One of the things that most terrifies me in the world – right up there with being in a hospital without someone to advocate for me – is not having the paperwork or other things I need to get the services I’m entitled to or to protect myself from some kind of officialdom.
This was brought home to me the other day when talking to someone who is helping a neighbor who needs a health aide. This person is able to do the work, but was struggling with having the right paperwork of their own to get signed up with the office that would pay them to be the aide.
They have IDs, but maybe not the right kind of IDs. They’re signed up for some things, but they’ve lost the password.
Maybe it sounds like they’ve been careless, and maybe they have been, but you shouldn’t have to be so damn careful about such things. It should be easy to get what you need, not a damn fight for every little thing.
It’s not, mind you, about certification for the job. It’s just not having exactly the right ID cards.
And they also had to get my neighbor signed up for the care, which is another complicated step in the process.
You have to prove you’re entitled to help, after all. The fact that you’re sick isn’t enough.
I can do this for myself, but then I have a law degree and have in the past done the kind of work where you help people who are in trouble due to misplaced or screwed up paperwork. I also will jump on top of a problem that has elements that could be disastrous because, as I said, this is the sort of thing that scares me.
I file my taxes on time. I pay my bills on time. I keep up with my IDs. And I still panic over this kind of stuff.
I mean, every time I’m headed for an airport, I have a coughing fit that is clearly a panic attack. (I have allergies, but this is different.) I’m tense until I’m through TSA.
And mind you, I’m an old white woman with the right paperwork and I make a point of packing carefully so that I don’t draw any attention.
I try to be careful because I’m terrified of what happens if you are missing something crucial, especially when it’s not something anyone in their right mind would think was actually crucial.
There are days when I wonder how people who didn’t go to law school survive in this society.
And I also worry about what happens if I’m too sick to take care of all those details.
There are so many rules to prevent “fraud” and yet the actual fraud that happens in social services is usually someone who figures out how to milk the system as a provider.
The system doesn’t seem to stop them until they’ve made millions, partly because these systems are made for people who know how to make it look like everything is fine.
But the people who need things rarely live the kind of lives where everything is in perfect order. If you’re just barely making ends meet, there isn’t a lot of room for fixing problems that don’t look serious at the time.
And now I read that they want to cut Medicaid and even add work requirements to it. Anything to make it harder for people to get what they need.
But it’s not even the new abuses being introduced into the system – the possibility that someone can be arrested and even shipped out of the country without any kind of due process or that benefits long earned may be denied – that brought on this rant.
The problems I’m talking about have been there for awhile and while they’ll surely get worse under the Stupid Coup, it’s not like it was easy before.
The richest country in the world has always done a lousy job of taking care of its people. It’s starting to feel like everybody needs a lawyer on call just to survive.
Have you seen what lawyers charge these days?
I’m much the same; I think I’m guilty by nature–not guilty of doing anything, per se, but ready to feel guilty regardless of whether I’ve done anything. I’m always sure that if anything is missing or out of kilter I will be punished–anything from “sent to the back of the line” to turned away. I would never make it as a criminal–because I’d be too certain they’d catch me and I’d be a nervous wreck. As slapdash as I am in many areas of my life, my damned paperwork is always impeccable.
In the past, once or twice, when things went awry, I was able to find assistance (including being hand-walked through TSA by a sympathetic agent to whom I was able to show everything -but- an ID). But I can’t rely on that, and I think the Powers That Are are trying to remove every iota of sympathy and assistance from the machines of government. Which means, I guess, that we have to be ready to assist each other.
Yeah. I have too much imagination to ever be chill in such circumstances. I would make a terrible spy. I’m meant for the straightforward fight, which of course is just as dangerous but doesn’t involve me trying to pretend I’m not doing whatever it is I’m doing.
I used to be amazing at all these things, but when chronic illness dominates, capacity to handle things diminishes. The world is so much scarier now than it was 20 years ago, and this is one of the reasons.
I don’t have a chronic illness and I have a law degree and all of this still stresses me a great deal. I remain terrified of being in a hospital without someone there to advocate for me. Taking care of all the details is so much harder if you’re ill.
I don’t think we’re preventing any significant amounts of fraud by making people jump through so many hoops to get the care they need.