Have you missed a doctor's appointment because you forgot you scheduled it or something came up?

Twenty-five percent of Americans say yes. About the same share of low-income households receiving an earned-income tax credit audit letter did not understand they were being audited by the I.R.S.

31 percent of Americans say they've done this. But if you forget to pay monthly health premium bills, you can get locked out of Medicaid coverage in several states.

26 percent of Americans say yes. But in some states, failing to open your mail and quickly respond can cost you Medicaid coverage or food assistance.

Do you have paper mail you plan to read that has been unopened for more than a week?

31 percent of Americans have done this. But missing an appointment with a government office could cost you food assistance, Social Security disability or welfare benefits.

In Texas, families risk losing Medicaid if they don’t promptly open a letter they may not be expecting, find and copy their recent paystubs, and send them back — all within 10 days of when the letter was issued. In Indiana, families who need dental care must mail a monthly premium as low as $1, less than it usually costs a state to bill and record a payment. In West Virginia, some adults who receive food assistance must document their work hours every month.

These requirements were created in part to ensure that only people who truly qualify receive benefits. In some states, the rules have recently been tightened or soon could be. Yet the complexity and frequency of such tasks can mean that hurdles meant to exclude the ineligible often exclude those who are eligible but who are also disorganized or overwhelmed.

Question You All Americans Have unopened mail 26% Forgotten to pay a bill 31% Got government mail didn’t understand 25% Missed doctors’ appointment 31% Morning Consult survey of 4,400 adults

We asked a national sample of 4,400 adults, across the income spectrum, whether they would struggle with these sorts of tasks. (We know that we do). In an online poll conducted this month for The Upshot by Morning Consult, some of the questions we asked correspond exactly with requirements for programs that aid the poor. Others involve similar tasks familiar to Americans with more means.

We found that a substantial share of people — including the wealthy, including Americans on the left and right — make the kind of mistakes that could cause a loss of government benefits. Many of us sometimes fail to open mail promptly, forget to pay major bills or miss important appointments.

We found that a substantial share of people — including the wealthy, including Americans on the left and right, including you — make mistakes that could cause a loss of government benefits. We fail to open mail, we forget to pay major bills, we miss important appointments.

Most programs that make up the American social safety net have become simpler to navigate over time, with more requirements automated, eliminated or moved online. Participation rates today vary depending in part on how much work it takes to get and stay enrolled. Only about one in four qualifying families receive cash welfare, a number that has declined since work requirements were added in the 1990s, while about four in five eligible parents are enrolled in Medicaid, a program that has broadly become more accessible.

Now in an era of partisan gridlock in Congress, the tasks required of participants — “administrative burdens” embedded in each program — are an increasingly critical policy lever that can raise or lower the number of poor Americans in these programs.

“This is a political tool that is becoming more important at the federal level because Congress isn’t doing anything,” said Pamela Herd, a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University who has written a book with Donald Moynihan, also a Georgetown professor, on administrative burdens. “If you’re going to try to change stuff, especially in the executive branch, this is your best opportunity.”

The Trump administration, citing fraud and the cost of poverty programs, has encouraged states to increase scrutiny of applicants, effectively adding to the complexity of programs. The administration is trying to shape the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, to prevent states from waiving complex work requirements for some adults. The changes would mean that many more people must regularly submit proof of exactly how many hours they worked — or how much time they spent attending job interviews or volunteering — in exchange for help buying groceries.

The administration has encouraged states to verify the incomes of Medicaid beneficiaries more often, and the added paperwork has contributed to substantial reductions in the number of children receiving government health insurance. The administration has also proposed more frequent checks on the health status of some people receiving Social Security disability, a process that requires piles of paperwork and doctor’s appointments.

“You want to reserve the public resources for the people who are truly eligible for the program,” said Brian Blase, who served on the National Economic Council in the Trump administration and now runs a consulting firm. Mr. Blase has raised concerns that more ineligible people enrolled in Medicaid after the Obama administration eased the process.

For some politicians and voters, the difficulty of accessing these programs is partly the point. Requirements, they believe, can be a test of personal responsibility, or even a nudge to develop it. Evidence also suggests that the public and Republicans in particular are more supportive of welfare — and its recipients — when they learn how hard the program is to get into.

Debates about how to structure these programs have long been influenced by a related economic assumption: The more people really need a benefit, the more effort they’ll put into getting it.

“For decades, economists had this view that burdens could quote-‘help’ separate out those that are what one calls truly disadvantaged versus those who might be more marginally needy,” said Hilary Hoynes, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Our current research suggests it could be exactly the opposite.”

These burdens, she suggested, may instead be tripping up the worst off: hourly workers who can’t shuffle their schedules for a meeting; parents dealing with domestic violence, disabilities or low literacy; families without bank accounts to automate monthly payments; households already facing unpaid bills and late notices when another urgent letter arrives in the mail.

“It’s not prioritizing, it’s triaging,” said Jared Call of the many demands on poor families served by his organization, California Food Policy Advocates.

Brittney Buford, 26, who lives in St. Louis with her three children, says she keeps important documents — like her children’s original Social Security cards — under her mattress. She has had trouble applying for food assistance and Medicaid, as well as disability benefits for her daughter Kherris, who was born with heart and lung problems.

She was quick to send her new address and a copy of her lease to the state Medicaid office after moving. But she has been unable to reach her former boss to get copies of her final pay stubs proving her eligibility for food assistance. And she learned her Medicaid benefits had lapsed just before her daughter was scheduled for lung surgery. She said she never received the renewal packet at her new address.

“Finding all my papers with a 2-year-old and a 1-year-old who’s in the stages of crawling — it was just a hassle,” she said. “Oh my goodness, you had to come with all your original copies or you would have to go and get those copies of everything you need. You’d have to sit around for hours and be sent away.”

Higher-income people have less contact with these kinds of government programs. But they can also buy their way out of many of life’s pesky tasks, handing them off to lawyers, accountants, apps or automated systems.

The Upshot’s survey shows that higher-income people are more likely to have banking accounts and credit cards, as well as ready access to printers, photocopiers and scanners. They’re less likely to have moved in the past year, meaning fewer hiccups with new addresses. They’re more likely to have advance notice of their work schedules. And they are far more likely to have confidence they can track down the last two months of their pay stubs.

“It’s not that the poor need so much more help — it’s that we get so much and they don’t,” said Eldar Shafir, a professor of behavioral science and public policy at Princeton.

Mr. Shafir’s work with Sendhil Mullainathan at the University of Chicago has shown that poverty also exacts a kind of cognitive tax that can make it hard to deal with precisely these kinds of tasks. That means the poor face more of these burdens in general while also having less mental bandwidth to devote to them.

The types of federal programs that benefit higher-income people, on the other hand, tend to require less paperwork and expertise. Some are simply tucked into tax return line items, like the mortgage interest deduction. It can be easier to apply for farm subsidies than it is to get SNAP benefits, said Joel Berg, a former official with the Department of Agriculture, the agency that administers both programs.

“Applying for practically every program that aids low-income people is harder than applying for virtually any program that benefits wealthy people,” said Mr. Berg, who is now the C.E.O. of Hunger Free America, an organization that spends half its budget helping people navigate the forms and meetings necessary to get food assistance.

Even the Department of Motor Vehicles, the bureaucracy unavoidable for most of the middle class, has become streamlined over time, with many states automating renewals, moving more functions online, and finding ways to cut long lines. Still, one in five adults in our survey said they’d been stymied at the D.M.V. because they did not bring all the right documents.

A large body of evidence suggests that simplifying programs can raise their participation rates. One study found that students who were given personalized help with the cumbersome Free Application for Federal Student Aid (Fafsa) — including automatically transferring data from their household tax returns — were more likely to complete the application, enroll in college and receive financial aid.

Other studies have proved the inverse: When the Social Security Administration closed field offices, making it harder to apply for disability, the number of recipients in the surrounding areas declined, with the largest effects for those with less education and lower incomes. Research on Medicaid has shown that requiring participants to pay even minimal monthly premiums reduces enrollment.

And one clever study in California suggested that people are often bumped from the state’s food stamp rolls because they stumble over barriers to prove their continuing eligibility. The study found that people randomly assigned caseworker interviews closer to the end of the month were 20 percent more likely to lose their benefits than people given appointments early in the month — possibly because they had less time to reschedule or to corral missing documents before their benefits were cut off.

If these kinds of errors seem unique to the poor — or unfathomable when the stakes are high — other research shows middle-class people behaving similarly. White-collar workers who can enroll in retirement accounts when they start a new job often put off those decisions and paperwork, and fail to complete them. As a result, they, too, lose valuable benefits because of the pain of obtaining them. When employees are automatically enrolled in a default retirement account, participation rates and worker savings jump up.

It’s likely that some of the responses to the Upshot survey would differ if respondents believed that their health care or grocery budgets depended on the answers. But the struggles of higher-income people with retirement accounts and the D.M.V. — or even your own daunting unopened mail stash — suggest a more universal experience of administrative dread.

“The pile of stuff we don’t want to fill out becomes symbolic of our own failure,” said Mr. Moynihan, the Georgetown professor. “There’s a sense of guilt about the task itself and whether it represents something deeper about our own ability to function.”