Read the Introduction
There is a ledger kept in your name. It has been kept since before you were born, it is kept by offices you have never visited, and entries are made in it whether you look or not. What very few people know is that you are allowed to read it, and that reading it is the beginning of everything else.
The accounts in it are called benefits. The word makes them sound like gifts, and a gift depends on the mood of the giver. They are not gifts. Each one of them was enacted by a legislature, written into a statute, funded by a tax, and assigned an office with a duty to administer it. That is the difference between a favour and a schedule, and it is the difference this book is built on. A favour can be withheld. A schedule has to be applied.
So this book does one thing. It shows you where the schedule is written, what it pays, who is entitled, which door to knock on in the state where you live, and what to do when the office does not answer. It is written plainly on purpose, because the language of these programs is deliberately difficult and a person should not have to hire a translator to find out what they are owed.
Three things need saying at the start, because they are the difference between a book that helps you and a book that gets you into trouble.
The first is that the rules change. Amounts are adjusted, ages move, programs are added and cut, and the figure printed here is the figure that was in force when this was written. The agency's own schedule is always the authority, and the addresses for finding it are given in the pages that follow.
The second is that this is general education, not advice about your own case. It tells you how the machinery works, not what to put on a particular form under your particular facts. Where your situation is complicated, take it to someone qualified to look at it with you.
The third is the one worth carrying all the way through. An office can only act on what is written in its own record. Nothing that was never filed exists for that office, and nothing that was filed badly can be argued away later. That is why this book spends as much time on keeping the record as it does on the rules. The person who keeps a dated file of every letter, every notice, and every receipt is working with a different instrument than the person who remembers what happened.
One more thing about the shape of what follows. You will notice that no chapter tells you what one particular state does and stops there. The programs here are federal, so the rules travel with you. What changes is the office and the door, and every chapter tells you how to find yours. Learn the federal rule, then find your own state's answer. Those two questions will carry you through almost anything: who administers this where I live, and what does my state add or require beyond the federal floor.
The ledger is not hidden. It is simply unread. This book is the reading of it.