Dealing with Housing - and Other Benefits for People with Disabilities

Let me start by saying I am grateful there are benefits available to people with disabilities, like subsidized housing, Social Security, food stamps, Medicaid, etc.  Without such benefits, I would be living in my car.  If I even had a car.  I purchased my car way back before I went on disability; I have no clue how I will manage to afford a new car when this one dies, which it will eventually, because cars don't live forever.  But anyway, without benefits, I'd probably be living in my car, eating at soup kitchens, unable to afford the many vitamins and supplements I need, unable to access any health care, without a service dog.  My life would suck big time.

But accessing these benefits is not easy.  Consider yourselves lucky that I was not blogging back when I first had to stop working and apply for disability.  All you would have read about every day was how stupid the whole system was, how it made no sense, how stressful and confusing and exhausting it was, and so on.  I think that's all my therapist at the time heard, every week for about three months.  But I'm going to share a little of it with you now.

• There was the time I got a seven-page form in the mail from Social Security, with a letter instructing me that the information had to be received by the Social Security Administration in ten days from the date on the letter.  Well, I received the letter on a Thursday afternoon.  According to the date on the letter, the information had to be received by Sunday.  Of course, mail doesn't run on Sunday.  I tried to call the claims specialist that sent the letter to ask if I could have more time, but didn't get an answer.  In order to make sure the information was received on time, I needed to put it in the mail on Friday.  I had to stay up all night long completing that form.  The form consisted of seven pages of essay questions, seriously, like "What do you do all day on an average day?" and "What things do you need help doing in your daily life?"
• There was the time I hand-delivered some paperwork to the local Social Security office, to make sure it got there safely.  A full month later, someone called me from Social Security to tell me they'd never received that paperwork.  I insisted I'd taken it there myself, the person looked again, and found it had been misfiled.  That meant it would take a full month longer to process my claim.  Some idiot at the Social Security Administration did not know their alphabet and could not file papers correctly, so my benefits ended up being delayed by a full month.
• There was the Department of Job and Family Services office, otherwise known as the welfare office, in Cincinnati, where I used to live.  I would arrive on time for an appointment with a caseworker, which I had to do in order to get food stamps and  Medicaid, and sit in a crowded, noisy waiting room for a couple of hours waiting for the caseworker to get to me.  The room would be crowded with noisy kids, crying babies, exhausted and frustrated parents screaming at them to shut up.  Just the place someone with severe anxiety and PTSD wants to hang out for a couple of hours.
• There was the ridiculous amount of information Social Security wanted in order to consider my application for disability.  They wanted a list of every job I'd had for the past 15 years (since I was 31 at the time I applied for disability, that meant they wanted to know about every job I'd every had, except for a few babysitting gigs I had as a young teen), including the name of the company, when I started working there and when I stopped working there, how many hours a week I worked, how much I earned per hour, my job title and job duties.  They wanted the name, address, and telephone number of every health care provider that had ever treated me for my disability (and you realize doctors sometimes move, right?  It can be quite a challenge to track down current information about them).  They wanted medical records (and do you know how hard it is to track down medical records from a doctor that moved ten years ago?).

Sorry.  I kind of got off on a tangent there.  See how frustrated I am about it still, ten years later?

Dealing with all the red tape of getting subsidized housing is bringing that all back.  They want a ridiculous amount of paperwork and won't accept what I think would be reasonable documentation.  For instance:

• They want proof that I am disabled, but the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will not accept the Social Security Administration's finding that I am disabled.  Oh, no.  They need a form filled out by my doctor saying I am disabled.
• They also want proof that my dog is a service dog.  They want to know that I have a disability and need a service dog, and they also want to know that my dog has been individually trained to perform tasks that mitigate my disability.  However, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will not accept a copy of the paperwork my doctor filled out just six months ago when I was applying for a service dog.  They need their own form that says I'm disabled and need a service dog.  They also will not accept any of the paperwork from the program that trained my service dog.  They need my doctor, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the training of my service dog and probably doesn't even remember the things I told him my service dog was going to be trained to do, to fill out a form saying the dog has been individually trained to perform tasks to mitigate my disability.
• They need proof of how much money I have in the bank.  However, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will not accept a copy of a current bank statement showing how much I have in the bank.  Oh, no.  They need a form filled out by someone that works at the bank which will show the same thing a current bank statement would show.  

And there is a whole bunch of stuff like that.  And who knows how long it takes all those people to fill out all those forms and fax them back?  And I can't move into my new apartment until that happens.  In fact, they can't even calculate exactly how much my rent will be until that happens.

See why I have a headache?