Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) - Indiana

Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) - Indiana

The Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) of Indiana is a social services and health care funding organization which was founded in 1991 by the Indiana General Assembly. The institution was created with the goal of simplifying the human services process for the people of Indiana, streamlining the eligibility process for aid. FSSA is comprised of eight programs: Division of Family Resources, Office of Medicaid Policy and Planning, Division of Disability and Rehabilitative Services, Division of Mental Health and Addiction, Division of Aging, Office of Early Childhood and Out-of-School Learning, The Disability Determination Bureau, and Indiana 211. FSSA's website states their mission as "to compassionately serve Hoosiers of all ages and connect them with social services, health care and their communities." Governor Eric J. Holcomb appointed Daniel Rusyniak, M.D. as secretary of the FSSA on August 1, 2021. Prior to promotion, Dr. Rusyniak was FSSA's chief medical officer.

Programs

Division of Family Resources (DFR)

This division is responsible for the review and approval of applications for Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and child care.

Office of Medicaid Policy and Planning (OMPP)

This division is responsible for managing Medicaid programs as well the care systems of Healthy Indiana Plan, Hoosier Care Connect, Hoosier Healthwise participants, and also reviews Medicaid disability plans.

Division of Disability and Rehabilitative Services (DDRS)

This program is responsible for managing the delivery of services to adults and children alike with developmental disabilities. In addition, DDRS oversees First Steps program as well.

Division of Mental Health and Addiction (DMHA)

This program is intended to support the mental health care provider network in Indiana. DMHA also funds addiction treatment and prevention programs as well as operates six psychiatric hospitals.

Division of Aging

This program is involved with alternatives to nursing home care, through developmental and supporting of utilization of these alternatives. The Division of Aging also funds long-term care through Medicaid programs.

Office of Early Childhood and Out-of-School Learning

This program is responsible for overseeing early care and education as well as out-of-school time programs, including the On My Way Pre-K program.

The Disability Determination Bureau

This program is responsible for providing Social Security Disability and Social Security Income disability determinations, in partnership with the Social Security Administration, and is completely funded from the Federal government.

Indiana 211

This service is free to Hoosiers and is aimed to connect them with health and human service agencies, as well as resources, in their local communities.

History

FSSA was created in 1991 with the goal of connecting the people of Indiana with the social and healthcare services that they need. The institution was achieved by integrating the departments of mental health, welfare and human services, ultimately outsourcing many of its functions. From its inauguration in 1991, FSSA operated in an "old school" fashion which involved caseworkers who would work one-on-one with families in order to obtain the full story of their needs. However, the organization suffered significant damages due to fraud from employees, used out-of-date systems for calculating eligibility and verifying income, slow intake processes, and caseworkers who were difficulty to reach, in part to a telephone system which was unreliable.

The decline of productivity, efficiency and accuracy lead to the question of needing to reassess the current FSSA system. Republican Governor Mitch Daniels stepped into office in 2004 with the main goal of "privatizing many of the sate's public services, including the Indiana Toll Road, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and the state's public assistance programs." To the many people who were upset by the current system, Daniels was a light of hope who had the goal of changing the system to make it better than before by way of automation. The entire system had becomes privatized, as Daniels had hoped for, and had eliminated most of the need for caseworkers with the use of software to declare people's eligibility. However, Daniel's high-tech welfare reform system met much criticism from the people of Indiana as well as prosecutors, and in 2009 he admitted that his efforts to put Indiana's welfare systems at the top of the country had failed, placing the blame on his private contractor, IBM.

Budget and Financing

In 2006, the FSSA had a budget of $6.55 billion and a staff of roughly 6,500 employees. Upon automation of welfare services, the FSSA had diminished its public workforce by half and was using 92% of its budget to buy services from outside, private vendors.

The automation of FSSA was a result of a $1.3 billion contract with a private company.

Criticism

Governor Mitch Daniel's automation of the FSSA system lead to more harm than good. Daniels had been against many of the public assistance programs prior to his role of Governor of Indiana. While serving President Ronald Reagan in 1987 he had attempted to institute policies to eliminate AFDC and, nearly 20 years later, also attempted to terminate TANF in Indiana by way of policy. One of Daniel's first actions as Governor was to automate some of the state's public services, including "a welfare reform program that relied on multinational corporations to streamline benefits applications, privatize casework, and identify fraud." Daniels even famously stated that products or services which are listed in Yellow Pages should not be provided by the government. He was all about efficiency, pushing to digitize the current system and remove face-to-face interaction in the effort to make offices more organized and efficient, using technology opposed to policy this third time around. This plan eventually moved forward, as Hoosiers were told that by digitizing the approval process, caseworkers would be able to spend more time with their approved clients.

The result of Daniel's action was catastrophic; the automation of the FSSA system had caused a 54% increase in application dismissals than the previous three years under the old system. Many people who depended on this program to support themselves or their family were no longer able to receive the benefits they had been getting for so many years, as FSSA serves as a gatekeeper to all possible state and federal aid. Some of the new mistakes were due to simple administrative mistakes such as integration and technical glitches; however, many of the errors which hindered families from receiving aid were products of the inflexible rules of this new online application system. Virginia Eubanks, an American political scientist and author, spoke to many families who had been experiencing great difficulties upon the new digitized system in her book Automating Inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police and punish the poor, which covers the discrimination against the poor which comes from the government's push for new-age technology. Not only were Hoosiers having difficulty gaining approval for their necessary services, but a large burden was placed on public services in town, such as libraries or building which had computers or internet access, as many of the people seeking aid did not have the ability to apply for it from the comfort of their own home. The extremely inflexible new system which Eubanks uncovers to the reader is designed to sever the links of relationships created between families and their caseworkers to decrease the frequency of fraud and increase the efficiency of tax dollars. In simpler words, the automated system of Governor Daniels was hurting not helping the Hoosiers in need of welfare and led to a larger problem.

The idea of using technology to fix a greater social issue is known as technological solutionism. This notion can also be evaluated through the lens of a technological fix, which Ruha Benjamin explains as "rather than challenging or overcoming cycles of inequity, technical fixes too often reinforce and even deepen the status quo," meaning that these technological fixes allow these underlying problems to become a greater issue than before. In this instance, the new FSSA digital application system's significantly increased denial rate was due to the many applicants who did not have access to some of the required documents, and had relied on caseworkers in the past to work with them in order to gain approval for the benefits that they needed. Though caseworker's individual biases had supposedly been removed from the equation, the new technology became negatively biased towards an overwhelming portion of Hoosiers because of the strict and inflexible new application system that was difficult to access and and inherently biased towards only the 'deserving poor.'

References

This article "Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) - Indiana" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) - Indiana. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

---