“ Because you didn’t make that court date, we’ll take away your livelihood.”
Published on 2007/06/16Michael Kelly and Gerald McIntyre weigh in on the injustice of cutting off benefits to elderly and disabled people for failing to appear in court. Read this latest post on the Talking Justice blog.
Something seems grotesquely out of proportion when you punish someone for failing to appear in a court by cutting off his or her primary or only source of income. But this is what the Bush Administration’s Social Security Administration is doing. And not to just a small handful of people. Well over 100,000 recipients of social security and SSI (Supplemental Security Income, the federal government’s disability support program) have lost their benefits as a result of the policy summarized in the title above.
How could our government engage in such an injustice? How did this happen?
About a decade ago, Congress amended the statute relating to SSI and later the Social Security program, to provide that persons “fleeing to avoid prosecution” would not be entitled to benefits. Since felons serving time in jail have long been excluded from Social Security and SSI benefits, this extension of an established principle seemed at the time a small, routine and rather unimportant addition to existing policy. And nothing noteworthy happened for a number years in connection with this small adjustment. As you can imagine, a very small number of disabled Americans or people over the age of 65 are on the lam running from the law.
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