Health Care at the Crossroads Impacts Welfare Policy in West Virginia

This year, the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources reversed the most controversial section of its welfare reform policy, which prohibited families collecting Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits from also receiving welfare checks. Welfare rights advocates credited the public outcry that was fueled by stories broadcast in the Health Care at the Crossroads series, the Sound Partners project of the West Virginia Public Radio Network, with helping to overturn the policy. The series, which included 26 three-minute news features and four live, hour-long call-in programs, focused on the ways welfare reform was affecting people's access to health care.
Our programming concentrated on first-person stories of current and former welfare recipients. These vignettes gave many policymakers their only real glimpse of the lives of people affected by state SSI policy. The poignant descriptions of life on the margins of society came from several of the roughly 14,000 people who had been cut from the welfare rolls because someone in the household, often a child, received a $496-a-month SSI check for a mental or physical disability. Only two states, West Virginia and Idaho, choose to count SSI as income, therefore making families who received it "too rich" to collect welfare.
As the series' producer, my own awareness of the policy's consequences started with a phone call from one of our community partners, Sister Brendon Conlon, a Roman Catholic nun who runs an "emergency everything" agency in rural Mingo County. By the next afternoon, Sister Brendon and I were bouncing up a steep, winding, hard-packed dirt road looking for the trailer of Ronnie and Barbara Copley and their seven children. The couple had come to Sister Brendon's Christian Help Center after Ronnie's medications ran out and they couldn't afford to refill the blood-thinner he was taking after suffering a stroke.
They had just been cut from the welfare rolls because one of their children received SSI for a learning disability. As a result, the family's income dropped by 50%, leaving nine people to survive on less than $500 a month, plus food stamps. After the cut, they could no longer afford Ronnie's medicines or other items essential to health and hygiene such as diapers, soap and, most importantly, a safe place to live. Losing their welfare check forced them to move to the cheapest place they could find, a musty two-bedroom trailer perched on a mountainside miles above the nearest paved road.
When my old four-wheel-drive truck chugged around the last hairpin curve, three of the Copleys' preschoolers were playing outside in the rusty car hulks that filled the front yard. Barbara was inside banging on the pipes. She told us that the well water had mysteriously shut off that morning. They couldn't afford a phone, so she was getting ready to walk to a neighbor's trailer to call the landlord. Ronnie, who had a blood clot in his neck as a result of his stroke and had been warned by doctors not to overexert himself, was lying on the couch.
Ronnie said losing welfare and the ability to buy his medications was not only unhealthy for him, but put two of the children at great risk. The couple's 4-year-old daughter has bronchial asthma and frequently needs to be rushed to a hospital more than an hour away. She has to go in an ambulance that can provide oxygen, and the ambulance can't make it up the Copleys' road. To make matters worse, the family's youngest son hurt himself in a bicycle wreck and had part of his pancreas removed. He also gets sick a lot and usually winds up in the hospital. In both cases, the couple has to walk to the neighbors, call an ambulance, and then carry the sick child down the mountain to meet the emergency vehicle on the paved road. In dry weather, they can drive one of the old cars, but only to the end of the dirt road because they can no longer afford mandatory automobile insurance.
The Copleys' story kicked off Health Care at the Crossroads, which aired from July to December 1998. Early in 1999, a federal judge ruled that children's SSI benefits could not be counted in the income eligibility determination for welfare. The West Virginia Legislature followed up with a law that exempted adults' SSI as well. As a result of these rulings, the DHHR reversed the policy and in June, SSI recipients started signing up for welfare, or what's now called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families again.
West Virginia is a small, rural state. Most policymakers, including the federal judge who ruled in the case and the head of the WV Department of Health and Human Resources, are regular WVaPR listeners. Our statewide network allowed those who experienced the effects of welfare reform to tell their stories to the policymakers and elected officials in the state capital by means of the news features and the listener call-in programs. Advocates for low-income families such as the Charleston Legal Aid Society and the West Virginia Economic Justice Project of the American Friends Service Committee credited WVaPR's coverage of the policy, as well as an editorial in the state's largest-circulation newspaper that was written by one of our community partners, with helping to educate officials on the real implications of the SSI rule.
As the reporter/producer for the series, I was pleased that these reports helped people understand the impact SSI policy has on families. The stories and listener call-ins did not set out to promote a particular point of view, but to act as a conduit between those whose health care was affected by welfare reform, the officials who were making and implementing the new guidelines, and the public who elected the officials. I was also pleased that Health Care at the Crossroads generated a tremendous amount of listener feedback. The most common comment was, "You talk to people nobody ever hears from on public radio." That was a great lesson to me as a reporter, for not only do our listeners want to hear from people on the margins of society, but when they do, some are touched and take action.
Contact: Mary Pettey, Outreach Coordinator, WVPN-FM, at 304-558-3000 or e-mail: mpettey@wvpubrad.org