Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I started law school shortly after the PSLF program was created. The program created a loan forgiveness option after 10 years of qualifying public service. The criteria for qualification are clearly specified up front. Among other things, you need to make 120 monthly payments on a qualifying income-driven repayment plan. None of these criteria are arbitrary or hard to understand.

Nonetheless, because so many people couldn't figure it out, Congress allocated an additional $700 million to help those folks. But, as far as I can tell from the article, the people being denied are the ones who still can't figure it out. 28,640 of the 38,640 had not previously applied for loan forgiveness. Of course those people must be rejected--this $700 million is a supplemental program for people who goofed up and got rejected from the regular PSLF. It would make no sense to let people get money from that program before they were rejected from regular PSLF. The other reasons for rejection are even more meritorious. If you haven't been paying for 10 years, or were paying less on your incorrect plan than you would have under the PSLF plan, you shouldn't get loan forgiveness--you haven't paid in what you were supposed to. Likewise, the federal government cannot do anything about private student loans. It goes without saying that people who don't have 10 years in a qualifying public-service job shouldn't get forgiveness. Literally every reason mentioned in the article for rejecting these applications are good reasons for rejecting these applications.

The vast majority of the people who "can't figure it out" are employed by the Department of Education or by FedLoan Servicing. I am employed by the U.S. government, recertify for an eligible repayment plan every year, am enrolled in autopay, and still get told that I've only made 9-10 qualifying payments in a year-long period. I often have to spend hours on the phone, across several months, arguing and documenting, just to set the record straight.

> I often have to spend hours on the phone, across several months, arguing and documenting, just to set the record straight.

Welcome to the federal government.

"But lets put them in charge of my health care too!"

Lesser evil in comparison to having no healthcare for so many people who need it the most.

Just curious, have you ever heard of lodge practice?

It was a huge source of medical care for the poor and working class well into the early 1900 (serving ~1/3 of the population), but was strangled by the AMA and the centralization of unions: http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html

I think it’s particuarly interesting because it was completely absent from all my previous education about medical systems. I only recently learned it existed, and it’s changed my views significantly. (I.e. I’m no longer of the opinion that switching to full government management is a good target, but rather, the government should stop propping up and providing corporate welfare to the systems which strangled mutual aid societies.)

No, I hadn't. Thank you for that.

Good to hear! Here’s also a fascinating news clipping from a 1910 issue of the New York Times. It really helps to get a feel for the rhetoric of the era, “Physician Condemns Practice for Lodges”: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1910/11/06/105...

I was at the post office the other day to get passports for the family. It turns out that they had a signup sheet with only 25 spots on it for the whole day. I got there 13 minutes after they opened and I was 21st on the list. I waited for 3 hours just to be able to hand in the paperwork. I didn't walk out with a passport, just handed them the paperwork.

And no, if you have a kid under 10 with you, you can't do it online. You have to show up in person with both parents.

Funny, we just did the same with our two kids. We called the post office and they encouraged us to make an appointment, which we did. We showed up on time, and waited less than 5 minutes. They walked us through completing the paperwork and had us out in minutes. A couple weeks later (yesterday) the passports arrived.

That's a better job than Comcast or Blue Cross ever did for me.

It's almost as if, the federal government is a vast machine with a few malfunctioning parts which doesn't mean its bad as a whole, over generalization of its specific shortcomings being unproductive. Its almost as if...we need to improve it instead of bitching about how we don't need it

Same, and the post office photographer even had a great technique for getting an infant to look at the camera and not smile.

The one is San Jose is even worse. You have to show up 2 hours before the Post Office opens to get a spot.

Meanwhile, the US has worse and far more expensive healthcare than all of those "socialist" European and Asian countries. But don't let the facts get in the way of your opinions.

OK so let's back up and look at this from a higher level.

A program that is supposed to help 10s of thousands of students ends up helping very few. Does this mean that all the rejected people are lazy, stupid, or grifters? Or is the program implemented poorly?

This is not a welfare program for needy people. It’s a transactional arrangement with specific terms for college and graduate-school educated people. The government should be able to expect that the applicants will be able to dot their Is and cross their Ts.

Why are there any Is to dot and Ts to cross at all? Why isn't the application:

  Name: _________________
  Taxpayer ID: __________

? The government should be able to figure out from that what government loans you have that are eligible for the program, and if you've satisfied ongoing payment requirements. They should be able to figure out from your income tax returns if you are working in a qualifying public service job.

As it turns out, random government agencies can’t just data mine your tax returns, bank accounts, and payment history from a third party servicer.

To build the infrastructure to do this would cost the government probably $100 billion. See healthcare.gov for an example where they tried to do something similar.

... Look outside the US. This is how a lot of social programs work. Especially if it were for a Public Servant/Employee then the records are even easier to access.

Perhaps the US’s relative state independence doesn’t help it here.

Healthcare.gov was insanely successful after the initial poor launch (the initial launch was poor only because the Supreme Court struck down certain aspects of the law, which meant that the entire scope of healthcare.gov changed overnight).

I haven’t used PSLF, but the IBr system does in fact do stuff like pull your income and loan information from the relevant government data bases when you certify your income each year.

The issue here is not filling in the forms properly, but people failing to look carefully at the underlying requirements for eligibility and make sure they meet them.

Spoken like someone who has never found themselves in the insane loops that a bureaucracy can throw you into, with contradictory news coming from multiple parties.

You've studied law, so I'll use a legal analogy.

Imagine if the only way to get a court to hear your plea were to file the correct form of action. Depending on what you want the court to do, you might have to file a different form, and you also have to know which court to petition. As you probably know, courts following the English law tradition have simplified their forms of action (say, [0]) so that this task is much easier now than it used to be.

A common problem with this sort of program is that the bureaucratic requirements end up preventing people from successfully applying or completing paperwork which they didn't know that they needed to handle. While this might seem like a mere UX problem to you, or perhaps "a formality", I assure you that it can and does drive people mad. [1]

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_2

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtEkUmYecnk

This is quite common across all govt services and republicans like to add extra red tape to reduce the number of people using services.

And the other side also likes to have that red tape so they can hire more administrators and burn through the money that was supposed to actually help people.

The red tape is very much a unilateral thing. And given the govt at least seems to employ more democrats, I'm not sure I agree with your assertion.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-hates-red-ta...

The thing is both parties are involved in most of the red tape in everything. In general, I'm opposed to most state sponsored charity, I'd much rather it were mostly voluntary or unilaterally applied. This includes corporate charity and I'd also like to see IP law rolled back a bit.

That's just my own POV, which really doesn't align with either D or R a lot of the time.

So the disabled should just rely on alms?

You would refuse to donate to charity in support of the disabled? Also, I said "MOST"

The "regular PSLF" mentioned above is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Service_Loan_Forgivenes...

The "supplemental PSLF" is: https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancell...

Just because each step might be a valid reason, does not make the steps as a whole valid.

I'm doing to draw an example to hiring in the tech industry for example. It's fair to have a phone interview for a job position, I think we could all agree on that. The same goes for a phone interview plus an in-person.

Now let's start adding more steps into the mix. Let's say you need a phone interview, followed by a small side project, another phone interview, a timed test, then multiple days of in-person interviews, followed by another phone interview and ending with a final vocal offer (which if you don't say the right salary might be rescinded).

Are each of these steps valid in itself? Sure. But every time you add an additional step, you end up shedding a lot of individuals. Some that might be actually pretty good hires, but made a small mistake that got them filtered out early. The end result is the company has trouble finding 'the right candidate' and a position ends up open for months.

It's the exact same idea here. The government has added so many steps and gotcha moments that all it takes is one small mistake to get denied.

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