The Importance of Social Security

Dohn Hoyle, Partners in Policymaking Faculty Member, Activist and Organizer
31. The Importance of Social Security
I think people underestimate how important Social Security is. They don't understand that most services provided in almost every state these days are Medicaid services and their eligibility for Medicaid in your state like mine comes with eligibility for SSI or its equivalent. And therefore knowing what goes on in the Social Security Administration is really important.
Knowing what goes on and knowing how to qualify for eligibility, it's not everybody on Medicaid has SSI 'cause some have too much Social Security income to get SSI, but they all had eligibility for SSI kinds of benefits. And those benefits now are pretty much translatable to Medicaid benefits. And I don't care what the services you're looking for in the future, whether it's case management or it's vocational or it's residential or whatever it is, your state probably captures federal Medicaid money for that service and they'd be foolish not to because states affording it on their own just isn't likely to happen.
So states are really almost blackmailed into having to apply for Medicaid as a service, nothing to do with hospitals and doctors, as a service that might serve a person with a disability throughout their lifetime. And eligibility is typically tied to SSI eligibility. You know, your state like mine probably has 30 categories of eligibility for Medicaid, but the ones that really matter are the SSI eligibility for Medicaid, because that means income and resources that you can look at are narrowly scoped and so on and so forth.
That means that services you might need in the future or are participating in now are gonna require Medicaid eligibility are ending the waiting list in Michigan, ends it for people on Medicaid. It doesn't end it for anybody who's not on Medicaid. There's almost no way to do that. But you have to go after Medicaid and those kinds of things that are very closely tied to Title 19, it's tied to Title 16 in many ways and even back to Title 2. So I mean the Social Security piece is a big piece of this and to say it isn't important or doesn't matter is really wrong.
Plus how many sources of income are people with disabilities gonna have? I mean, we can use employment as one example and hopefully they'll earn enough to not get anymore SSI or Social Security, but that's, for most people, that's a long way down the road or it's gonna be exceptional. I would tell people that you need to learn enough about Medicaid, but that means you gotta go back and all way back to the Titles of the Social Security Act.