Government Assistance Programs Are A Scam

By James Donahue

I recently watched a television "news" program that showed video footage of people allegedly scamming the workman's compensation insurance program.

We were shown various pictures of healthy people playing soccer, lifting weights and doing other physical things. The pictures were blurry and you couldn't make out faces. The narrator did not disclose names, although we were told that the people in the films were all convicted on fraud charges and sent to prison because they faked back injuries and attempted to collect workman's compensation insurance.

From personal experience, I find it hard to believe that very many Americans ever succeed in scamming the workman’s compensation program. I strongly suspected that the “news” story described above was a propaganda film designed to make people afraid to file claims against something they are entitled to. It was just one more lie, among the many, imposed on the American public by corrupt bureaucracies that are fleecing, not helping the people they were designed to serve.

Our own dealings with Workman's Compensation involved an attempt to get my wife some help after she was injured on her job. At the time I wrote an angry story about what happened to us. I was not surprised at the volume of letters from people, just like us, who have been caught up in the same quagmire of government and legal red tape, without getting the help they desperately needed.

My wife never received any help other than that given by our family physician. To get this we were forced to convince our personal health insurance carrier that Workman's Compensation Insurance no longer applied to her case. In the meantime we were left with outstanding bills from a lot of doctors and hospital X-ray facilities where we were sent during the days when we tried to comply with Workman's Compensation demands.

Out of desperation, we started contacting some of those law firms that promise to fight for people injured on their jobs, and promise you don't have to pay until your case is won. We discovered that the legal pitch is nothing more than another type of scam against the same people who are desperate for help. The lawyers only seem to want easy cases and won't go up against the battery of high priced lawyers that stood in our way.

Because the workman's compensation payments were cut off five months after they started, my wife had no choice but to turn to the Social Security Administration and file a claim for disability. She was suddenly out of work and without treatment, would probably be unable to ever go back to work again.

But we found that to get disability help, she had to go through another battery of medical examinations, a psychological examination, fill out volumes of paperwork, and then wait nearly a year to find out if she qualified.

In the meantime, someone at the Social Security Office suggested that my wife take early retirement, since she was old enough to qualify for the minimum payments available to her. They explained that if she received disability, the money she received would make up for the loss of full Social Security.

Thinking that was the best solution available to her at the time, she gave up her battle with Workman's Compensation and retired. Her Social Security checks were used to pay off a pile of doctor and hospital bills that had been accumulating since the accident. If not for the fact that I was able to come out of retirement and go back to work, we would not have been able to live and continue seeking medical help.

All year we held on, hoping for a Social Security disability check that would solve our problems and qualify her for the medical treatment she badly needed.

In the end, she received a letter from Social Security informing her that she was approved for disability. However, the letter said, because she elected to take early retirement, she will not receive any additional money for disability.

We were invited to appeal, of course. The Social Security office said a lawyer was highly recommended if we wish to file an appeal.

Do you get the picture here? We have government bureaucrats out there, living off our tax dollars that must stay up nights thinking how to confound the minds of the people they are hired to help.

I have reached the conclusion that the only people helped by government assistance offices are the people who work in them. They have jobs. Their presence only gives the rest of us the illusion that we have a benevolent government ready to step in and take care of us in times of trouble.

Once you need help, however, you become one of the growing numbers of Americans who discover the truth. It is all smoke and mirrors.