Ask HN: A friend is being cut from benefits, what is wrong with SSI?

This is a question about how poor elderly people survive in the USA metro areas.

We are in Oakland. Mary is my neighbor.

Mary has about $3,000 in her bank account, which is barely enough for rent around here. She lives on SSI benefits [1].

But suddenly she got a letter saying she was suspended from SSI.

Plus a $19,000 fee.

The reason they gave: because her bank account was over $2,000.

Turns out, yep, extremely strict, fixed limit. If you go over this limit even barely, you can be penalized. The limit is two. thousand. dollars.

They are saying they overpaid her and now she has to pay it back.

They say she was over the limit for a year, which was true — she could have easily hidden the assets if she were trying to commit a crime. (As if having $3k could be a crime.)

Turns out this limit has not been inflation adjusted since 1970s.

Apparently it is the strictest limits of their kind in the USA. [2]

The strict limit clearly discourages people from saving. I mean, it literally prohibits savings.

And now just when her income goes down to zero, she will get a new bill to pay every month. Absolutely punishing!

She is poor and harmless, she really did nothing wrong and this feels like a life-threatening policy failure.

What can I specifically do to help Mary?

This is devastating for her and may really leave her homeless. It is impossible for me to tell how to approach the SSI bureaucracy. She has no lawyer or advocate, and we don't know what to do except to ask around.

So, any feedback would be welcome from folks who have experience with this or can give pointers to other relevant resources, thanks.

Should we contest the case and what kind of logic would be persuasive to this machine?

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/ssi [2] https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/the-case-for-updating-ssi-asset-limits

Nothing actually. Here in germany, we may have a broader safety net but similar harassment of already recievers or applicants.

I once had to bridge over 6 month of unemployment and years later recieced invoices of wrongfully granted aid i got. For about another 6 month, i was arguing with bureaucracy over ever new details. Its deliberate.

In my oppinion, such extra discrimination is meant to water down welfare, ultimately to cut cost. Its perfectly aligned to our recent bill, to reduce budgets to compensate for past crisis over spending (covid, ukraine, inflation), instead of raising taxes on those who even profited in all these crises.

I am not suprised, that any government -- the sovereign -- takes the route of least resistance in terms of fiscal policies and i think neither should you.