The proposal to eliminate General Assistance – another effort to strip those with disabilities and low incomes of survival-level help:

Who uses General Assistance? About 33,000 adults with disabilties or incapacitating illnesses who are living on less than $300 a month. They have serious illnesses, physical disabilities, blindness , low IQs, serious mental illnesses, and/or are elderly and/or homeless. They do not have children living with them. Some are teenagers living on their own with no custodial families.

What is General Assistance? Up to $203 a month in assistance for an adult and up to $260 for married couples.

What is the Governor’s proposal? To eliminate this assistance and replace it with an emergency program that offers once-a-year help. The Governor eliminated exactly that program – Emergency General Assistance – with his unallotments last year. (The Governor would continue the part of General Assistance that pays for people in group homes.)

Isn’t an emergency program a good idea? Emergency programs work when one-time assistance can help people out of an immediate crisis. But one-time help is pointless if there is no income to pay the next set of bills.

Aren’t these just people who move to Minnesota to get on our assistance programs? No. According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, 94% of the people who were new to General Assistance in 2008 (the most recent year for which data is available) had lived in Minnesota had least a year.

Aren’t we just encouraging dependency? Most people use General Assistance for short periods of time: 43% use it for less than six months at a time and over a nine year period the average time on General Assistance was 20 months. This makes sense: because 64% of the people who turn to General Assistance are incapacitated with illness. General assistance supports people through a period of serious illness when they cannot earn other income.

Don’t people just claim they are ill or disabled to get General Assistance? No. A medical or mental health professional has to verify the condition and that it has been present for at least 30 days.

With the state’s budget crisis, don’t we have to focus on costs that are growing more expensive every year? The forecast anticipates less than a 1% increase in costs (0.7% in the 2010-2011 biennium and 0.8% in the 2012-2013 biennium.) The forecast calls them “small increases”. (p.18, Minnesota Department of Human Services Forecast, Feb. 2010).

Minnesota has not increased the assistance people on General Assistance receive since 1986. General Assistance accounts for only 1.1% of the Human Services budget – and only 0.1% of the overall state general fund spending. Caseloads have grown in proportion to the growing backlog in the federal system for determining whether someone is eligible for federal disability income.

This cut generates a $14.6 million savings in 2011, $19.8 million in 2012 and a $17.7 million savings in 2013. This includes accounting for $5.9 million lost in federal reimbursements next biennium. A number of the people on General Assistance are found eligible for federal Supplemental Security Income for the Disabled and the federal government reimburses the state the cost of General Assistance during the application period.

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