Disabled kids also objects of welfare reform

Not everyone affected by welfare reform fits the common stereotype of a freeloader unwilling to work.

As a case in point, consider the situation now faced by families with blind or disabled children. Until the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was passed last year, these families received not only Medicaid, but also monthly Supplemental Security Income checks. In Taylor County last year, 423 such families qualified for those benefits.

The children of these families didn't voluntarily become blind or disabled, and their medical bills are frequently far beyond the families' ability to pay. And so Medicaid benefits are easy to understand and justify.

The purpose of modest SSI checks was also practical: to let a parent stay home and care for the child instead of placing it in an institution to receive the kind of constant - and expensive - care such children often require.

Apparently, Congress felt people were taking unfair advantage of this arrangement because the "welfare reform" act passed last August eliminated Medicaid and SSI benefits for an estimated two-thirds of these families by requiring new evaluations of all previously qualified children and enforcing a much narrower definition of "disabled."

Thus, some 12,000 families in Texas were placed in the dilemma of having both parents work outside the home to afford placing their disabled children outside the home, instead of keeping one parent at home with the children, and of resorting to private medical insurance that is sometimes impossible to obtain with "pre-existing conditions."

To many observers, erasing benefits for families with disabled children was the most inequitable provision of welfare reform.

In this summer's budget negotiations, the Clinton administration regained Medicaid benefits for those families, but not the SSI checks. Although these children will continue to have their medical bills covered, many of the 423 Taylor County households will still confront the prospect of a parent's having to work instead of staying at home with a disabled child.

It's a segment of people with special needs that the local community must not overlook as it responds to the changes of welfare reform.