MINNIE, Ky.  — Donna Dye saw the coal truck come barreling over the horizon and her head started spinning with that familiar, desperate urge to end it all.

She thought of the disconnect notices, the engagement ring she pawned to keep the lights on, the house she loved and would probably lose. Life insurance was the only bill that was up to date; this way, she thought, it might look like an accident.

Months had passed since the letter arrived from the Social Security Administration. “We are suspending your disability benefits,” it had said.

She thought of her husband, a proud man with a body broken from 26 years mining coal, and the fights over money they never had — until now. “Fraud,” the agency had written, and the humiliation consumed them.

She thought about veering across the yellow line and slamming head-on into that truck.

For more than a year, Dye’s family and hundreds of others in the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia have been fighting the federal government to keep their Social Security Disability checks. They have one thing in common: They hired attorney Eric C. Conn, a flamboyant master marketer who billed himself “Mr. Social Security.” For years he clogged the highways with neon yellow billboards promising to help people get what they deserved from the government.

Dye thought they could trust him.

Now federal officials allege he funneled $600 million in fraudulent claims to this impoverished pocket of Appalachia, and the government has turned off the spigot. It suspended disability payments to hundreds of Conn’s former clients, propelling them into an unprecedented, year-long battle with the federal government. They must prove once again that they deserved disability years ago.

If they lose, their checks stop and they are billed for tens of thousands of dollars they received over the years, money the government now believes they never deserved.

The government has good reason to ferret out disability fraud. Critics call it a secret welfare program that morphed over the decades from serving the truly disabled to aiding the unemployable: the uneducated, the frail, the unfortunates who live in places where a rotting economy relies on back-breaking labor. Burgeoning claims — in Floyd County, Kentucky, 15 percent are on disability — have pushed the disability fund to the brink of insolvency.

The government has squeezed other programs for the poor, leaving many in these crumbling corners of blue-collar America with few good options. The mass suspensions laid bare their absolute dependence on disability.

Three people have killed themselves. Others caught themselves in quiet moments wondering whether they’d be better off dead.

Donna Dye didn’t crash her car into the coal truck. Instead, she pulled over to the shoulder of the road and sat for an hour, her temples pulsing with panic, her thoughts racing. Disability had been her family’s safety net; now, she thought, there was nothing to save them from flailing toward impact.

“It’s like sitting in a tub of water, floating, nothing’s wrong,” she said. “And then somebody pulls the cork, you get sucked out and everything’s gone.”