Deaf Watch Newsletter
( Address Snipped )

June 2, 1998

The Honorable Loretta Sanchez
United States House of Representatives
Washington, D.C.  20510

RE: Social Security Changes

Dear Representative Sanchez:

The Republican leadership in the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human 
Resources is currently drafting proposals that would make drastic changes to 
the Supplementary Security Income (SSI) Program.  A draft list of the proposals 
is dated April 21; a bill including these proposals is expected to be introduced 
in early June.  They are:

1) Amending the definition of disability to specify that "controlling weight" be 
given to medical evidence. Sound reasonable to you? WRONG. This would be disastrous.
You cannot determine disability solely or even primarily on the basis of "medical
evidence". You doctor has to rely in large part of what you tell him or her. Take 
this away, as this proposal would, and you reduce the Social Security disability
process to something like veterinary medicine -- the patient can't tell you
what's wrong with him or her. Proving disability due to mental illness would be
virtually impossible.

2) Make it much harder for children to be approved for SSI disability benefits 
this is on top of legislation passed two years ago which already made it terribly 
difficult to get kids on benefits.

3) Reduce SSI benefits where two or more unrelated SSI recipients live together.
Applying a family cap by reducing the payment of 2 SSI recipients who live together 
by 25% and reducing the payment of 5 or more recipients in the same household by 40%
This is like punishing the disabled for finding a way to survive on their small SSI
checks.  This also affects the disabled who live in group homes.

4) Reinstate a transfer of assets penalty in the SSI program.  Congress eliminated 
the SSI transfer of asset penalty in 1988, recognizing that people generally
transferred assets to establish Medicaid eligibility, not SSI eligibility, and that
the requirement just created an administrative nightmare for elderly and disabled
recipients as well as SSA.  People who are applying for SSI are not in the same financial league with those who were hiring attorneys and financial planners to
assist them in becoming Medicaid eligible.  By the time they apply for SSI, they 
are by definition very poor.  Penalties in the early 1980s fell very hard on many
elderly people who had transferred modest assets to children or other relatives and
who were unable to sustain themselves during the penalty period.  At a minimum, the
ban on benefits should be limited to no more than the old two-year statutory bar. 
However, since this bar could be life-threatening for many people who are elderly 
or disabled, SSA must have authority for waiver of the bar. Further, if assets 
incur a penalty period in both SSI and Medicaid, there must be coordination of 
the penalty periods to prevent the same amount of funds from being "double-counted" 
as if the person could have covered his/her own SSI and Medicaid expenses with the
same finite amount of money.

5) Make collection of SSI overpayments harsher than you can even imagine. Replace 
the current SSI 10 percent rule with a series of rules.  This provision would lift 
the current 10 percent limit on recovery of overpayments which protects SSI 
recipients from having too large a portion of their monthly check held back by SSA 
to pay back overpayments.  This provision as simply too harsh, particularly when 
the vast majority of overpayments are created by SSA's failure to properly input
information reported by recipients into the computer.  SSI recipients (and people
who receive both SSI and Title II benefits) are living on virtually nothing -- a 10
percent reduction is already a tremendous hardship.  This one is almost unbelievably
crude and punitive. You do not want to be on SSI if this happens.

6) Pay Social Security employees a bonus for reporting "fraud", giving them all 
the encouragement in the world to report simple misunderstandings and minor 
mistakes as if they were fraud. This could cause all sorts of unpleasantness for
Social Security disability claimants and recipients.

All these proposals would spell disaster to the Disability community in which 
already has a 70 percent unemployment rate!   I ask you to oppose any proposals in
congress that will make the lives of the disabled much harder.

The disability community is one of the largest and most underrepresented groups in 
the state as well in the nation.

Thank you very much for your time to read this letter and I anticipate your 
response.

Sincerely,




Richard Roehm
Deaf Activist