It's a cluster to deal with, navigating a maze of rules and forms and approvals. The entire thing is designed to be confusing and tedious so that many people will make mistakes that make them ineligible and others will give up trying.
I help an old friend who is a disabled vet living on social security disability, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. It's non stop hoop jumping for him where one box missed being checked can mean suspension of benefits for several months. He's become somewhat of an expert on navigating this stuff as he's been fully disabled for going on 20 years now. But it's still tough for him to manage staying eligible. I've seen some of the forms he has to stay up on, they're intentionally designed to be verbose and confusing. If you don't read every paragraph of every piece of mail you get you could end up screwed. He spends hours weekly sorting through everything. He schedules phone calls to make sure everything is correct regularly. And he's in rural Northern Michigan, so one of the hardest things to manage is getting to and from a doctor when the nearest hospital is now 40 miles away after corporate mergers took over and closed small rural hospitals all over.
It's a constant source of stress for him, but at least he has his wits about him and is sharp enough to navigate it all. Every time he tells me about it, I think about the millions of elderly people living in poverty trying to navigate some of the same types of things to get the services they need to stay alive. I'm convinced the homeless shelters are filled in part with people who just couldn't manage the forms and appointments that you need to sort through to stay eligible for aid.
And that's the whole point I believe, the Right wants to make it so more and more of the people who most need help can't get help so they slip through the cracks and in many cases just become homeless or die early.
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