County wants to test welfare recipients for drugs

By Sarah Einselen

Inquirer Reporter

An Ohio Sen­ate bill that would require wel­fare recip­i­ents to undergo drug test­ing is in com­mit­tee, and Craw­ford County vol­un­teered to be one of three coun­ties to par­tic­i­pate in a pilot of the drug test­ing program.

County com­mis­sion­ers sent Gov. Kasich a let­ter reit­er­at­ing their will­ing­ness to allow Craw­ford County to help pilot a pro­gram founded on Sen­ate Bill 69, which was intro­duced in Feb­ru­ary and is now under the aus­pices of the Health, Human Ser­vices and Aging com­mit­tee. Com­mis­sion­ers Jenny Ver­mil­lion and Doug Weise­nauer had told the gov­er­nor and his staff at a Sept. 23 meet­ing that the county had sig­nif­i­cant food stamp fraud and wanted to help launch the pro­posed statewide drug test­ing program.

The pro­gram, as out­lined in SB 69, would require adults apply­ing for need-based pub­lic assis­tance, includ­ing cash, food stamps, and med­ical, hous­ing and energy assis­tance, to pass a urine drug test. Peo­ple apply­ing for unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits would not be required to take a drug test. Any­one else who refuses the test would be inel­i­gi­ble to receive ben­e­fits and would also have to wait 30 days before reap­ply­ing. As is stan­dard in drug test­ing, peo­ple tak­ing legally pre­scribed med­ica­tions would not be con­sid­ered to have failed a drug test.

Lit­tle more is known about the pro­gram at this point, since the bill is not yet passed or signed into law. Accord­ing to a state-issued analy­sis of SB 69 as intro­duced, the local county agen­cies in the pilot pro­gram would con­duct assess­ments of all appli­cants for Ohio Works First cash assis­tance to deter­mine if there is rea­son­able cause to sus­pect that the appli­cant is a drug user. Then, if the agency deems it nec­es­sary, the appli­cant would have to take a drug screen­ing, ini­tially at his or her own expense.

Fail­ing the drug screen would make some­one inel­i­gi­ble to receive OWF cash assis­tance for a year, but that fail­ure would not make other mem­bers of the house­hold inel­i­gi­ble for assistance.

Craw­ford County already has many appli­cants who are abus­ing drugs, accord­ing to county Job and Fam­ily Ser­vices direc­tor Linda Bas­sett. Of the younger peo­ple apply­ing for food stamps, “many even openly admit that they’re drug depen­dent,” she said.

“We com­pleted about 500 fraud inves­ti­ga­tions in the last 12 months,” Bas­sett noted. “We could have done ten times that many, but we just don’t have the staff.” Some of those inves­ti­ga­tions were ini­ti­ated before an appli­cant began receiv­ing ben­e­fits, but oth­ers involved assis­tance that was already being dis­bursed. The county had 8,385 appli­cants for food assis­tance from Jan­u­ary through Octo­ber and about 15,000 Med­ic­aid recipients.

The county has not kept a total of the money that has been defrauded, Bas­sett said, and can­not pur­sue all instances in which fraud is sus­pected, so it is unknown how much money is lost to fraud. The county attempts to col­lect back over­pay­ments in the cash assis­tance pro­gram, Bas­sett said, but has dif­fi­culty doing so.

Bas­sett still has sev­eral ques­tions yet to be answered by the state, includ­ing whether the state would pay for the program’s imple­men­ta­tion or if that bur­den would be borne by the county instead. The cheap­est urine drug screen offered by Galion Com­mu­nity Hos­pi­tal is a seven-panel test that costs $33, accord­ing to the hospital’s Work­Well office. But Bas­sett said the county could ben­e­fit immensely from screen­ing appli­cants for state assistance.

“We are hav­ing quite a few peo­ple sell­ing the ben­e­fits on their cards,” Bas­sett said, refer­ring to the elec­tronic debit-type cards issued for food assis­tance. “We know that fraud is occur­ring and we also know that we have a drug prob­lem in the county.”

“I think that’s where a lot of the fraud is occur­ring, in the food stamps,” she said.

Crit­ics of test­ing wel­fare recip­i­ents for drugs have said that deny­ing assis­tance based on drug addic­tion hurts chil­dren of users, since the assis­tance no longer pro­vides food for them. Bas­sett sug­gested that, based on con­ver­sa­tions between chil­dren and school offi­cials, some wel­fare recip­i­ents who are defraud­ing the sys­tem to obtain more drugs are also defraud­ing their chil­dren of the food that wel­fare is sup­posed to help provide.

Bas­sett cau­tioned that the reports are based on what chil­dren have said, so their verac­ity may be called into ques­tion, but nev­er­the­less pre­sented a response to critics.

Posted by Sarah Einselen on Dec 24 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.