More Nonsense From GAO

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report entitled "Federal Disability Programs: More Strategic Coordination Could Help Overcome Challenges to Needed Transformation." You can tell immediately just from the title where we are going with this one: Everything is the fault of those stupid bureaucrats.

Here is the GAO's summary:

SSA and VA have taken some initial steps to recognize a more modern concept of disability, but both agencies still encounter challenges in fully assessing an individual’s capacity to work and in addressing claims processing problems. SSA and VA have revised some eligibility criteria to reflect medical advances and to support beneficiaries’ efforts to return to work and achieve self-sufficiency. However, their revisions to eligibility criteria fall short of fully incorporating a modern understanding of how technology and labor market changes should impact eligibility for disability benefits and return-to-work rates remain low. The low return-to-work rates may be due, in part, to the timing in which certain supports are offered to beneficiaries. However, the timing of services are constrained by several factors, including program design, laws, and the agencies’ limited span of authority over benefits and services offered by other agencies. Finally, although SSA and VA are taking steps to address management challenges, both agencies continue to experience delays in processing disability claims and persistent backlogs.

What is "a more modern concept of disability"? I think they mean that they want Social Security to deny more disability claims because modern medicine is so miraculous and employment opportunities are so great for disabled people. If this is what they mean, they are naive. Modern medicine has not conquered pain. Modern medicine cannot halt the aging process or prevent the progressive nature of chronic illnesses such as diabetes and osteoarthritis. Modern psychiatry has not conquered schizophrenia and does little for many suffering from bipolar disorder. Employment opportunities mean nothing when you are in severe pain or so ravaged by mental illness that you cannot show up for work regularly, stay at work once you get there, keep your mind on your job or get along with co-workers and supervisors.

The belief that more disabled people could return to work if Social Security would just adopt enlightened rules is ridiculous. Cannot GAO see the enormous failure of Ticket to Work and draw the obvious conclusion? If the program is set up to pay benefits only to those who are half dead or fully nuts, why would anyone expect many people drawing disability benefits to return to work?

This report seems to be based upon the implicit assumption that disabled people are mostly wheelchair bound people. If you know nothing about disability, that must seem like a natural assumption. After all, a wheelchair is used as the very symbol of disability. The reality is otherwise. Pain and mental illness are the most important causes of disability. People in wheelchairs are only a small part of the disabled population.

It is time to stop being polite about the well-meaning fools at GAO. If this report is the best that GAO can do, it is time to ask whether GAO is a waste of money.