These disabled people tried to play by the rules. It cost them their federal benefits

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

72% : So brushing my teeth, washing my face, give me a shower,” she says.
70% : Social Security allows a few exceptions to what gets counted as an asset.
62% : On earnings more than $65, Social Security will reduce their benefits by $1 for every $2 they make.
60% : Till Social Security do us part Last year, Gabriella Garbero of St. Louis passed the bar.
60% : But Garbero says she realized the government worker “had all the power over my life that she could ever want.”
59% : When someone gets approved for SSI, they give Social Security the right to check their bank accounts and monitor other records of assets.
59% : He tried to sell it, without success, and showed proof to Social Security.
59% : O’Malley, at a conference this month, said SSI accounts for just 4% of all the benefits Social Security gives out, but it takes up 38% of the agency’s administrative budget.
58% : Romig recently went to work as a senior adviser to the commissioner of Social Security.
58% : Someone at Social Security had noticed she’d accumulated the $260 in her checking account and had spotted her life insurance policy with its $1,900 cash value.
58% : Private insurance, the kind that people get through work, typically won’t cover in-home personal care assistants and nurses.
58% : Until September, SSI recipients are still expected to provide Social Security with the receipts that show the amount of any food — from a grocery store or restaurant — that was gifted to them.
57% : Still, Social Security demanded that her son repay three months of SSI checks, a total of $2,742.
57% : The wait times to get approved for disability benefits are long — almost doubling during the pandemic when Social Security closed its offices.
57% : In most states, someone who is eligible for SSI is automatically qualified for Medicaid, the state and federal health insurance for people with little income.
57% : Several years ago, Garbero says her caseworker at Social Security “asked if we were sharing a bedroom.”
57% : It gets them onto Medicaid and it pays for their group homes or other living arrangements.
57% : In addition, SSI would reach more people and more would become eligible for Medicaid as a result.
56% : ‘If I lose it, do I have a roof over my head for my kids?’
56% : Social Security reported $4.6 billion in overpayments in fiscal year 2023.
56% : Martin O’Malley, the new commissioner of Social Security, revealed the extent of those overpayments when he told a congressional committee in March that 1.3 million people — 1 out of every 6 people who rely upon SSI — got an overpayment notice last year.
56% : It wasn’t the first time Social Security demanded that Smith pay back money.
55% : But Social Security still demanded repayment of $2,742.
55% : Social Security eventually relented after Ramirez documented months of research and calls to multiple agency staffers.
55% : When people go over the $2,000 asset limit, sometimes they get a warning from Social Security to quickly, within days, “spend down” money they’ve saved.
54% : Overpayments and fear Valerie Smith noticed right away when Social Security, two years ago, deposited an extra SSI check in her son’s bank account.
53% : A surprise in Philadelphia In Philadelphia, Karen Williams was caught off guard when, in 2019, she got a letter from Social Security telling her she needed to come to the local office.
53% : Social Security counted the loan as an asset and cut off the benefits that went to the family’s disabled son.
53% : A Holocaust survivor in Virginia received a reparations check from Germany last year, and when Social Security spotted the extra money in his bank account, it moved to end his SSI.
53% : In 2011, someone at Social Security noticed that a child support payment from her son’s father hadn't been properly recorded — back in 2006.
53% : Meanwhile, he says Congress or Social Security could change the way it determines who is over the limit.
52% : When NPR interviewed her last year, she wasn’t speaking for Social Security or SSI.
52% : Lawyers who represent beneficiaries get “a bucket of mail a day, literally, a bucket” from Social Security, says Camp.
52% : Because Social Security hadn’t adjusted her son’s monthly benefits, based on the new child support amount, the agency ruled that Goods had received too much.
51% : It is not funded by the trust funds that support better-known parts of Social Security, like the checks it sends 53 million retirees and their dependents, or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which supports 8.5 million people who leave the workforce because of a disability.
50% : Williams, who is disabled and doesn’t work, relied upon a little-known federal assistance program — Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, run by the Social Security Administration.
50% : NPR interviewed roughly 200 people, including those who depend upon SSI, lawyers who help them, experts who study SSI and poverty, Social Security officials, staff and others.
50% : The worthless timeshare and the Holocaust reparations check An average of 70,000 beneficiaries have their benefits suspended every year, according to Romig, the policy expert now at the Social Security Administration, and 40,000 have their benefits terminated.
50% : It’s Medicaid that pays for Garbero’s nurses and aides.
50% : But today, Social Security says it has no record of the returned check, even after she called and returned to the office and showed the receipts that were written to her.
49% : The penalty was stiff: Williams was kicked off SSI, her primary source of income, and told by Social Security to pay back two years of benefits totaling $20,385.
49% : Many beneficiaries depend on the Medicaid eligibility that is automatic in most states for someone who qualifies for SSI, but then risk losing Medicaid if they marry.
48% : Social Security collects data on the family’s rent and living costs to calculate the SSI beneficiary’s “fair share” of rent.
48% : Once she filed the appeal, Social Security was required to stop taking money from her son’s check.
47% : SSI’s rolls peaked a decade ago and then fell after Congress and Social Security tightened eligibility reviews — and kept the low asset limit in place.
47% : The burden of proof will now fall on Social Security, not the recipient, to prove that the person who gets the check did something to go over the asset limit or to cause the overpayment.
47% : Morris complains about the outdated asset limit and how SSI is run by Social Security.
46% : Peter Balletti of Deer Park, N.Y., fought Social Security for years after he was denied SSI benefits because he owns a timeshare in the Poconos, one that he argued is worthless.
46% : If a parent gives their disabled daughter $100 “to help them make ends meet,” Wagner notes that Social Security “would reduce her SSI by $80.
45% : “Nobody should be afraid to say they’re in a relationship with somebody,” says Garbero, comparing the situation to the fight for the legalization of interracial marriage in 1967 and marriage for same-sex couples in 2015.
45% : Still, Social Security so frequently recalculates a recipient’s financial eligibility — sometimes monthly — that it’s dangerous to save and easy to run afoul of the low asset limit.
45% : She worried whether she was “going to get locked up” or was Social Security “going to take my son’s check away?”
44% : SSI, a $61 billion program in 2023, is funded out of general tax revenues.
44% : It took Social Security more than five years to notice the mistake.
43% : —Social Security is not up to the task of administering such a complex system.
43% : Last year, Social Security conceded it made a mistake and had not properly told Williams of her right to appeal.
43% : An Illinois man, who asked to be anonymous for fear of retaliation, told us he feels trapped living in his unsafe and run-down apartment because when he saved up for the down payment on a new place, Social Security said he was over the asset limit and moved to end his SSI.
42% : Also, few lawyers take SSI cases because Social Security puts a low cap on how much they can earn from such cases.
41% : SSI came years before the ADA, which banned discrimination at work, on public transportation or access to public places like going to restaurants and movie theaters.
41% : The extreme red tape of SSI isn’t just a problem for recipients and their families — it’s a burden for Social Security, too.
41% : It costs Social Security a lot of money to do all those complex calculations.
39% : Social Security said it could not provide data of how many people lose SSI for violating the “holding out” rule or for marrying.
38% : But Ramirez says Social Security got it wrong and there were no accounts in her son’s name or Social Security number at those banks, something she says the banks confirmed to her.
38% : She was born six months after President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law in 1990, proclaiming: “Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”
38% : Social Security Commissioner O’Malley acknowledges many of his staff’s complaints and has cited high staff turnover and low morale as problems to address.
37% : In Georgia, Stacey Ramirez says Social Security suddenly stopped sending SSI checks to her 29-year-old autistic son, Ryan, last year.

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