I'm 1 and 9

1 out of 9 is mostly good news. If you've read past posts you may know I have been struggling with some seriously troublesome bureaucracy that has to do with services my parents receive from the state and county; earned wages the county refuses to pay, entitlements arbitrarily denied and other stuff that I've been trying to fix for more than a year.

When there are problems with these things, the law allows the recipient to request a "fair hearing" within 90 days to try to resolve the problems before an administrative judge. As my parents' representative I had requested hearings last August for 2 of the issues and never got a response. I even re-requested one of them, but it seems all my requests were ignored, misdirected or lost until well after the 90-day limit had expired. Seems like just more bs to me. At stake were more than 500 hours of earned wages from last year which IHSS has refused to pay, citing various ambiguous "regulations".

Months later I finally got a hearing scheduled. Then a few days prior to the hearing I got a call from a representative of the county (which runs IHSS) to propose what basically amounts to a settlement in lieu of proceeding with the hearing. I was offered about 85% of the unpaid wages I was requesting. Though I believe I have a solid case, there's no way of telling how the judge would have ruled, but the county's offer was guaranteed. I've not had good luck with these things before so rather than risk losing it all I had to accept the offer of 85%.

Settling does leave one of the issues uncorrected, which could negatively affect me (and other caregivers) in the future. And even though 85% is a lot better than zero, I still feel I've been cheated out of wages I've earned through blood, sweat and tears. And I've still got about 7 other problems to try to get fixed before it's all over. The upside is that the money will be put to good use and will help with some of my short term goals. 1 for 9 is much better than 0 for 9.