Auditor general’s report on AISH reveals bureaucratic nightmare
Alberta’s auditor general has found what thousands of Alberta’s disabled people, and their families, have known for years. The system called AISH is so cold and distant that it makes handicapped people wait an average of more than 200 days for benefits, and won’t even speed up for the dying.
The bureaucratic mess will make you mad. The human harm could make you weep.
Alberta’s auditor general has found what thousands of Alberta’s disabled people, and their families, have known for years.
The system called Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH) is so cold and distant that it makes handicapped people wait an average of more than 200 days for benefits, and won’t even speed up for the dying.
The auditor general found that some approved palliative care applicants did not get proper application forms, received fewer benefits than they were entitled to, or died before receiving any benefits at all.
To put it in the bleak humour of this tormented world, AISH will even stiff the stiffs.
“We would expect the department (human services) to have a triage process for reviewing applications and expediting palliative and terminal patients,” writes auditor general Merwan Saher. Really, you think? Saher reaches an astonishing conclusion: “The department does not know what it needs to change to improve the program.”
The system is such a jumble, with such inadequate reporting and training, that the government is as mystified as AISH applicants.
The problems range from ridiculous delays between numerous stages of approval, to complex forms that handicapped people have trouble dealing with, to rejections because of minor details that could have been resolved at the start.
That only begins to describe the wall handicapped people are forced to climb. But whatever it takes, this system must be reformed and saved.
It pays out nearly $1 billion a year to more than 50,000 Albertans with severe disabilities.
AISH is an enduring symbol of Albertans’ dedication to helping the unfortunate, even when politicians darkly suggest it’s open to fraud. One former premier, Ralph Klein, was almost universally condemned when, during the 2004 election campaign, he griped about being approached by two AISH recipients who were upset by low payments.
“They didn’t look handicapped to me, I’ll tell you that for sure,” he told a Progressive Conservative crowd. “Both had cigarettes dangling from their mouths, and cowboy hats.”
Later he told people at a PC rally they obviously didn’t want to hear about AISH “because you’re normal — severely normal.”
Klein won the election handily in that era of Tory dominance, but he’d heard the backlash. His new government quickly struck an MLA committee to study AISH.
It heard many complaints about low support levels, red tape and obstruction. But disabled people and their families were also grateful, sometimes to the point of tears, for aid that helped them cope.
The committee asked for higher payments and a more streamlined system. In 2012 then premier Alison Redford raised monthly benefits by $400, to a total of $1,588.
But the call to fix the system stalled out somewhere along the line. And now, AISH is a bureaucratic fiasco.
The father of a disabled adult son sent me a wrenching email after the report came out Monday.
The young man lived with his mother, he said, but “she died, and he was alone. Nobody at AISH ever cared or offered to help. How they managed I will never know. How he survived is a miracle.”
The father took over care of his son and they moved to northern Alberta.
“I assumed there was a vast support network that he had relied upon and could rely on going forward,” he says.
But after many visits to AISH, he found out that his son’s file had been closed and sealed in the south. Officially, the young man was no longer eligible.
“I was more exasperated after each fruitless visit to AISH. The person we saw was never the same when we returned. We presented our case many times and were never offered even basic courtesy.
“We waited for weeks to have inquiries replied to. I lost count of how many doors we knocked on trying to make sense of the AISH maze.”
“One indignity follows the next, one uncaring person transfers you to the next, and the only escape from the AISH hell is to give up.
“I am a person somewhat familiar with bureaucracy. I was healthy, I was determined and I love my boy.
“I cannot imagine how a person with any form of disability could possible survive dealing with AISH on his own.”
Created to relieve human misery, AISH now causes too much of its own. The NDP, of all governments, can’t let this stand.