[dizzant]

An underrated reason to remove eligibility testing is to make programs accessible for people in poverty. Navigating a means-tested welfare program is byzantine in the worst way-- accessing and submitting countless forms with confusing, often ambiguous or incomplete instructions; standing in long lines at specific times/locations far from the city center to get help or make progress; complete lack of process transparency; and dependence on faceless bureaucrats to decide your fate.

My family once had to navigate Medicaid. I was well-resourced, understood the expected outcome thoroughly, was motivated to get it done, and committed the time to follow the required process. When our initial application was mishandled due to inaccurate guidance, it took over 2 years of persistent failed communications with the various county, state, and federal agencies, back-office middlemen, doctors, and legislators to get any response beyond "apply again and hope for the best", which we did several times to no avail. In the mean time, having a Medicaid application open changes the availability of medical care, as some doctors will not or cannot by law accept additional Medicaid patients. Eventually by some mild social engineering I procured direct access to a specific empowered bureaucrat who had knowledge of a separate set of applicable rules/processes and resolved our case immediately.

Most people in poverty do not have the time, attention, or stamina to persist through means testing on top of struggling against whatever landed them in poverty in the first place. Every time I visited the county office, I would hear someone complaining about how they had applied 8 times without success for a program everyone in the room agreed they should qualify for. Means-testing is designed, by popular demand, to make accessing benefits difficult for the sake of spending less. UBI, for all its faults, at least addresses that problem.

[danudey]

This is the main benefit of UBI specifically - if something is truly universal, you don't have to spend inordinate amounts of time, energy, labour, and money on making sure people don't get it. In fact, there are a lot of articles about the idea of UBI and how governments could pay for it that tend to show that more than half the cost of UBI could be paid for by the funds going to existing programs and the funds going to keeping people off of those existing programs.

It could also replace existing government programs like employment insurance, parental leave, child welfare payments, sales tax rebates, and so on, and simplify the rules for all of the above. Did you know that in Canada the government pays for parental leave? Did you know that it's capped at a fixed amount regardless of your income or the cost of living where you are? Did you know that if you make any income while you're on parental leave - even if it's 'passive income' like sales of an ebook - you have to report it and they take it out of your benefits? So that you're legally not allowed to make up the difference between what they're willing to pay and what you actually need to live?

Sure, they're trying to avoid people double-dipping and getting government benefits they don't need on top of income they're already getting, but in practice it means that you're getting a maximum wage and if you don't have savings then the government may be forcing you into (temporary) poverty if the number they've picked won't pay your rent.

A universal and consistent basic income process with a proper sliding scale (so that each dollar you earn privately doesn't remove one dollar publicly) would simplify everything and let everyone get by to some degree.

[techdmn]

I had a similar experience helping a disabled family member. Without being too specific, it's amazing how much effort and expertise it takes to access benefits to which a person is legally entitled. It's almost as if the means testing is inverted, you cannot access benefits without the means to navigate a system designed to prevent benefits from being distributed. We have a homelessness epidemic for a reason.