Thomas Scully has a busy law office in Lake County, Indiana. He mainly practices disability law, with good reason. Lake County is home to steel mills. Workers have aching backs and hands warped by machinery. Mr Scully helps them win Social Security Disability Insurance (DI), which provides cash and, after two years, access to Medicare, government-subsidised health insurance meant mainly for the elderly. DI is not supposed to be a safety net for the jobless. “I tell clients”, Mr Scully explains, “disability insurance is not unemployment insurance.” But they should be forgiven for being confused.
Politicians like to deride expensive programmes. DI may be the least discussed and most muddled. The programme is severely strained. The number of awards has spiked in the downturn, rising 28% since 2007. This surge follows decades of growth. DI accounted for about 10% of Social Security spending in 1989 but 18% by 2009. This is not because beneficiaries are bending any rules; the real problem is that the rules are a mess.
The article goes on to make a classic argument about the Social Security program which I will paraphrase: "It's much easier to get disability benefits now than it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s; therefore the program has run amok." A more sensible take would be to first examine what was going on in the late 1970s and early 1980s to determine whether that was some golden age. It was not. Disability standards were preposterously tight in those days, by far tighter than anything before or since. The problem is not what is going on now; the problem was what was going on then, but that does not make for an interesting story.
Of course, the author is right in saying that discussions of Social Security disability benefits are frequently muddled.
Of course, the author is right in saying that discussions of Social Security disability benefits are frequently muddled.
4 comments:
"The problem is not what is going on now; the problem was what was going on then, but that does not make for an interesting story."
That's one opinion. However, the opinion set forth in the story is not necessarily a bad one. There are many people that would agree that tighter standards (maybe even tighter than those of the 70's or 80's) are correct. Based on the lack of funding for SSA, those people are probably right.
I don't have a problem with disability benefits for older laborers who just cannot "go" anymore due to degenerative illnesses associated with aging. But what I find so maddening is the younger (i.e., in their teens and early 20's) individuals who are granted disability because they "just don't like to get up to go to work in the morning" or "just can't get along with people and don't like taking orders from anyone". These are not the people for whom disability was intended and I think that's a big part of the explosion in the disability programs.
One of the most difficult aspects to evaluate/adjudicate is the interplay between physical and mental impairments. Some people "soldier on" with full-time work despite multiple impairments; some never even try or give up when given a diagnosis (saying "I've got ----- so I cannot work). Also, when the economy was better, with unskilled/semiskilled jobs available for the asking,many of today's claimants would have been able to get a job. Today, they file for disability, in part, because the competition for jobs is so tough and they are shut out.
I have been a SSD attorney since the early 2000s. But it seemed like the most major change was in 1996 with the elimination of benes for drug addicts/alcoholics for SSI. So in that sense, it was easier to get SSD prior to 1996.
It seems like the listings are still very hard to meet/equal. So that pretty much leaves us with arguing step 5 (for those under 50) and the grids (for those 50, 55, 60).
I don't have a huge problem with the strict standards. I do have a huge problems with how the SSA has dealt with the backlog. It's ridiculous to take 2-3 years to get a hearing. I'm pretty sure it did not take that long maybe in the 1980s and 1990s. That is the major crime.
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