A Catch-22 for Disabled Children Ends

For years, poor families with disabled children were forced by a governmental Catch-22 to make an agonizing choice: accept food stamps and give up the family car or keep the car and forgo the stamps.

Last week, in an about-face, state and federal officials did something they rarely do: They admitted they were wrong. The decision, advocates said, will affect thousands of poor people.

In a tersely worded announcement, the officials told county welfare offices there was a new interpretation of the regulations; no longer would families be confronted with a Hobson’s choice between a car they needed for medical visits and food they needed to stave off hunger. They can keep the car and still get the stamps.

The change was prompted by a class-action lawsuit brought by the Western Center on Law and Poverty, but in the end the turnaround was based more on compassion than legalities.

“Frankly, I thought [the regulations were] pretty stupid and so did my staff,” said Rita Saenz, the new California Department of Social Services director. “We told [the federal government] we just didn’t want to do this anymore. These families needed to be served, they needed to get their food stamps, and we were willing to go to the mat about it.”

Single mother Kendra Anderson from Oceanside is one of those the change is aimed at. She chose to keep her car to ensure her quadriplegic daughter could get to the hospital quickly. The decision plunged the family of five into homelessness.

In San Francisco an unemployed father with a child who suffered from a debilitating bone disease also opted for the car, believing it was his only hope for a job. His family was denied food stamps and, because they were otherwise eligible, welfare.

In Hesperia in the High Desert, Feliciana Moreno bought a 1991 Oldsmobile knowing she needed reliable transportation for the 55-mile trip to the hospital that was treating her son for a rare facial disease. She was notified that her welfare and food stamps would immediately be cut off.

A Consequence of Conflicting Regulations

What had victimized such families was a collision of political agendas and a series of unintended conflicts in government regulations. Some of the situation grew out of the backlash against welfare recipients and the image of the “welfare queen” in her Cadillac. Singer Guy Drake popularized the image in his 1970s-era song lyrics: “I’ve never worked much/In fact I’ve been poor all my life/ . . . But I’ve always managed to somehow/ Drive me a brand new Cadillac.”

A regulation affecting food stamps--government coupons that are exchanged for food--and other assistance denied benefits to any family that owned a car valued at more than $4,650. An exception was made if the vehicle was used to transport a disabled family member.

As that regulation was being put in place in the 1980s, there was an effort in California to cut governmental red tape in the Supplemental Security Income program, which provides aid to the blind, aged and disabled, by melding food stamps with SSI benefits. Those who received SSI automatically got a food allowance.

But here was the rub: The disabled child in the family was entitled to SSI. The rest of the family, if poor, was served by two other programs, welfare, or CalWORKS, and food stamps. Since the child was already getting SSI and a food allowance, he or she was not considered part of the family that was separately applying for food stamps and welfare.

Because the child, in the eyes of government, was not part of the family, the family was not entitled to the exemption for the car that was used to ferry the child to the doctor.

Most families that had disabled children also had vehicles valued at more than $4,650, often because they were vans outfitted with costly wheelchair lifts.

Family Keeps Van, Loses Home

“I remember when the social worker told me my daughter was not considered a member of my household,” Kendra Anderson recalled in an interview. “I said, ‘What do you mean; she lives with me. I’m her mother. I have to take care of her. She doesn’t walk, doesn’t crawl, doesn’t talk. She’s legally blind. I need a reliable car.’ ”

The social worker told her she was sorry, the $14,000 van Anderson was buying on time was too expensive.

Anderson said she toyed with the idea of selling the vehicle, but the payments she owed on it were more than its Blue Book value.

Her decision to keep the car was costly. The county denied the family welfare and food stamps, a determination that ultimately caused them to lose the lease on a rental house.

“For months we lived in a single motel room,” Anderson said. “It had a sink, a closet, a bathroom and two beds.” On other occasions they moved in with friends.

Eventually Anderson decided to seek help from a legal aid attorney who passed the case on to the Western Center, which handles poverty issues.

At the Western Center attorney Emma Leheny was gleeful, thinking she had just been given a case that was a slam-dunk.

“I started like a house afire, I thought it was so unfair,” she remembered. “Then I stopped dead in my tracks. . . . The law was on [the government’s] side.”

Meanwhile, in the High Desert, legal aid attorney Amy Stump was reaching the same conclusion as she researched the law for Moreno, who had been threatened with the loss of aid when she purchased the Oldsmobile on credit for $7,500.

Stump said Moreno had needed the vehicle for her son, age 7, who suffered from hemifacial microsomia, a rare condition causing the bones in half of his face not to grow properly. The single mother, who worked full time, lived in a rural area where there was no public transportation.

“So we went to a hearing and the county worker made a statement that for this purpose her son was a nonperson,” Stump recalled.

She remembered trying every legal argument she could think of, but eventually the sympathetic judge suggested they needed to figure out a way to reduce the value of the car. Moreno was able to keep her benefits, when he skirted the regulation and decided the car needed body work that dropped its actual value below the $4,650 threshold.

Anderson was not as lucky. A hearing in her case went against her, and Leheny decided to challenge the regulations in a class-action suit.

“This was definitely a gamble,” Leheny said. “It was one of those things where you just shake your head and say somebody somewhere has to be impressed by the reality of the situation.”

By that time, Robert Capistrano, a Bay Area legal aid attorney, was ready to go with a similar case, that of the father of the child with the bone disease. That family owned a car valued at $6,800.

“It’s just an amazing, absurd story,” he said.

Shortly after the cases were filed, Saenz said, officials in the Department of Social Services looked at the issue and decided to ask the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which finances the food stamp program, to change its position.

Attorneys for the state told the USDA, she said, of “our concerns and our willingness to do whatever it took to get this rule changed, and they responded. I want to give them credit for that. . . . They responded to our request.”

Even better, federal officials agreed to reinterpret their regulations, a decision that meant the new changes would take effect immediately.

“I think everybody who got involved in one of these cases got really angry,” Stump said. “Nobody should have had to go through what these people had to go through.”