Issues with SSI benefits and casemanagers

I thought this was a well-crafted short piece examining some of the issues and complexities of the SSI benefit policies.

When it comes to assigning people certain amounts of SSI for different disabilities and things, I think case managers making the overall decisions need to be more aware of the person’s situation. For some people receiving SSI is an excuse to not hold a job or contribute anything worthwhile to society. And then others are kept from receiving these benefits. For instance when alcoholism is listed as someone’s main medical problem – they are kept from receiving SSI benefits.

Here are two examples.

A young man in our community who is developmentally disabled, but he’s also an alcoholic. His doctor listed alcoholism as his main problem, keeping him from receiving SSI, something that he truly needs because he is not developed enough to hold a steady job. The thing keeping him from holding a job isn’t alcoholism.

There’s the other side of the coin as well – the diabetic alcoholic who receives SSI because their main medical problem was diabetes. So he gets a SSI check every month, but rather than using it to eat properly, he uses it to go buy alcohol, thus making his diabetic issues worse and worse.

It’s hard to say that one person deserves SSI over another. I can’t even imagine being the person in the position to set down those rules and those standards. It’d be nice if it were the sort of thing that could be looked at differently from person to person, etc and so on. Perhaps it’s time to do something like that. To start looking at individual circumstances when it comes to handing out SSI and moving forward based on those circumstances and how they fit into the whole. Sometimes a simple set of standards is just fine to get by on, but other times things need to be shifted and changed to put everything in right order.