Of the four Veterans Affairs social workers that T.G. Polachek has cycled through in the past four years, his favorite has been a woman he refers to only as “Rita from Nepal.”
She worked with him for just four months last year, assigned through a VA supportive housing service. But in those four months, she did more than anyone to date in combing through public assistance programs to see what benefits he might qualify for.
The Veterans Affairs Medical Center, for instance, doesn’t offer blanket dental services for all veterans, and Polachek, 56, a college-educated U.S. Army veteran with a non-physical disability, is struggling with two broken molars. Rita quickly got him on Medica dental insurance through the state’s MinnesotaCare medical assistance program, though he acknowledges he’s since procrastinated on visiting the dentist, fearful of what they might discover along his gumline.
“I’m scared they’re going to take a bunch of teeth out,” Polachek said.
Finding him dental insurance, as well as discounted internet and public transit passes for low-income riders, was the relatively easy part. Qualifying for general assistance — once referred to as “welfare” — through Ramsey County has been much trickier.
Paperwork processed
With just $9 left in his bank account, Polachek bit the proverbial bullet in late April 2024 and applied for general assistance benefits. Three months passed before a fed-up Rita put him on a three-way conference call with Ramsey County, demanding to know why his paperwork had not been processed.
A county supervisor put the call on speaker phone, and Polachek could distinctly hear her feet padding across the floor as she wandered over to what must have been an old stack of mail.
“Oh!” he recalled the county worker saying about his application. “It hasn’t been looked at. We’ll take care of this right away.”
Two weeks later, in the last week of August, four months of cumulative general assistance payments suddenly were available through his Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card, delivered all at once.
As a self-described lifelong Republican skeptical of government excess, Polachek has donated ample hours toward helping conservative candidates win office — even candidates who would seek to cut or reduce the public assistance programs he increasingly relies on to survive. As a veteran who suffers from debilitating depression, he’s spent more hours than he cares to admit wrangling with the bureaucracy at Ramsey County and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, while attempting to access state, county and federal services.
On paper, those benefits should already be within easy reach.
The reality has been more complicated.
80 new county screeners to help with backlog
Neither political party, as he sees it, has done an exemplary job of listening to his concerns.
“I’m seeing everything Republicans never see or give a (expletive) about,” said Polachek, whose general assistance benefits totaled just $277 per month at the outset, though they increased to $350 last October. “God’s put me in this place so I can blow a whistle on a lot of things.”
His experience is hardly unique. As conservative federal efforts like DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency — and federal bills in the House and Senate bear down on public assistance programs, administrators of those programs have been hard-pressed to acknowledge backlogs and inefficiencies that have kept some promised benefits all but out of reach for many poor clients.
Ramsey County announced in early March that it was hiring 80 new staffers — including more than 60 assessors — to help make headway on its massive backlog screening elderly and disabled residents for Medicaid-funded services. Since then, “we’ve hired quite a few, and the impact has been great to move things up,” County Board Chair Rafael Ortega said last week.
Ortega noted his office used to receive 10 complaints a day from desperate constituents wondering why their applications had yet to be processed. Pointing to the experience of his own 96-year-old mother, he brought those concerns to the county board, only to discover his fellow board members were drowning in the same requests for assistance. With added hiring and higher salaries, turnover among financial assistance workers has since improved.
“We have trained a lot of financial assistance workers, and then other counties offer them more money,” Ortega said. “We’ve adjusted our salaries to be more competitive.”
Frustration over backlog
County residents request initial MnCHOICES assessments with the county’s Aging and Disability Services and MnCHOICES Division, which determine eligibility for home- and community-based assistance for the elderly and people with disabilities. As of the beginning of March, new enrollees could expect wait times for screenings of up to nearly eight months, according to the county.
At the time, there were 1,947 residents waiting for their initial screening.
Emily Duesing, a case manager for the severely mentally ill who has worked with a variety of Twin Cities nonprofits, began writing letters to Ramsey County Board members in December on behalf of her frustrated co-workers.
“We would call Ramsey County to work on food stamps or figure out where our clients’ Medicaid was, and according to their own numbers they had a 52% call-abandonment rate, which essentially means you had a 1-in-2 chance of reaching a live person,” said Duesing, an incoming board member with the National Alliance on Mental Illness-Ramsey County, or NAMI, a group she worked closely with on her letter-writing campaign.
“One of my co-workers had a client, they were trying to figure out what was going on with her Medicaid, and they had called a Ramsey County financial worker 18 times and never received a call back from June to the end of December,” Duesing said. “My co-worker probably put in close to 40 hours of work in making those calls. That should have been a 20-minute phone call, and it took six months.”
That backlog has been blamed on everything from understaffing and high turnover to outdated state and county software that don’t share information well, forcing workers to create paper copies of key data and enter the information twice by hand.
“We have technology systems that don’t talk to each other,” Ortega said. “That’s being addressed. We just got money in this legislative session to address the technology.”
‘Really trying’
Meanwhile, a unionized workforce has resisted in-person work, delaying simple tasks like opening mail. Online portals like mnbenefits.mn.gov have made applying for assistance easier, but also led to an increase in applications, adding to already crushing workloads.
At the same time, inflation and rising housing costs loom large over an aging population.
“Case loads for financial workers have doubled since COVID,” Duesing said.
Still, she said the county’s backlog has gradually improved and she noted county workers are now using voicemail-to-text transcription technology to screen through calls faster.
Monthly “Ramsey County United” forums that were discontinued during the pandemic have finally started up again, bringing together the disabled, their families, case workers and others to meet with administrators face-to-face.
“Experientially, things have gotten better,” she said. “What I’m seeing is them really trying.”
‘It’s a safety net’
One of the public misconceptions surrounding public assistance, said Keith Kozerski, chief program officer with Catholic Charities, is the idea that recipients are somehow getting wealthy off free handouts. Most public assistance programs take property and other assets into account when determining if the applicant lands above a wealth threshold to qualify, meaning having a steady income, savings or a house could be disqualifying.
“For the average person who is living in deep poverty, that doesn’t change for them,” Kozerski said.
Polachek said he feels like a case in point. If his bank account has benefited from public assistance, it hasn’t benefited much.
“Right now, I have $46 in it, which is not even enough to cover one week’s worth of groceries,” he said.
The bureaucratic delays in obtaining public assistance as bills started piling were frustrating enough. Even worse, in his eyes, is the stigma.
Polachek, who works seasonal jobs as he can, said he takes no pride in receiving public assistance, and he shies away from mentioning it to his conservative peers, some of whom can be judgmental.
“A lot of this government assistance stuff, I was very reluctant to take it,” he said over lunch one afternoon at John’s Pizza Cafe in St. Paul. “People find out you’re on it, they blow a gasket. ‘How can you take that?’ But it’s a safety net. I can pay all my bills. I go everywhere on the bus. It’s not like I have a lot of vices.”
Public benefits
Despite his undergraduate degree in engineering, his last regular, full-time job was in 2014, though he spent the better part of 2019 working part time for the VA office near downtown Minneapolis in “compensated work therapy,” mostly serving as a gofer, transporting parts between work units.
“It’s an eight-month program,” Polachek said. “When you’re done there, if you don’t have a job lined up, they don’t really care.”
He still ventures back to the VA for psychological appointments and yoga therapy.
“I don’t like telling people I’m depressed because I want them to treat me normally,” he said.
Among his public benefits, he receives food coupons through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which is state-administered, as well as federal assistance through Housing and Urban Development’s Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program, or HUD-VASH, which covers the vast majority of his rent.
But it’s hardly luxury living. His small apartment is visited frequently by a mouse he’s nicknamed Jerry.
Polachek jokingly refers to the low-income housing where he lives in St. Paul as the United Nations because of its large mix of residents of color, many of them immigrants.
“As a white guy, I’m the minority there,” he said. “That doesn’t bother me at all.”
He’s never met most of the caseworkers he’s been assigned through the VA or Ramsey County. They’re usually just a voice on the phone, even a caseworker he once had for five consecutive years. Most “don’t know all the bells and whistles of assistance,” he said.
With late notices from Xcel Energy in hand, he applied through gritted teeth last year for monthly general assistance. After months of delays obtaining benefits through the Minnesota Family Investment Program, or MFIP, he began receiving cash assistance last August.
Three different MFIP case managers were assigned to him from September to December, before a letter informed him his new case manager would be “MFIP V”; he later surmised that “V” stands for “vacant.”
Critics “automatically think anyone on welfare is abusing the system,” Polachek said. “I’m sure there’s some fraud, but not to the extent people say. SNAP, a lot of Army families are on that because they’re not paid enough to raise a family.”
At the age of 56, this isn’t entirely where he expected to end up in life, but it’s not a terrible place to be, either.
“I guess I’m on welfare,” he said. “I don’t call it that.”
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