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It isn't the first time. Because when it comes to kicking the down and out, disabled kids have been a favorite Washington target for a long time.
The Supplemental Security Income program was established in 1972 as a means to provide money to the impoverished, aged, and disabled. The idea that no one in this country should starve amid plenty was once in fashion, and Congress discovered that people incapable of supporting themselves due to advanced years or physical and mental impairments were not being taken care of. Technically, SSI is a welfare program, as it is means-tested, or based on need. But while it is possible to measure a person's income objectively, measuring infirmity or instability is not so simple. And right from the start, disabled children in poor families -- perhaps the most vulnerable of all Americans -- have had a tough time getting in.
At the program's outset, SSI applicants had to show they suffered from one of a number of specific ailments enumerated in what came to be known as "The Listings," a detailed document that itemized the woes deemed to be bad enough to land a government check in your mailbox. As initially written, The Listings contained few childhood diseases at all; most of the qualifying infirmities were adult afflictions. In addition, adults had the option of trying to prove they were so impaired they couldn't work, even if they didn't exactly fit a specific listing.
Children were forced to follow the same formula: They had to be either disabled in a way that matched the adult listings or functionally incapable in a way that, if they were adults themselves, they wouldn't be able to work. Sound confusing? It was, and the government decided to settle the confusion by issuing near-blanket refusals. "Children made up only 9 percent of the SSI population," says Barbara Bergstrom, an S.F. attorney specializing in Social Security benefits. Factor in the Reagan administration's generally dim view of social programs, which was ascendant in the early 1980s, and the SSI program became markedly off-limits to kids.
So much so, in fact, that the Supreme Court stepped in to turn administration of the program around.
In 1983, the parents of a Philadelphia child named Brian Zebley sued the federal government, saying their son -- brain-damaged at birth -- had been illegally dropped from SSI the previous year. Finally, in 1990, the Supreme Court declared that the Social Security Administration had illegally denied aid not just to Brian, but to countless disabled poor children. The court instructed the government to come up with new eligibility rules.
In complying, the Social Security Administration added a measurement tool called the "individualized functional assessment" (IFA), which took into account a child's total behavior. (The new rule's full text was made up of the 26 words referred to in the Woodward/Weiser Post piece.) This was when the SSI rolls swelled, from 300,000 kids in 1990 to nearly 1 million five years later -- many of whom found out about SSI through government-financed outreach projects. Each family received about $6,000 a year per child from SSI, with no specific strings on how the money should be spent.
What the IFA allowed for was consideration of the cumulative effect of a child's impairments. Taken singly, as The Listings required, each factor might not be enough to qualify for aid; taken together, perhaps, they might. Thus, a child with a low IQ, impaired motor functioning, and a tendency toward hurting animals might get SSI, whereas pre-Zebley, he would not have.
"It was a much, much more flexible and all-inclusive standard," says Rachel Shigekane, managing attorney for the Volunteer Legal Services Project of the Bar Association, where she heads up a project on children's SSI benefits.
But now, Congress has tossed Zebley out the door -- and the IFA with it. Under the changes made last summer, it drastically tightened eligibility in two simple steps: banning the use of the IFA and prohibiting any consideration of "maladaptive behavior."
The last might sound technical, but it's not. Maladaptive behavior is a broad spectrum, and it includes setting fires, hitting people, and hurting animals, Shigekane says. Congress professed concern that simply setting a kitten aflame could qualify a child for free government bucks.
By eliminating the IFA and maladaptive behavior as qualifying criteria, Congress quickly and strictly limited access to the program for children with mental impairments and emotional illnesses. The truants, the delinquents, the violent, and the sad, the reasoning went, were on their own. After all, can't they just sit down and shut up like everyone else?
"In the past, children were compared to other children of their age and how they functioned in school. How they behaved was all part of the way we looked at that," says Lowell Kepke of the Social Security Administration. "Now there will have to be more specific medical evidence for a child to be disabled. Their behavior alone won't qualify."
Or, as Lois Jones, director of Parents Helping Parents puts it: "The kids in the wheelchairs, blind and deaf, are still going to get their checks. Kids who behave differently for whatever reason will not. And nobody talks about these kids."
When the Social Security Administration looked through its roster last November and started sending out redetermination letters, the families who got them -- in the mailbox during Thanksgiving week, by the way -- were those whose children had qualified for SSI through the IFA or with the consideration of maladaptive behavior.
It was, of course, arbitrary -- casting suspicion on 30 percent of SSI children because of the sins of a few families. Adding to the arbitrariness, no one knew precisely who might be affected by the changed regulations. Congress had left it up to the Clinton administration to figure out who would be cut. Speculation abounded, with some advocates predicting the worst and some hoping that no more than 10 percent of children -- the fewest possible under Congress' new parameters. The new rules were due in November, but weren't actually promulgated until Feb. 6.
