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This isn't wrong, but I think there is a lot of low-hanging fruit to improve these systems by reducing their complexity: is there a common application for Medicaid, SNAP, and free school lunches? Section 8? Can we align the the means testing thresholds to eliminate benefits cliffs?
I've gotten the sense in the past that anyone really capable of wrangling all the different systems as they are intended probably has to have it together well enough to have the ability to hold down a job paying well enough to disqualify them from the benefits.
It's too arbitrary. Sometimes you go to the DMV and there's no line and you had all the paperwork and the person you talk to is in a good mood and you are like wtf is all this angst about? Then you go and the line is 3 hours long, they aren't doing the thing you wanted to do but you had to wait in the line the whole time to find that out, etc.
Likewise sometimes you try and sign up for medicaid and it is painless and easy, sometimes you need the help of three people at your primary care doctor's office. It's random.
So when we say "it's hard" or whatever we mean at random times it shits the bed for no reason. If it's universally hard you can write out instructions, have dedicated workers to sign up, but the problem isn't as easy as just being consistently hard.
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In my state there is (and free school lunches are automatic anyway). For young children, especially, people apply for pregnancy medicaid, and the children are automatically enrolled until 5 years or so.
I'm not familiar with the Section 8 situation here.
The state also offers heavily subsidized childcare to people with surprisingly high household incomes, but it's a bit complicated if one of the parents wasn't continuously employed while giving birth/initially taking care of the child, since everything has to line up with finding childcare and work within about a month. Jobs that can be had on short notice likely won't even pay as much as the state is spending on the childcare plus program administration, making it a net loss economically.
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