. Jim McCrery, a Louisiana Republican who has fought vociferously against efforts to build family planning services for poor people into welfare reform because he says it would encourage abortion. Yet he led the fight to cut SSI and praised the administration for doing “an exemplary job” in denying disabled kids assistance.

McCrery insists that children denied benefits were faking their symptoms, but in his home state of Louisiana, fully 92% of kids cut off the rolls had their benefits restored upon appeal. The disruption in those children’s lives would not have occurred if the law that McCrery drafted and that Clinton signed were not such a travesty of due process and common decency. Much credit is owed the ABA for exposing this egregious wrong.

Clinton frequently brags about lowering the number of people on welfare and implies, without ever offering solid evidence, that the children and their parents driven off the rolls are somehow better off. The example of hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled children whose benefits were cut off irrationally by a mindless bureaucracy blindly following the chief executive’s orders should be enough to wipe that smug smile of satisfaction off the president’s face when he next boasts about the results of welfare reform.

Robert Scheer is a Times contributing editor. E-mail: [email protected]