Old Fart's Blog

Did you get your answers or do you still want them, seeing as this post is a few months old?

Loving the idea of an old fart's group. Are there any other female old farts at Opera, I wonder....

dear talldawg,

to be alive without an income. that means that even though physical strength is diminished, only due to age, it is still survival of the fittest.

ssi is... if you have been approved after years of applications by a slew of doctors paid by the fed, (through the fed's nose i am sure), you get a bare minimum to ensure that you will have food.

that's all. no food stamps. so you have to make a choice... a place to hang your hat and starve or die sorting the spoiled food at food banks and eventually making a botulism error, or a salmonela strain will kill you; or you can take your chances pushing a cart of your recent belongings and eat well here and there. you will always be broke by the 15th of each month...

then you have to just curtail any desires you may have
regarding going out into the world as a normal human being.

it's not bad if you have something engrossing to do. like basket weaving or in my case, since i am a painter, i am enabled by default to keep working to improve my style.

people deemed crazy... or 'section eight' get more than the physically disabled. compare section 8 with rent reduced from $950 a month tp $250 a month and receive almost $1200 a month, to a pittance for a physical disability of $852.00 a month. and no rent reduction.

so, if you pay $700 a month as i do, that leaves you with five dollars a day to live on.

when i was a young man of 58 years, i was waiting for full social security benefits.... then it was 62.
then by an act of a biased congress, skinflint congress i mean, they pushed the age of my group... world war II babies, to 65 with a penalty of 30% for the rest of your life if you settled at age 62.

so i waited. now i am going to be 64 in september. so, one more year, if the treasury can withstand the trillion dollar expense of fighting terrorism,(getting more oil for a spoiled voting public) i will finally have enough to live on... say in
belize.

i hope i have clarified the real situation for you.

just an addendum... i have been wearing the same temporary teeth and losing all of the others because everywhere i have gone to have my teeth maintained over the past twelve years, the government has shot down paying for anything at all.

south africa and the united states... the only two countries in the whole world who have no socialized medicine. we are in appropriate company. the last vestige of aryan superiority and us.

respectfully,
scott cumming
I_ArtMan

Very good description of SSI. I've been thinking a lot about the state of medical care in The United States. For years I believed that socialized medicine would be a mistake. I believed the hype of the medical community and the insurance lobbys. Then, out of the blue, my son and I both became ill. I pay quite a lot for insurance coverage and still have co-pays to worry about. I consider myself lucky because my son has no insurance and is left to deteriorate with not treatment until he is sufficiently disabled to qualify for SSI. Intervention would give him many more productive years. A real conundrum.

Then there's SSD - Social Security Disability. If you're disabled and have enough of a work history you can apply for SSD. It can pay considerably more than SSI, although it will be considerably less than you made from working. It depends on your past income, same as retirement Social Security. The thing about it is that it usually puts you over the income limit for Medicaid, but you can't get Medicare until you're on it for two years. Sometimes you can get Medicaid but with a considerable spend down before you can get benefits. On SSI, you can get Medicaid, but of course, how good it is depends on what state you live in.

SSI and SSD are not specifically for seniors. A senior might get SSI if they haven't acquired enough work points to get regular retirement social security, though. SSD is really for if you become disabled prior to retirment age.

Well, this is rather depressing.

A lot depends on the laws in your state. Social Security is the same everywhere, but SSI isn't enough to get along on by itself. Whether other public benefits are available usually depend on state and local rules. Is your son still working? If not, there should be some kind of assistance available to him.

I agree we need universal healthcare and we need it yesterday. Too many people are either shut out, or in danger of being shut out, of access to medical care.

My son has probable MS. They have been able to document a demylenating incident, but there has to be more than one for a full diagnosis. He tried for a year and got really close. Now we just wait.

I'm soo confused!