March 4, 1985

The federal government, soon after the ascension of President Reagan to the White House, decided on an austerity program which, in part, became a vicious attack on the disabled. Using the excuse that they wanted to root out the frauds word was sent out to cut the disability rolls, and to do this, almost everybody had to be reevaluated. Disability was determined according to some ridiculous formula arrived at according to some collated medical reports. Sharp terminating letters went out to the disabled, few of which had the wherewithal to fight back. When those that did hired lawyers and got reinstated, the lawyers got a hefty piece of the reimbursement. Many were either too poor or too sick to get legal assistance. The disabled could never get together to start a class action suit but apparently the city of New York did. Give New York credit. Let’s agree that the city went to court and spent money for charitable reasons to help the disabled and not because the sudden load of sick people was straining its resources.

In either case, judge after judge agreed with the city that the federal government was going about this in the wrong way. The feds argued that each case had to be decided on its merits individually, claiming that each disabled person kicked off the rolls had to file individually in court. The federal government lost its case in all courts, and state after state followed the example of the legal citation established by New York.

Anthony Lewis in the New York Times argues that this proves we are a nation of law. Law may have triumphed, but what about humanity. Humanity was a lonely unheralded victim of this entire affair.

First of all the manner in which the determination was made to delete a person from disability payments was farcical, unfair and secretive. Secondly, although perhaps justice triumphed in the end a ghastly three years ensued before justice came to the fore, during which many suffered untold harm, and some are said to have committed suicide. The fact is that the government under executive directive made war on the disabled. One point I sent pictures of gruesome skin lesions of one of my patients to senators and the president himself, to appeal the sudden cutoff of disability payments. The photographs must have been effective, because a Camden judge had his secretary call me to say that the judge thought that this particular case could be settled without a formal hearing. But other disabled patients weren’t so fortunate.

The bureaucrats that threw people ruthlessly off the rolls belonged to the state Department of Labor. They would tell me on the phone how terrible they felt, how they knew thy were doing the wrong thing, but were afraid for their jobs. They proved Hannah Ahrendt’s thesis that evil can be performed by perfectly decent people simply by obeying directives.

The very tardy judicial decisions are better than nothing, but do not compensate for the three years the sick people were attacked by their government, left in some cases impoverished with no means to fight back. Law can’t compensate for inhumanity. Indeed had the decisions been made on a humane basis there would have been not need for the law to have been recruited.