Regardless of your opinion on the ever-growing welfare state, this next story is pretty screwed up.
A Michigan mother kept her daughter home from school after a surgery to remove a brain tumor left the child with strokes, fighting off seizures, and according to a doctor’s note, requiring “assistance in dressing, eating, and elimination of urine and feces.”
This child has been in and out of the hospital repeatedly over the last several years going through a horror that most adults wouldn’t even be able to fully contemplate. She is obviously in no physical state to attend school, a fact that should be common sense and obvious to pretty much anyone including the child.
Well, someone at said school (you know, the place that is supposed to have the best interest of kids at heart, right?) decided to turn this mother in for truancy, and the mother was subsequently kicked off of her welfare which is probably all she had for her and her children to get by.
Via The Daily Beast:
When asked how effective this policy of cutting parents off welfare was in getting children to go back to school, Wheaton said the department doesn’t really know.
“That’s not anything we’re able to track because they’ve stopped receiving public assistance,” Wheaton said, adding the department has the “ability, in some cases, to manually cross-reference new-applicant [data] and current-recipient data.” […]
Despite a lack of conclusive data that cutting parents off welfare gets children to go back to school, Republicans pushed a bill to write the policy into state law. Representative Jim Runestad said at a hearing this year that it was time for “tough love” because parents of truant children “were on drugs” and “kids were running free.”
Just forget about the fact that taking care of a child with these kinds of special needs is a full-time job unto itself.
In a country where the jobs have been shipped overseas, we have the largest wealth gap in history, the most people unemployed who could be since the 1970s, and nine out of the top 10 jobs that employ the most people earn an average of less than $35,000 a year. Now states are pulling the rug out from under people’s feet on top of it for any reason they can think of.
How is making this girl and her mother and siblings homeless going to help her get back in school? She’s dying of cancer.
Everyone knows the only reason schools are so stringent with these laws in the first place is for the per pupil funds they get for attendance anyway.
Then again, what do you expect from a country that arrests 90-year-old men for trying to feed starving, homeless people?
TPTB are antithetical to all decency.
Just evil minions doing their fathers work.
Other people have committed suicide because of the system called Midas in Michigan. It’s not he mother it is how the system of fraud that calculates and criminalizes the needy:
Criminalizing the unemployed
By Ryan Felton
Inside the lobby of a nondescript building situated in a strip mall along Eight Mile Road, just outside Detroit, a tall man emerges from behind a door. Like a nurse calling for a patient at a doctor’s office, he bellows a name.
Attorney David Blanchard stands, picks up his briefcase, and begins to stroll down the hall, past a series of unremarkable offices that double as courtrooms. Beside him is a 50-something woman who works as an
information technology specialist. A representative from the woman’s employer trails behind.
The woman, who’d prefer to be known as “Sue,” is set to meet Administrative Law Judge Raymond Sewell, one of a cast of characters who routinely decides the fate of a parade of people that come through his doors. Sewell and his colleagues take their jobs seriously; they’re an affable bunch, which is perhaps surprising, given their line of work: As judges who work for the Michigan Administrative Hearing System, they routinely settle the mundane — tax bills, compensation issues, and disputes over unemployment benefits.
But really, the boring can be earth-shattering for the folks who await their decisions. These administrative law judges dive into hefty problems, giving their cases as much attention as you’d find in the highest courts in the land. They take notes, deliver grand pronouncements, and hand down life-altering decisions.
Sewell’s office is decorated with a photo of President Barack Obama and emptiness otherwise. The 78-year-old judge is a former Macomb County prosecutor. He’s a lanky gentleman who speaks with a deep, gentle croon.
The reason Sue has taken off work to meet with the judge on an unpleasantly hot and humid day in June is because the state of Michigan believes she’s a criminal.
It began like this: In October 2014, Sue filed for unemployment insurance after being laid off from a contracted IT position. Before the economy self-destructed in 2008, she worked at Ford. Today, like many, she relies on contractual employment opportunities. It was the understandable decision to file for unemployment that led her into Sewell’s world. According to the state, Sue has misrepresented how much income she earned during periods she claimed to be unemployed.
State records showed she collected a check from the beginning of January 2014 until she was laid off in October.
But that’s not the case, according to Sue. It’s indisputable when the job began. It was Valentine’s Day.
“I remember,” she later tells me. “I brought cookies.”
Michigan’s Unemployment Insurance Agancy is adamant, however, saying its records indicate Sue has received about $2,200 in benefits from the unemployment insurance fund that, according to the agency, she illegally obtained. And because of the alleged fraud, the state says she is required to pay $9,000 in penalties — combined with the $2,200, she’s looking at a bill of more than $11,000.
That would freak just about anyone out. And Sue is freaked.
Blanchard, with 10 years of experience handling similar cases, is able to quickly pinpoint an error. For whatever reason, he says, the state’s computer system, wrongly, took the lump sum she earned in the
first quarter of 2014 (Jan. 1 to March 31), and divided that figure by 13, before spreading the uniform dollar amount across each week.
He hands Sewell a spreadsheet illustrating the error. The representative appearing on behalf of Sue’s firm confirms there’s no record of her starting work before Feb. 14.
The look on everyone’s face in the room presents the same question: What’s going on here?
No one from the UIA was present, but Blanchard posits the error is yet another screw-up generated by the UIA’s software program used to detect fraud.
Sue appealed the claim, he says, but it fell on deaf ears. Literally.
“[The appeal] was not considered by a human person,” says Blanchard.
“You’re saying the agency used the computer to determine fraud,” Sewell responds.
Yes, without any human oversight, a machine had determined Sue committed fraud. Sewell promptly dismisses the fraud claim, saying Sue was legally entitled to unemployment benefits.
Given those circumstances, some of Sewell’s colleagues are baffled by what they’ve seen lately.
Since 2011, under Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, the state has spent tens of millions of dollars to slowly implement a computer software program that handles applications filed with the UIA. The effort to curb waste is consistent with a vision posed by Snyder of operating government with a business-minded attitude.
The program — called MiDAS — detects possible fraud by claimants….
Read more below…
http://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/criminalizing-the-unemployed/Content?oid=2353533&showFullText=true
The REAL question is…
What the hell is wrong with US for letting the known evil and insane idiots to carry on.
It’s painfully obvious the worst has risen to the top but we just keep sticking our heads back in the sand hoping it will all go away.
A PEOPLE DESERVE ANY REGIME THEY ENDURE.
People are making these decisions because in their own personal lives, children are unwanted.
where the hell are the religious people, locals, who should be shouting to the rafters and……giving assistance, financial too….and putting pressure on the legal system right there….in this families defense? Where are they? ? ?…..most likely….All are hiding…not to be counted to do the right thing….like it’s been in all of modern times………………..And these religious types think they have a personal line to the above……They should just once prove that,,,, Believe it was George Bernard Shaw or someone of the stature and time…….who said..” Christianity?…might work if anybody ever tried it”