Our Screwed Up Safety Net; States Cause Hit Or Miss Patchwork Of Aid

[dajoki]

The Safety Net
Uneven Benefits
With hundreds of thousands of jobs lost and major industries on the ropes, America’s array of government aid subsidies, including unemployment, insurance, food stamps and housing, is being tested as never before. This is the first in a series of articles examining how the safety net is holding up under the worst economic crisis in decades.

The Safety Net
For Victims of Recession, Patchwork State Aid

By JASON DePARLE
Published: May 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/us/10safetynet.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

WASHINGTON — As millions of people seek government aid, many for the first time, they are finding it dispensed American style: through a jumble of disconnected programs that reach some and reject others, often for reasons of geography or chance rather than differences in need.

Health care, housing, food stamps and cash — each forms a separate bureaucratic world, and their dictates often collide. State differences make the patchwork more pronounced, and random foibles can intervene, like a computer debacle in Colorado that made it harder to get food stamps and Medicaid.

The result is a hit-or-miss system of relief, never designed to grapple with the pain of a recession so sudden and deep. Aid seekers often find the rules opaque and arbitrary. And officials often struggle to make policy through a system so complex and Balkanized.

Across the country, hard luck is colliding with fine print.

Workers who banked $2,000 in severance pay can get food stamps in South Carolina; their counterparts in North Carolina cannot. Oklahomans who earned $10,000 in six months can collect unemployment if they started work on the 15th of February, May, August or November — but not if they started two weeks later.

<<snip>>

When the recession cost Erika Nieves of Bridgeport, Conn., her job with a wrestling promoter, she did get unemployment benefits. But that caused her to lose a welfare-to-work grant and her child care subsidy. Now Ms. Nieves is months behind on her rent and is job hunting with a 2-year-old. “They took away my aid when I need it the most,” she said.

<<snip>>

Just 50 percent of people eligible for food stamps receive them in California, compared with 98 percent in Missouri. Nineteen percent of the unemployed get jobless benefits in South Dakota, compared with 67 percent in Idaho.

[dkf]

1. Well the only way to make it uniform is to move it to the Federal Level.

And do we really want to be at the possible mercy of people like George W. Bush? I'm in a blue state and I'd like to keep my blue benefits.

[dajoki]

2. The states just need...

to make it fairer and easier for people who qualify to find benefits.