They’re calling it welfare abuse, and they’re accusing doctors of it.
Doctors can help nudge up the incomes of their welfare-dependent patients by completing a form that entitles them to some extra food money each month for health-related reasons. It’s called the Special Dietary Allowance. There are a number of qualifying health conditions, such as diabetes, Crohn’s Disease, Celiacs, HIV, vitamin deficiencies and food allergies. The more such conditions a person has, the larger their food supplement will be, up to a maximum of $250 a month.
A few years ago, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) urged social assistance recipients to ask their doctors to complete the forms, regardless of their health status, as a strategy to address Ontario’s woefully inadequate welfare rates.
A number of doctors have completed the forms for patients who do not have the listed conditions, presumably because they see a nutritious diet as good preventive health care, and because they know it is virtually impossible for someone to eat a nutritious diet on a welfare income. You can get enough calories, but not enough nutrition. Same thing with the food banks and the soup kitchens: plenty of calories, not many fruits and vegetables.
According to the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association, Dr. Jeffrey Turnbull, poverty is the single greatest predictor of poor health in Canada. It’s associated with higher levels of chronic illness, infant mortality, stress, depression and disability…and that’s just scratching the surface.
If you are a single employable person receiving Ontario Works (welfare) , you live in extreme poverty. Your total annual income is $7,204* (including federal and provincial tax credits), or $600 a month. That’s about one-third of the poverty line. In other words, you can have one-third of what you need and none of what you want. It’s amazing what you will consider a luxury under such circumstances.
I’ve been on welfare and I can’t even fathom how people do it. Gabriel wrote about eating on welfare very compellingly in his blog post: The More Things Stay the Same the More They Continue to Suck but in a Totally Bad Way.
Anyway, it’s a pretty sad day when doctors are being accused of welfare abuse for signing forms that might get their patients some fresh fruits and vegetables. Doctors shouldn’t be put in this position in the first place, of having to intervene to ensure their patients’ access to adequate nutrition. Welfare incomes should be sufficient to cover basic nutrition for all recipients, not just for those who are already sick. Instead of going after doctors and other so-called ‘welfare abusers,’ the government should immediately raise the rates to a livable level. Nobody should ever have to scam fresh fruit. Nobody.
Speaking of welfare abuse, one of these days I’m going to blog about my own experiences of being a welfare cheat. I hope the statute of limitations is up.
*That’s the 2007 welfare rate, according to the National Council of Welfare. I don’t know if it’s changed since then, but it likely hasn’t changed much. The only time welfare rates change dramatically is when they are slashed.
So many thing are making my blood boil these days – the words “afghan detainees”, “taser” and “RCMP” send me into a rant. This does too. The people who make the rules have no idea what real people go through and what’s more, they really, really don’t care.
Thanks for a great post, Zoom.
Well said, Zoom. I’m sure you had a similar experience to mine during your Shepherds volunteering, but the number one thing that the women who come to eat dinner at the shelter ask for is fruits and vegetables. They go crazy when we have apples and oranges for dessert and one time there were brussels sprouts in the stew and they loved that too. It makes me really aware of how much of my own diet is fresh fruits and vegetables and how I can’t imagine living without that.
If the statute of limitations doesn’t work for you, there’s always plausible deniability…
– RG>
That $7,024 puts people at risk. Living in New Brunswick on 1/2 that [$3,574] makes it virtually impossible to live. WE AGREE, by electing our provincial governments, that it’s OK to kill poor people with bad food and bad/unsafe housing. WE AGREE to keep low income workers marginalized and afraid to leave poorly paid jobs, when we elect people who set these rates for social assistance.
I think the worst thing about being poor is the limited access to the food you want and need. Almost everything about living in poverty is a struggle, but being fed like a barnyard animal with whatever comes out of the bucket — having that fundamental choice taken away from you — that I would find impossibly dehumanizing.
There are some stories at http://sareview.ca/tell-your-story/ and more ODSP horror stories are being sent to another project I am involved in.
CMHC makes the average housing charge in each region publicly availible. In Ontario each Municipal Health unit tracks the cost of a healthy diet.
So how unintelligant are politicians that They cannot do the math http://www.dothemath.thestop.org/ to provide enough money to prevent the expense to other systems (healthcare, Prison system etc)of continually undersupporting the most vulnerable.
I feel sad when I think of this. Here we are . . . so wealthy . . . and we can’t feed our most vulnerable. Thanks for this post, Zoom.
I can say from personal experience (I’ve been on welfare for over a year) that it is disgustingly low and the people at the welfare office are ****ed up — they rush you as fast as possible OFF of welfare regardless of your employment — their current target is to have people off of welfare within six months. Which would be GREAT, if the people leaving the program actually had jobs, and weren’t starving to death in the meantime! Not to mention that if you’re on welfare, you probably have other problems with your social determinants of health besides employment, and these issues can take a lot longer than six months to sort out. I’m going to try and apply to ODSP because I have Hep C, schizophrenia (although I think I’ll have to see another doctor for that one), and of course addiction issues (which were proven in court to be enough on their own to get you on). I know the pitfalls of disability but it’s literally double the amount of money I get now (plus a little more, plus a much more holistic apporach, plus more health care benefits). My roommate is on ODSP and to me, the only difference I see right away is his cheque is $1100 while mine is $570, minus $375 for rent right away, leaving me with under $200 for all my expenses throughout the month. If it weren’t for him feeding me, plus the shelters/soup kitchens, I would LITERALLY starve to death. Not to mention I could NEVER afford clothes or anything like that (by the way, the clothing allowance is a joke).
Sorry to harp, but it’s a big issue that needs dealing with.
I know the line is that people on social assistance aren’t responsible enough to actually use the money for necessities, and “food stamps” are infantilizing but the more I hear about the food stamps and WIC program and school lunch assistance programs in the USA the more impressed I am with it. They get coupons for food based on family size and need – the CSAs and farmer’s markets are equipped to take them too. Schools that have a high percentage of kids under a certain financial level get breakfast, lunch, and a dinner in aftercare.
I wonder if this isn’t something that would garner more public support?
Food is as basic a right as health care to me.
Thank you Laurie. You and me, our blood is boiling over the same things.
Jo, absolutely, I remember how clients’ eyes would absolutely light up on the occasions where we could offer them some salad or fresh fruit. They craved it.
Grouchy, I’m not sure how plausible that would be. 😉
Fuzzpedals, yes, I recall that New Brunswick is notorious for having the absolute lowest welfare incomes in the country. It’s unfathomable, really, how anybody can survive on that, or how anybody can expect anybody else to do it. It literally forces welfare recipients into the role of welfare cheaters. (I have a theory about this. I’ll blog about it soon.)
XUP, I totally agree with you. It’s dehumanizing.
Reb, I think the problem with politics is nobody wants to support solutions that take time or that can’t be immediately credited back to them. So the linkages between adequate welfare spending and subsequent savings on criminal justice spending and health care spending have no real appeal to your average politician. Thanks for those links – very interesting.
Cheryl, it’s interesting how – in both our countries – we’ve got so much wealth available for waging wars and building prisons, but we can’t afford decent food for everybody.
JM, one of the things I found when I was on welfare was that it was like quicksand. You just keep getting sucked deeper into poverty, and you feel powerless to extricate yourself. Every month is worse. For example, your clothes keep getting shabbier because you can’t afford to replace them, which leaves you feeling less and less employable with each passing month. Anyway, yeah, if you qualify for ODSP, you should make the leap as soon as possible.
Mudmama, really? I’m so surprised to hear you say that!
My point is that politicians don’t want to spend money on social welfare programs. The general population doesn’t want to see money going to social welfare programs.
They don’t begrudge things like social housing, socialized medicine the same way. It’s interesting that people in the US don’t begrudge the food programs they have in schools. They were not delivered with “socialism” in mind. At the start of WW1 so many american’s had to be turned away from service because of malnutrition that they implemented the program to make sure schools turned out good little factory workers – and soldiers. It’s stuck. A socialized food stipend (which in the US is available to the working poor as well – I know families where both parents are working – one as a teacher! who still qualify for WIC and the school lunch program) which provides actual food or food coupons would be supported by more people.
Tie it into the local food economy (community supported agriculture and farmer’s markets and community kitchens that both teach and provide space for cooking and communal meals for people who are marginalized – rooming houses for instance) and you have a loop that supports people getting healthy food and it doesn’t isolate people – it makes them feel a bigger part of their community. Community kitchens and gardens are being set up all over the US in areas that are extremely hard hit by poverty (they started as grassroots programs and are getting community/business/local government support.
Also programs like Project Heifer do urban programs in the US – meat bunnies and chickens for eggs and meat.
Mudmama, I need to respectfully disagree with you about how Americans on the right feel about food stamps and other social programs. All you need to do is google food stamps, school lunch programs and you can come up with lots of nasty stuff on fairly mainstream forums.
Here are a couple of links I found with a quick search. One is pro-food stamps, addressing abuses and one is about how the poor are already getting too much to eat. The comments are interesting,too.
I grabbed both links within seconds of googling “food stamps abuse.” Not very scientific, I know, but I just wanted to show that many, many Americans do begrudge food stamps. And we won’t even go into the problems with food stamps from a progressive perspective.
http://foodstampchallenge.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/05/the_false_fraud.html
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/01/why_not_food_stamps.php
I’ve substitute taught in the alternative program at our local school district for the past 5 years. I usually take my lunch unless I have only a morning or afternoon. A couple of times they’ve asked me at the last minute to continue into the afternoon. I had no lunch with me so I went to the elementary cafeteria. The food choices are mostly dismal. Chicken food-part nuggets and “curly fries,” for example. I don’t know the politics of these programs, but I know they’re federally subsidized with surplus food from agribusinesses that are subsidized. That would not be our local organic farmers.
This is part of my new mission . . . getting better food into our children in the U.S . . .
p.s. Zoom . . . thanks for starting this thoughtful dialogue.
Ugh I posted here with like 4 or 5 links and it disappeared.
Go google “Edible Schoolyard” and “Urban Sprouts School Gardens”.
Go to the New York City School Board page on their lunch program and read the *incredibly inclusive letter* that is sent home to every household encouraging them to apply for a funded lunch even if they don’t think they qualify, or they don’t qualify right now – they might later in the year.
Follow that with looking at the awards they’ve won for including local produce and whole grains in every meal they serve.
Look up the documentary “what’s On Your Plate”
When I say that people don’t begrudge service based social welfare programs I’m not talking about the far right, I’m talking ordinary people. Ordinary people on the streets feel good about social housing initiatives – coops and geared to income mixed housing, about socialized healthcare – medicare, tricare, medicaid, universal health care here, about clothing programs, snowsuit fund, thrift shops, programs that provide outfits for job interviews, or food – supporting the food bank, CSA boxes that are geared to income, school gardens, community gardens, etc. They do feel much more uncomfortable with giving cash to people on welfare.
I’m not saying their biases and misperceptions about people who receive welfare are right. But they exist. When people are fed, clothed, given shelter, and healthcare THEN we can address even more progressive welfare reform. For now, I think we need to meet people’s basic needs. If that means doing what voters feel comfortable with – like food based programs instead of cash I think we should support them, and make sure that reforms help people feel more a part of their community (like making sure food coops, CSA’s and farmer’s market boxes are included in that program.)
[…] the math Posted by Zoom! on February 25, 2010, at 10:09 am | Not too long ago I blogged about Ontario doctors being investigated for welfare abuse because they were completing paperwork that allowed some of their patients to […]