The Emergence Of The Social Welfare System

The NHS came around in July 5, 1948. The Health Minister Aneurin (also known as Nye) Bevan purely nationalised the existing system across the UK. The groundbreaking change was to make all services freely available to everyone. Half of Scotland’s landmass was already covered by a state-funded health system serving the entire community and directly run from Edinburgh. Additionally, the war years had seen a state-funded hospital building programme in Scotland on a scale unknown in Europe. This was combined into the new NHS. Scotland also had its own individual medical tradition, this is centred on its medical schools rather than private practice. The legislation that empowered the UK to have the NHS is National Health Service Act (1948), this despite opposition from doctors, who maintained on the right to continue treating some patients privately. The NHS ensured that Doctors, hospital, dentists, opticians, ambulances, midwives and health visitors were available, free to everybody. This Reason why we have health services is because it developments a view that health care was a right, not something given unreliably by charity, also two-party’s agreement that the existing services were in a mess and had to be sorted out, it stopped financial difficulties for the voluntary hospitals and After the second world war it ensured the creation of an emergency medical service as part of the war effort

Changes within the welfare system as a result of policy shifts and by new thinking, more generally in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), have had many methods, but the one that seemed most important, was that welfare recipients were required to do much more to justify their income support payments than before. The foundation of this new idea is that income support programs should allow individuals to maximise their participation in work. Due to the general shift in welfare administration, the number of activity test requirements an individual in Australia must meet in order to receive unemployment benefits, has expanded significantly since the early 1990s. This complex, overly bureaucratic process means that disadvantaged individuals cannot access the income support payments they require.

The welfare system first came into action during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployed citizens needed federal assistance to escape the reality of severe poverty. The welfare system supplies families with services such as: food stamps, medicaid, and housing among others. The welfare system has played a vital role in the US, in controlling the amount of poverty to a certain level. Sadly, the system has been abused and taken for granted by citizens across the country. The welfare system was previously controlled by the federal government until 1996; the federal government handed over the responsibility to the states in hope of reducing welfare abuse. However, this change has not prevented folks from scamming the system. The

The social welfare system in the United States can be a controversial topic especially now with the new presidential elect. For this paper I was assigned to look into two different peoples perceptions and attitudes on the social welfare system. I looked into how they perceived the system and whom they believed benefits from this system. Throughout this paper the identities of the two people I interviewed will not be revealed. I will simply refer to them in pronouns. My goal during this interview was not to educate my two interviewees so some of the information contained in this paper may not be accurate. Throughout this paper the two interviewees opinions will be stated and their opinions will then be compared and discussed. Although the whole population of the United States is experiencing the same welfare system each individual perceives and has different beliefs about the system.

Medicaid, WIC Programs, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program known as “food stamps”, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and HUD which deals with housing are only a few of the programs that are available for the poor and underemployed today. These government programs cost the taxpayers billions of dollars. State and federal government try every year to reduce programs. In Mississippi, Medicaid has been reduced although children and the disabled are still covered. SNAP commonly known as food stamps have also been reduce and restricted to balance both the state and federal government. At the height of the recession, the last few years, has increased the number of single bread winner families seeking help by applying for government welfare programs. We often hear of people selling their food stamps for things that are not approved. These stories are used by the people who do not think that tax money should be used to support people who do not work. Changing the name of “welfare” to TANF has not slowed the

In America today, just over ten million people are on unemployment insurance, one hundred and ten million people are on welfare, and the total government spending annually is around one hundred and thirty billion dollars (Welfare Statistics). The welfare state is a political system based on the proposition that the government has the individual responsibility to ensure that the minimum standard of living is met for all citizens. Specifically, in the matters of health care, public education, employment, and social security, the welfare state assumes all responsibility. According to John Rawls, “In a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice“(Rawls). In the 1840s, Otto Von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany, was the father of the modern welfare state. He built the program to win over the support of the working middle class in Germany and ultimately reduce the outflow of immigrants to the U.S., where welfare did not exist (Welfare State). In the United States, not all companies provided workers with benefits, thus the workers appealed to the government, giving rise to the first form of welfare capitalism.

All throughout history welfare services have been available to the general public. While these benefits have changed over time, the basic intentions of the welfare system has stayed the same. The welfare system provides benefits and monetary assistance to those who qualify. Different acts over the past two hundred years have been amended in order to try to help the poor, and while not all have been practical and successful, many programs have indeed done an outstanding job in aiding those in need. But, just like with all good things, there is a negative side. Even with all the reforms to try perfect the welfare system there are still some holes in it. Not only is the welfare system easy to manipulate, according to usgovernmentspending.com, eleven percent of the federal budget is spent on welfare, leaving tax payers livid. (usgovspending.com) It 's obvious there is a need for a welfare system in the United States, but with the abuse the welfare system has endured a major change needs to be seen in order to ensure the welfare system be used as efficiently as possible.

In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act which, among other things, provided for the financial, medical, and material needs of the poor (Komisar 125,128). Since then, there have many additions and reforms to the bill, none of which has served to quell the controversy surrounding the effectiveness of the welfare system in the United States. The main concerns of the distribution of welfare dollars and resources can be answered by the questions ?Who gets assistance?? and ?How much do they receive??. The U.S. welfare system is administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, which attempts to answer these questions through a system of minimum incomes, government-calculated poverty levels, number of children, health problems, and many other criteria. This complicated system leads to one of the critiques of the welfare system?that it is too large and inefficient. President Lyndon Johnson declared a ?War on Poverty? in 1964 designed to alleviate the burden of the poor and established the Food Stamp program the next year (Patterson 139). In 1996, a major welfare reform bill was passed that placed time limits on welfare assistance, required able participants to actively seek employment, and implemented additional services for the needy (Patterson 217).

Welfare has been a safety net for many Americans, when the alternative for them is going without food and shelter. Over the years, the government has provided income for the unemployed, food assistance for the hungry, and health care for the poor. The federal government in the nineteenth century started to provide minimal benefits for the poor. During the twentieth century the United States federal government established a more substantial welfare system to help Americans when they most needed it. In 1996, welfare reform occurred under President Bill Clinton and it significantly changed the structure of welfare. Social Security has gone through significant change from FDR’s signing of the program into law to President George W. Bush’s

109,631,000, that is the number of Americans that lived in households that received benefits from one or more federally funded "means-tested programs" — also known as welfare — as of the fourth quarter of 2012, according to data released by the Census Bureau.( Jeffrey 1) This is my objective to tell the history and statistics of the welfare system in the U.S. There is no lack of information on the topic of welfare due to it being a topic of politics in the nation. Accordingly most information I have is from databases and news reports or speeches over it. However a lot of these areas of information can be biased which is something to avoid. To evenly space the information I will supply you with I am going to split it up into two halves. The first half will be the history of welfare and how it affects the country. The second half will be over the statistics and who all is eligible for welfare.

During the early nineteenth century poverty was major issue, the Poor Law passed earlier in the Tudor period put responsibility on local parishes to pay tax to help the poor. However, over the years the financial strain on parishes became too much and in 1834 The Poor Amendment Act was passed. This was to help reduce the cost of looking after the poor and it was to stop the payment of tax unless you had special circumstances. If the poor wanted help they had to go in to workhouses and work, in exchange for clothes, food, free healthcare and a few hours of schooling for children. The poor had no choice but to go in there for help. On one hand The Poor Amendment Act 1834 was good as it gave the poor free food, shelter, healthcare and education for their children. However, the conditions in the work houses were made so awful that people would avoid going in there unless they were really desperate. The diet was bad, families were spilt up and the people in there had to wear uniform.

Social workers need to keep update on resources and programs and need to be able to help their clients navigate the complex process of accessing resources. Federal and state welfare programs include cash assistance, health and medical provisions, food assistance, housing subsidies, utility subsidies, child care assistance, unemployment compensation etc. Below are some of the important programs that are designed to help or intervene on behalf of clients in distress.

In today’s modern society, the United States faces many public policy issues, whether those issues include social welfare, immigration or even environmental issues. Congress receives numerous issues on public polices every day, but they cannot handle and solve every issues that comes across their daily agenda, nor can they satisfy every person in this country. Congress prioritizes on those issues that are more important and relevant to find a probable solution too. A growing issue we see that in today’s society are issues in the social welfare system. Social Welfare has so many issues within some of those issues include the food stamps, and even in the healthcare system. The matters in social welfare requires every individuals help to resolve, not just congress. The second major public policy issue we face in American today are within the Public Assistance Programs. Those programs include the SNAP, SSI, and even the TANF program.

The history of social welfare begins during colonization. Although there was not social work, there was some form of public assistance. Public assistance during colonization consisted of Early American Poor Laws. During this time the poor were referred to as “paupers” because they were unemployed and were required to wear P’s so they could be identified. The belief during this time was that it was the relative’s

The institutional approach to social welfare is proactive. It addresses needs and problems that may arise before the need is seen/developed in individuals. Examples of this include social security, public education, and tax exemptions for the number of children in a household (Segal, Gerdes, Steiner, p.40). The institutional approach tends to be broader and less detailed in terms of resources, money, and the size of the population in need.