The system is an random assortment of "band-aids" at both the Federal and State level.
There is no "one stop shopping" for assistance services. By that I mean, if you find yourself unemployed, unhoused, unable to work for long periods of time, etc there is no State or Federal office you can go to that will hold your hand through the process of finding, applying for, and troubleshooting application problems. If you're lucky there might be a mutual aid org near you that specializes in understanding the patchwork of systems and can guide you through.
Federal level programs, being hard to find and sometimes the requirements/limitations are hard to understand will at least have a single set of "rules" that everybody has to follow. An example would be the program that I heard about and signed up for, totally at random on Reddit or Hexbear ( I forgot which), that would help pay a chunk of your internet bill. I would have never thought to look for it, when looking for poor people assistance programs in the past few years after I lost my job and the pandemic hit, this program never came up.
State level programs will have different rules by each State, subject to change whenever. Amount that your could get, duration, how many times a year you could apply for the insurance are all different by state. When I tried (and gave up on) applying for unemployment insurance after being fired three years ago, one of the requirements was that I had to apply for/interview for 5~10 jobs... A WEEK... and fill out a worksheet. Every Friday I would have been expected to call some office and spend time telling somebody about each interview or application that I did. Another stated requirement was that you could never turn down a job.
Now maybe, just maybe, I could have lied about every application/interview and it wouldn't have mattered. Maybe there's enough people working in that system that are just clocking in for a paycheck that nobody would look too hard. But I found it sad funny that I could spent 10 years working at a place, find myself involuntarily unemployed, and instead of being cool about things and just giving me some money to help pay bills while I tried to look for work I would have had to do another part time job recording and reporting to the State government that I was looking for work.
While this was going on, I looking into food stamps. Because my wife still had her job and we still had a few thousand dollars in savings (because saved cash is counted against you when trying to apply for financial assistance in the USA) we did not qualify for food stamps. There's a block grant program to help pay energy costs that I stumbled across, but we made too much money for that as well.
About food stamps in the USA. I spent a decade working in a grocery store and here's what I remember about food stamps. (Another commenter said something about only certain brands, I don't know, but in the state I was in the brand didn't matter.) I'm pretty sure there are only State level programs (possibly funded by Federal money, but managed individually by each State who gets to make their own rules). You get a debit card that is refilled at the end of every month. Each State gets to decide what the food stamp money applies to. For years where I'm living, it was only certain food stuff but has been expanded to some non food items like toilet paper and packets of seeds for growing your own food.
Now here's a weird thing about food stamps. Packaged foods, food stamps would pay for. This gets weird when there is a salad/hot bar/behind counter prepared food setup. So if the deli in the store where I had been working made hummus, put some of that on the salad bar, packaged some up in a grab and go case, and sold some to people buying a sandwich that a deli employee would make after it was ordered, the food stamps would only be allowed to purchase the pre-packaged hummus in the grab and go case. If there was chicken being sold on the hot bar and the same chicken was also being sold pre-packaged in a grab and go case, only the cold stuff in the grab and go could be purchased. Literally, a deli employee could (if there was a food stampable entry in the point of sale system) grab food off of the hot bar, print off the bar code price tag, slap it on a container and that's all it would take to make a non-food stampable item food stampable.
Medicaid (the Federal heath care stuff for poor people, not Medicare which is the Federal health care stuff for old people) we DID qualify for. Which turned out to be fucking amazing. I and my wife had been trying to figure out how to pay for healthcare for years with employee (or self employed) private insurance and it just never worked. You'd spend thousands a year on the insurance and then have to pay doctor's bills because you had not accumulated so much in medical bills that you didn't meet the minimum amount of yearly bills that the insurance company would then start paying for. Example, I got really sick and went to the ER. After 6~8 hours of a fever of 102F in an emergency room waiting area, I was given an IV bag because I was dehydrated (you are not allowed to drink/eat while waiting) and a prescription for regular antibiotics. Antibiotics that could not be given to me at the hospital and only through a private pharmacy. The bill was 2000$, and my employer provided insurance, that I had been paying into for years, covered none of it. The insurance that my wife could afford, for years, didn't cover endometriosis treatments/surgery for YEARS. When the insurance company finally started covering any procedure to deal with endometriosis, it was the oldest procedure that caused the most long term health problems.
So we get broke enough to qualify for Medicaid. And suddenly my wife realized that Medicaid covered endo surgeries, and the decent ones. After a year of doctors visits and consultations she goes in for a procedure that lasted a few hours and was released for a month of home recovery. The final total was something like 30,000$ and we paid none of it out of pocket. The issues she has had to deal with for 10 or more years has stopped. And I'm thinking, "Holy fuck, the shitty government health insurance is fucking amazing! Everybody should get this stuff."
But its a weird thing, to be poor enough for 30,000$ in surgeries but not poor enough for a few hundred extra dollars a month to pay for groceries or a portion of the electric bills to be paid. Perfectly functional system we've got here in the USA.
iirc specific brands is more of a WIC thing, which is worse somehow. when i was on EBT the store's POS would handle it and make me pay for whatever wasn't allowed
The system is an random assortment of "band-aids" at both the Federal and State level.
There is no "one stop shopping" for assistance services. By that I mean, if you find yourself unemployed, unhoused, unable to work for long periods of time, etc there is no State or Federal office you can go to that will hold your hand through the process of finding, applying for, and troubleshooting application problems. If you're lucky there might be a mutual aid org near you that specializes in understanding the patchwork of systems and can guide you through.
Federal level programs, being hard to find and sometimes the requirements/limitations are hard to understand will at least have a single set of "rules" that everybody has to follow. An example would be the program that I heard about and signed up for, totally at random on Reddit or Hexbear ( I forgot which), that would help pay a chunk of your internet bill. I would have never thought to look for it, when looking for poor people assistance programs in the past few years after I lost my job and the pandemic hit, this program never came up.
State level programs will have different rules by each State, subject to change whenever. Amount that your could get, duration, how many times a year you could apply for the insurance are all different by state. When I tried (and gave up on) applying for unemployment insurance after being fired three years ago, one of the requirements was that I had to apply for/interview for 5~10 jobs... A WEEK... and fill out a worksheet. Every Friday I would have been expected to call some office and spend time telling somebody about each interview or application that I did. Another stated requirement was that you could never turn down a job.
Now maybe, just maybe, I could have lied about every application/interview and it wouldn't have mattered. Maybe there's enough people working in that system that are just clocking in for a paycheck that nobody would look too hard. But I found it sad funny that I could spent 10 years working at a place, find myself involuntarily unemployed, and instead of being cool about things and just giving me some money to help pay bills while I tried to look for work I would have had to do another part time job recording and reporting to the State government that I was looking for work.
While this was going on, I looking into food stamps. Because my wife still had her job and we still had a few thousand dollars in savings (because saved cash is counted against you when trying to apply for financial assistance in the USA) we did not qualify for food stamps. There's a block grant program to help pay energy costs that I stumbled across, but we made too much money for that as well.
About food stamps in the USA. I spent a decade working in a grocery store and here's what I remember about food stamps. (Another commenter said something about only certain brands, I don't know, but in the state I was in the brand didn't matter.) I'm pretty sure there are only State level programs (possibly funded by Federal money, but managed individually by each State who gets to make their own rules). You get a debit card that is refilled at the end of every month. Each State gets to decide what the food stamp money applies to. For years where I'm living, it was only certain food stuff but has been expanded to some non food items like toilet paper and packets of seeds for growing your own food.
Now here's a weird thing about food stamps. Packaged foods, food stamps would pay for. This gets weird when there is a salad/hot bar/behind counter prepared food setup. So if the deli in the store where I had been working made hummus, put some of that on the salad bar, packaged some up in a grab and go case, and sold some to people buying a sandwich that a deli employee would make after it was ordered, the food stamps would only be allowed to purchase the pre-packaged hummus in the grab and go case. If there was chicken being sold on the hot bar and the same chicken was also being sold pre-packaged in a grab and go case, only the cold stuff in the grab and go could be purchased. Literally, a deli employee could (if there was a food stampable entry in the point of sale system) grab food off of the hot bar, print off the bar code price tag, slap it on a container and that's all it would take to make a non-food stampable item food stampable.
Medicaid (the Federal heath care stuff for poor people, not Medicare which is the Federal health care stuff for old people) we DID qualify for. Which turned out to be fucking amazing. I and my wife had been trying to figure out how to pay for healthcare for years with employee (or self employed) private insurance and it just never worked. You'd spend thousands a year on the insurance and then have to pay doctor's bills because you had not accumulated so much in medical bills that you didn't meet the minimum amount of yearly bills that the insurance company would then start paying for. Example, I got really sick and went to the ER. After 6~8 hours of a fever of 102F in an emergency room waiting area, I was given an IV bag because I was dehydrated (you are not allowed to drink/eat while waiting) and a prescription for regular antibiotics. Antibiotics that could not be given to me at the hospital and only through a private pharmacy. The bill was 2000$, and my employer provided insurance, that I had been paying into for years, covered none of it. The insurance that my wife could afford, for years, didn't cover endometriosis treatments/surgery for YEARS. When the insurance company finally started covering any procedure to deal with endometriosis, it was the oldest procedure that caused the most long term health problems.
So we get broke enough to qualify for Medicaid. And suddenly my wife realized that Medicaid covered endo surgeries, and the decent ones. After a year of doctors visits and consultations she goes in for a procedure that lasted a few hours and was released for a month of home recovery. The final total was something like 30,000$ and we paid none of it out of pocket. The issues she has had to deal with for 10 or more years has stopped. And I'm thinking, "Holy fuck, the shitty government health insurance is fucking amazing! Everybody should get this stuff."
But its a weird thing, to be poor enough for 30,000$ in surgeries but not poor enough for a few hundred extra dollars a month to pay for groceries or a portion of the electric bills to be paid. Perfectly functional system we've got here in the USA.
iirc specific brands is more of a WIC thing, which is worse somehow. when i was on EBT the store's POS would handle it and make me pay for whatever wasn't allowed