It looks like a bit of work went into drafting this act, so probably this paragraph predates the Graeme Frost bashfest. Still, without Malkin's incessant blathering, fewer people would have been aware of the difference between [or even the existence of] means testing and asset testing when it comes to applying for public assistance.
In our incresingly predatory social and financial climate, we've made it as humilitaing and dehumanizing to ask for help, and to force someone to become completely destitute before throwing them a few crumbs is not only cruel, it is stupid.
Both the social and economic costs are so much higher if you stand idly by and watch people tumble into tiger traps when you could have prevented their falling onto the sharpened and hardened stakes just by sticking your hand out a few moments earlier, snatching them back, in that Wile E Coyote moment, onto solid ground.
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Our society's economy produces, more or less by design, a few big winners, a lot of losers, and far too many who lose so badly they cannot even minimally support themselves and their families. (I'll put aside for now the discussion of whether that is a valid or a smart approach, even from the winners' perspective.)
The real question is what we do with those who don't win, and especially those who lose big. I suppose we have the answer offered by compassionate conservatives, don't we: let 'em starve in the cold.
In my mother's institutionalization during her extended final illness, Alzheimer's disease (not covered by ordinary medical insurance), my father was means-tested into literal poverty. I could not help him financially: doing so would only have delayed availability of Medicaid help for my mother's condition. Dad was nearly broke when Mom died. If Mom's demise had not already broken his heart, being made to beg for help would have done the same. In a wealthy society such as ours, this is just not right.
that's basically what happened to my ex's parents, and it's starting to happen to my friends' parents now.
it's both stupid and inhumane.
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