Terry Haffner was born with no arms and two stunted legs.

He jokes about attending Bishop Luers High School, where football players would carry him up and down stairs in his wheelchair.

Eventually, Haffner graduated from high school, got a degree in mental health and became an advocate for the disabled, campaigning for equal access and equal education.

He attended national conventions on behalf of organizations of people with disabilities and was appointed to the Governor’s Planning Council on Developmental Disabilities.

So let’s just say he’s learned how to deal with the bureaucracies that people with handicaps face.

Still, Haffner lived with his family for most of his life. He lived with his parents and helped look after them when his father developed emphysema and his mother Alzheimer’s disease.

“I took care of them and watched out for them,” Haffner says. “I’d run errands (Haffner has a 12-year-old van that he is able to drive), get their medicine, cook.”

By the time he was about 50, though, his parents’ illnesses had progressed to the point where he couldn’t provide all that was necessary. So he and his parents moved in with his sister and her husband.

The year 2002 was a hard one, Haffner says. His father died and his sister developed Parkinson’s disease. In 2005, his mother died, but he remained with his sister and her husband.

Eventually, though, as his sister’s condition worsened, Haffner realized he had to strike out on his own. Last year he moved into a villa on the north side of Fort Wayne. The property is held in a trust, so he doesn’t own it. He just pays the taxes and utilities and association fees out of the $1,100 a month he gets in Supplemental Security Income.

But Haffner found that he couldn’t entirely take care of himself. He’s 3 feet 9 inches tall, so he’s too short for his artificial arms to reach cupboards in his home. He can’t cook on a stove, get clothes into or out of the washing machine or pour a drink from a half-gallon jug of milk. Running a vacuum cleaner is exhausting, and getting into and out of a shower is impossible because he has to take off his artificial arms to shower and can’t turn the water on or off or open or close the shower stall door.

Clearly, Haffner needed some in-home help. He could pay for it himself, he says, but that would quickly exhaust his income. He just needs someone to get groceries, do some cooking, laundry and light housekeeping and help him in and out of the shower, he says, a couple of hours a day three or four days a week.

Haffner gets Medicare, but it doesn’t pay for in-home care, so last August, Haffner applied for Medicaid, which does pay for limited in-home care.

He submitted volumes of forms, he said, birth certificates, driver’s licenses, medical, insurance and financial information, stuffing them into Manila envelopes and mailing them to locations in Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and Marion. He had to submit duplicates of requested forms, he said, when caseworkers told him he hadn’t mailed them in. He had at least five telephone interviews, he said, and went through the frustration of having caseworkers fail to call at the designated time and then claim he failed to keep appointments.

Finally, last month, he got word on his application for benefits. He had been denied for “failure to cooperate in verifying income” and “failure to cooperate in verifying resources.” Failure to cooperate means he had failed to submit the necessary documents, “when I know in my brain and my heart I sent them in.”

Haffner’s story isn’t a new one. Clients trying to qualify for Medicaid have long complained that documents they submitted were being lost. Recognizing the seriousness of the problem, and seeking a remedy, the state eventually canceled a contract with a coalition of private vendors led by IBM.

It seems, judging from Haffner’s story, the problem might not have been completely remedied.

The irony is that the person who feels frustrated is a person who has worked as an advocate for the disabled much of his life.

In Haffner’s case, the denial letter also came with an appeal form, and Haffner will appeal.

“I’ve learned not to rile them,” Haffner said of the bureaucrats he’s dealing with, “but for now I’m done. The activist in me is coming out.”