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Death by Missing Paperwork [1]
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Date: 2024-08-14
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
Hear reporter Claire Carlson narrate her column on Keep It Rural, a series from the Rural Remix podcast.
After every major disaster – once the debris has been moved into piles and the victims identified – there comes a second, secret, ongoing disaster, a sort of death by paperwork that can follow its victims long after the flames or floodwaters have disappeared.
This is what happened in Eastern Kentucky after floods two years ago killed at least 44 people and rendered thousands more homeless. Earlier this month, I spoke to a young father of three named Wesley Bryant whose home was severely damaged by the flood.
Wesley told me he’s been denied assistance seven times by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which responds to natural disasters and gives money to victims to help them rebuild. He’s also tried getting assistance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture so he can pay for house repairs, but every time he speaks with them, he’s told he’s missing paperwork or is over the qualifying income level. He told me he makes about $56,000 as a social worker.
“I’m a little aggravated because I’ve been working on this for a long time,” Wesley said. “And yeah, it’s just some paperwork, but between work, raising three kids, and not to mention the PTSD and depression (from the floods)…every time I get on that damn FEMA website, it’s really frustrating.”
This is a common issue. Most public assistance programs require tons of paperwork like proof of insurance, bank statements, or several forms of identification to ensure the applicant qualifies for whatever program they’re applying for.
Even for situations that aren’t as instantly devastating as a flood – applying for a free A/C unit or re-upping food stamps benefits, for example – this paperwork makes it very difficult for the people who should be receiving benefits to qualify, especially if they’re not fluent in bureaucracy.
I see this every week at a food pantry I volunteer at where the majority of people have low income, or no income at all. I usually work at the computer, where I log demographic information about everyone who enters the pantry. Two of the questions I have to ask people are whether they have Medicaid – a low-cost or free health insurance for low-income people – and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, which provides people a monthly allowance to buy food.
Often when I ask these questions, people answer no. When I ask why, they’ll tell me they don’t have access to Medicaid’s online application portal to apply, or that they had food stamps but they lost it or their benefits decreased, even though they had no change in income level.
Others don’t have an answer – they haven’t even tried to get benefits for reasons ranging from citizenship status, to a forever-changing mailing address, to being just too dang busy to spend an hour or two or three on the phone with the people who could help them. And even when they do, many of them don’t get the answers they need.
I’ve written a lot about the barriers rural communities face when qualifying for state and federal money. Staff shortages and smaller budgets make it difficult for smaller communities to apply for the grants that could help them. Now that I’m paying attention to this type of bureaucratic inefficiency, I keep seeing a version of this play out at the individual level, too.
And this issue is amplified during times of emergency when people absolutely need benefits, but have to jump through a hundred hoops to get them. Unless you’re already familiar with the process or have Yoda-level patience, these hoops can prevent the people who very much need benefits from ever seeing them.
Paperwork is necessary, of course, and making sure benefits are being distributed to the people who really need them is essential. But right now, when I look at examples in my own community and in Eastern Kentucky, I’m not convinced public assistance currently supports equity very well.
And for many folks, that assistance can be a matter of life or death. So why isn’t it being treated as such?
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