Allison Parker

Allison covers Social Security, Medicare, and the wider landscape of government assistance programs for Legal Not Legal, translating the rules that determine who qualifies for what and how the process actually works in practice. Her pieces focus on the moments people actually run into with these programs — an application that gets denied, a benefit amount that doesn't match expectations, a rule change that arrives with almost no warning — and try to explain the reasoning behind it in plain language instead of agency jargon. She pays close attention to deadlines, income thresholds, and the small print that tends to trip people up.

Allison keeps a running file of reader questions that come up again and again, which usually tells her what to write about next before any news cycle does. She'd rather answer the question someone is actually asking than the one a press release assumes they are.