What has caused this phenomenal program growth? Even SSA researchers rule out more bleeding-heart answers such as a worsening economy driving more disabled into penury. The real reasons seem to be typical of the modern welfare state: self-perpetuating bureaucracies more inter ested in serving their perceived client base than the taxpaying commonweal, and judicial action spreading entitlement rights further than lawmakers envisioned.
The main reason SSI rolls are exploding is that SSI spends millions beating the bushes for new clients. Congress gave SSI $21 million in 1990 for a multiyear outreach project. Much of that money went to various local advocacy groups to find disabled people and guide them through the application process. Coté first found out about SSI from pamphlets being distributed by suited gentlemen to his skid-row clientele. Funding interested activists to help balloon government aid rolls is one government program that works just as planned.
The institutional mindset, as SSA's Marganau explains it, has never been to streamline costs or keep the program at a manageable level; it has been that "there weren't as many people on the program as are potentially entitled.SSA wasn't doing enough to go out and find them, encourage them to sign up." SSA this year announced an entirely new application procedure that it says will save lots of money, but that calculation is based on the assumption that making the application process easier will not increase the number of people on the program.
But proposed reforms set forth in the SSA's Fall 1994 Social Security Bulletin seem designed to do just that. They include making sure SSI information packets are more widely available to advocacy groups; encouraging "interested third partiesto participate in the development of claims" and then letting them do all the interviewing, checking of medical records, and form filing with only cursory occasional monitoring from SSA; not requiring face-to-face interviews with claimants; ensuring that disability claims workers never "discourage a claimant from filing an application" and go out of their way to ensure people don't "inappropriately withdraw" from applying. All of these reforms, of course, "cannot be implemented without the full funding, development, and installation of a new case processing computer system." The end result is unlikely to be a cheaper, leaner pro gram.
The point of these programs, proponents say, is not to be cheap, but to help those who need help. But giving people debilitated by alcohol and drugs money to buy more is in no way helping them. While SSI theoretically requires its charges to go to treatment, the General Accounting Office found that only one in five actually went, and of course such treatment is not always effective.
The federal government's vocational rehabilitation program for the disabled doesn't really help either, says a 1993 GAO study. GAO looked at around 865,000 rehab candidates from 1980 and traced them both before and after the program. It found that any "gains in economic status made by clients rehabilitated in 1980 were quite temporary. [Among those] classified as rehabilitatedafter 2 years the proportion with any earnings from wages returned to near or below pre-program levels." And those were the clients who were considered rehabilitated; many going through the program were not. GAO estimates that "not more than 1 out of every 1,000 DI and SSI beneficiaries leaves the rolls as a result of SSA's return-to-work assistance." Only one out of 200 beneficiaries of the two programs are even sent to vocational rehab.
The courts are another petri dish for runaway program growth. The 1990 Supreme Court case Sullivan v. Zebley widened the standards for letting children on the rolls. As a result, the number of children on SSI rose 191 percent from 198793; not only were future applications affected, but past denials are being reviewed under the new standards. In the early '80s, the Reagan administration tried kicking 490,000 people off the SSI and DI rolls. The results? First, lawsuits galore, with hun dreds of thousands who had been kicked off SSI being kicked back on again by judges, and then the 1984 Social Security Benefits Reform Act that cemented into law new barriers to kicking anyone off again.
The same thing could well happen after any new reform. Congress, for example, could decide to kick noncitizens off the rolls. But as Christopher Wright points out, courts have generally taken a dim view of restricting noncitizens, who are still taxpayers, from enjoying taxpayer benefits on an equal basis.
The details of the SSA's proposed program reforms, the Zebley decision, and the Reagan-era experience in attempting to clean the stables of SSI all make any short-term optimism about mean ingful control over the program doubtful; what the legislature achieves, the bureaucrats and judges can undo.
Still, SSI's current growth trend can't go on forever. Wright projects SSI costs rising 60 percent by 2000 from its 1994 $22 billion price tag, and the SSA considered 2.7 million new applications in fiscal 1994. One way or another, the program must change. As a separate program for the disabled poor, it has been a total failure. It doesn't do anything effective to change their situation and in many cases helps them to destroy themselves. But meaningful change is unlikely to come before Bob Coté discovers the corpses of more of his charges.
"I try to fix people, not just feed 'em," he says. "The bar down the street gets almost my budget from the government to kill them."
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