For my first five years on food stamps, I had two small children, no child support, and no college degree. That was before Bill Clinton ushered in the policies that forced women into jobs that could not begin to keep their kids from going hungry. So I could receive assistance for five years, during which time it helped my kids and me to eat. Not well, but regularly.
I continued to get food stamps through graduate school while we were living on part-time adjunct teacher pay and student loans. However you might feel about this, I would remind you that taxpayers have subsidized far worse investments than me (and others like me). We pay much, much more in taxes once we become professionals than we ever received in assistance as poor struggling students. So it's been a long time since I qualified for help. But you can believe I would accept it -- with no hesitation -- if I qualified.
Not everybody feels this way. Especially among those of us who were raised to believe that accepting help means you're a loser, a failure at life, an undeserving mooch who ought to suffer the results of their own bad planning. But the fact is that it's not our bad planning that produced the inflation levels and other social problems we live with. It's vast amounts of tax dollars taken out of our pockets and delivered into the off shore coffers of the Big Banks, multi-national corporations, and Wall Street that has done us in. So exactly why are we apologizing?
When I ran a Family Services Program for a major national service provider, I learned a lot you seldom see in books. I met hundreds of people wrestling with insanely large medical bills, balloon mortgage payments, unexpected assessments, and their own -- or their children's -- student loans. As jobs left the country (and millions of workers) behind, the numbers of Americans with no health insurance went through the roof. And retirement accounts sometimes vaporized in the wake of unscrupulous corporate decision-making that left workers who had trusted their employers for decades sitting in stunned and terrified silence.
I am not at this time one of those workers. But I don't kid myself that I could never someday be one.
What does this have to do with managing diabetes? Only the idea that there are, I am absolutely certain, millions of us out here who do not have enough income to buy the adequate amount of healthy, natural food we need -- but who don't know we can get help or are unwilling to ask for it. And there is an excellent option we have every right as tax payers to access: SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), the new name for "food stamps." Do not imagine that the little bit you'd receive will break the American economy when so much of our tax base goes to rich people in the form of subsidies of all kinds (can we be honest about this?). This is the reason AARP is encouraging enrollment in SNAP.
Some people don't want to apply because they think the questions they will be asked are invasive. They are. So? Doctors ask invasive questions. Family members and friends ask invasive questions. The main reason we don't like people to "know our business" is that we don't realize there are so many of us struggling with the same issues. Imagine the conversations that might develop if we did know.
Some people don't want to apply because they assume they won't qualify or because they once didn't. But the rules change regularly. Let a professional decide. Seek expert input. Sometimes even professionals make mistakes. Appeal your decision. Read the fine print. An extra "paycheck" in the form of what amounts to a "tax rebate" every month could really help out. Couldn't it...?
(to be continued)
No comments:
Post a Comment