hi all

i wonder how many of the affected people are parkies?
i wonder if any of the pd orgs would be able to help?

janet

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March 31, 2002

Suit to Seek Food Stamps for Thousands Wrongly Denied Them

When Congress overhauled the nation's welfare system in 1996, it preserved
food stamps as a federal entitlement for the poor and disabled. Yet
thousands of needy New Yorkers who qualified for disability benefits lost
their food stamps automatically when they were cut from the welfare rolls.

Though state and city officials will not estimate how many people were
affected, the state's own figures show that 103,000 of those most obviously
eligible get no food stamps. They are New York City residents living alone
on Supplemental Security Income, the federal program for poor people deemed
too disabled to work again.

For years, city and state welfare officials have acknowledged the problem,
blaming programming features in the state's welfare computer system. In
response to many federal audits ordering that the problem be fixed,
officials instructed caseworkers to override the computer system manually
and keep the food stamps flowing.

Despite this, lawyers at the Urban Justice Center, an advocacy
organization, continued to see many people like William Brown, 53, a
disabled diabetic who could barely afford to eat after his food stamps were
erroneously stopped by the computer.

Tomorrow, the lawyers say, they will file a class-action lawsuit in Federal
District Court in Manhattan, seeking the restoration of food stamps for all
those who mistakenly lost them, retroactive to when the benefit was stopped.

"I have seen my clients, many of whom are among the most fragile of
citizens, forced to struggle simply to have enough food," said Craig Acorn,
one of the Urban Justice Center lawyers who are bringing the lawsuit with
lawyers at Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler. "I have seen this struggle
result in my clients becoming increasingly ill and despair of ever getting
the assistance to which they're entitled."

A colleague at the center, William Lienhard, said many people were not told
that the food stamps were supposed to continue. "The general belief among
poor people with disabilities now," he said, "is that if you win S.S.I.,
you lose your food stamps."

City and state welfare officials would not comment directly about the
lawsuit. But a spokesman for the city's Human Resources Administration,
David Neustadt, said that since September, a new manual method has ensured
that disabled people newly enrolled in Supplemental Security do not lose
their food stamps. About 500 New Yorkers are shifted from welfare to
Supplemental Security each month, he said.

Jack Madden, a spokesman for the state's Office of Temporary and Disability
Assistance, said that since 1998 the state has been working with federal
agencies on a project that would automatically send food stamps to all
Supplemental Security recipients who are living alone and not getting them.
"We anticipate having it in place this calendar year," Mr. Madden said. "I
don't know how many have been inadvertently cut off, but we are in the
process of automating the system."

The lawyers were not convinced. They pointed out that many plaintiffs
identified in the lawsuit still have not received the food stamps — as well
as other benefits — that they were awarded in administrative rulings.

"What kind of system is that?" asked Mr. Lienhard, who represented Mr.
Brown. "They cut off a huge swath of categorically eligible people, and
then they set up a system that requires a team of experts to put them back
on, slowly?"

The cost of missing even a few months of food stamps can be steep. Mr.
Brown, a former truck driver who has suffered a pancreatic cyst, asthma and
two strokes, said in an affidavit that the abrupt loss of $130 a month in
food stamps in January 2001 meant he could no longer afford to eat regularly.

Unable to control his blood sugar, he fainted several times, and records
show that he was taken by ambulance to hospital emergency rooms.

"When you're down and out, the government don't want to help you," he said
recently, sitting between a hot plate and a shoe box full of medicine in
his tiny hotel room in Manhattan. "I keep going like that, they'll be
cutting off my hands and feet next."

It was a grim joke about a real fear, the rising risk of amputation if he
does not get three healthy meals each day. He said the $68 in food stamps
he gets now do not stretch far in his neighborhood, near Baruch College on
East 23rd Street, where "it costs $4 for two tomatoes."

But as the last of 12 children born into a sharecropping family in North
Carolina, Mr. Brown has known hard times before. His laboring life began in
bean and cotton fields when he was 7. "If I didn't work, we didn't eat," he
said.

Mr. Lienhard contends that Mr. Brown and thousands of other disabled New
Yorkers were victims of a similar calculation at the core of the welfare
overhaul's work-first philosophy.

According to government correspondence that Mr. Lienhard obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act, in early 1999 the Giuliani administration's
welfare commissioner, Jason A. Turner, and Brian J. Wing, the commissioner
of the state's Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, resisted
keeping food stamps flowing to new recipients of Supplemental Security, as
well as to others who left the welfare rolls or were discouraged from
applying — but who, federal regulations made
clear, were entitled to food stamps.

"These federal regulations clearly go beyond the law and are outdated," Mr.
Turner wrote in a Jan. 8, 1999, letter included in the lawsuit. "We do not
have to encourage food stamp applications." Writing later to the secretary
of agriculture, Mr. Wing stated, "Much of our disagreement centers around
the interpretation of the Food Stamp Act in the post-welfare-reform world."

Later that year, federal officials threatened to dock the state millions of
dollars because of food stamp violations, including those that were
attributed to the computer programming problem and that affected the
disabled.

In response, the city issued new directives to welfare workers, including
complex instructions for manually overriding the automatic food stamp
cutoff to Supplemental Security recipients. In the spring of 1999, Mr. Wing
assured federal officials that those remedies were working. City
officials acknowledged that they were inadequate, and in September they
were replaced. "The directives were designed to fail," Mr. Lienhard
contended. "And they did."

Among the people most seriously affected were those whose welfare benefits
were periodically ended when they failed to meet its work requirements
before they qualified for Supplemental Security Income.

Barbara Harris, for example, who lives over a kosher pizzeria in Midwood,
Brooklyn, tells of returning from her mother's funeral on Aug. 3, 1999, to
find a notice that the city was ending her welfare benefits and food stamps
because she had missed an appointment.

Ms. Harris has bipolar disorder, panic attacks and asthma, making it hard,
she said, to endure the hearings required to regain her welfare benefits.
When the government deemed her too disabled to work and gave her
Supplemental Security Income, she abruptly lost her $130 in monthly food
stamps and had to start a new round of appeals.

"I just couldn't handle it on my own," said Ms. Harris, 44, who described
begging for food from a Catholic charity. She said the Urban Justice Center
helped her eventually get food stamps again, including some — but not all —
retroactively.

"I always tried to work and to do for myself," she added, recalling a farm
upbringing in the Blue Ridge Mountains. "I was born in America — I
shouldn't have to fight like this to get what I need."

In another case, Barbara Marroquin, disabled by severe bipolar mental
illness, discovered at the supermarket checkout line in June 2000 that her
electronic benefits card no longer worked and that her food stamps had been
stopped without warning. That began a Kafkaesque 20-month journey through
the state's "fair hearing" system, documented in court papers to be filed
as part of the lawsuit.

An administrative law judge ordered the city to issue retroactive food
stamps, but none appeared. A second appeal eventually restored some
benefits, followed by cryptic official notices and new cutoffs. As Ms.
Marroquin sank deeper into depression and was hospitalized, the cycle was
repeated again and again.

For reasons that neither she nor her lawyer understand, Ms. Marroquin now
receives the minimum in food stamps, $10 a month, which goes mainly for
milk for her 9-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter, who live with their
father but visit her on weekends. Even scrimping, she said,
she finds it impossible to buy them treats or take them to the movies,
because half her monthly $632 Supplemental Security check goes to rent a
room in the Bronx, and the rest must cover her food and other necessities.

"Raviolis for the children, peanut butter and jelly, mashed potatoes," she
said wistfully on a recent Saturday, waiting for the children's arrival.
"When they start asking me for stuff and I can't provide, I feel bad. I
feel like less than a person."

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/nyregion/31FOOD.html

janet paterson: an akinetic rigid subtype, albeit perky, parky
pd: 55/41/37 cd: 55/44/43 tel: 613 256 8340 email: [log in to unmask]
smail: 375 Country Street, Almonte, Ontario, Canada, K0A 1A0
a new voice: http://www.geocities.com/janet313/

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