Joseph Shapiro
speaker
255 appearances
8 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 26 Jul
Joseph Shapiro’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 4.
Appearances
Work. It's central to Tabby Haley's identity. Haley is a software engineer, a team leader on development and coding projects. She was a vice president at JPMorgan Chase, the financial services company.
Right. Well, she's one of a very, very small number of people who are on SSI but also make too much money to get a monthly benefit check. So she doesn't get a check, but she needs to stay eligible for SSI in order to keep her Medicaid coverage. So when Tabby Haley first started working, SSI gave her a waiver. It set aside her earnings from the asset limit and with her income,
She pays income tax just like everyone else.
Right. Medicaid is the only insurance that will work for her. It's the only health insurance that pays for the things she needs. Haley can't move her body. She depends upon aides to assist her day and night to help her move her arms and legs, to bathe, to get dressed, to eat.
This summer, I went to meet Tabby Haley at her apartment in New York City, and I watched as her personal care aide spent about 10 minutes getting Haley positioned in front of her computer.
With Haley's fingers placed on a large trackpad, she can control the computer and run her meeting.
She says some of her colleagues on the call know she's disabled, but almost no one has any idea of how disabled she is. Medicaid pays for her AIDS, her power wheelchair, and her medicine. No other insurance will do that. But she can only be eligible for Medicaid if she keeps her eligibility for SSI. And that worked fine for Haley for 19 years.
But earlier this year, her Medicaid didn't get renewed as usual. She didn't get a response at the Medicaid office, so she went to Social Security. And there, she says, a case manager told her, well, why don't you just reapply for SSI? And then Social Security sent her a rejection letter saying she made too much money to qualify for SSI.
Which is what Haley says staff at Social Security suggested, that she quit working, that she retire and take disability benefits instead.
That's right. Our benefit system, it was set up to take care of people, but not to help them get the support they need so that they can live independent lives, live in the community like Tabby Haley in her own apartment, and to have a job and a career. This summer, Haley took a leave of absence from her job while she appeals SSI's decision, and she's getting benefits for now.
But there's been no indication that SSI is going to reverse itself. And she's worried that she might end up in a nursing home soon. It's one of the only options for someone who needs hours and hours of care. And Medicaid, they'll pay for that.
Well, I think it's striking that right now there's this broad support for reform from Democrats and Republicans, from disability groups, of course, but also from big business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest banks like JPMorgan Chase, where Tabby Haley works, companies like Microsoft. They want disabled workers.
But the reform I've been writing about seems less likely to happen in a new Trump administration. The social safety net, it's going to be a target for budget cuts. The bottom line is that people in SSI, the disabled and elderly poor, they don't have political power. They rely upon a program that was created for them 52 years ago. And then the program and the people on it were forgotten.
So they're left to get around all these traps, the absurdities, the indignities of SSI's out-of-date and overly complex rules.
And I appreciate you, Ayesha. Thank you.
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