Mar 25, 2013

NPR Discovers Social Security Disability

     From a story on Social Security disability on National Public Radio:
In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.
The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. People on federal disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.
In other words, people on disability don't show up in any of the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing. But the story of these programs -- who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that -- is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It's the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net....
In Hale County, Alabama, 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability. On the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale. ...
Over and over again, I'd listen to someone's story of how back pain meant they could no longer work, or how a shoulder injury had put them out of a job. Then I would ask: What about a job where you don't have to lift things, or a job where you don't have to use your shoulder, or a job where you can sit down? They would look at me as if I were asking, "How come you didn't consider becoming an astronaut?" ...
But disability has also become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills. But it wasn't supposed to serve this purpose; it's not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet. Once people go onto disability, they almost never go back to work. Fewer than 1 percent of those who were on the federal program for disabled workers at the beginning of 2011 have returned to the workforce since then, one economist told me. ...
PCG is a private company that states pay to comb their welfare rolls and move as many people as possible onto disability. "What we're offering is to work to identify those folks who have the highest likelihood of meeting disability criteria," Pat Coakley, who runs PCG's Social Security Advocacy Management team, told me.
The company has an office in eastern Washington state that's basically a call center, full of headsetted women in cubicles who make calls all day long to potentially disabled Americans, trying to help them discover and document their disabilities: ...
There's a reason PCG goes to all this trouble. The company gets paid by the state every time it moves someone off of welfare and onto disability. In recent contract negotiations with Missouri, PCG asked for $2,300 per person. For Missouri, that's a deal -- every time someone goes on disability, it means Missouri no longer has to send them cash payments every month. For the nation as a whole, it means one more person added to the disability rolls. ...
Daytime TV in many places is full of ads from lawyers who promise to fight the government and win the disability benefits you deserve. There are tons of YouTube videos about getting disability -- one lawyer, one webcam. The standard form is a let's-get-real chat about how to win this thing. ...
Who is making the case for the other side? Who is defending the government's decision to deny disability?
Nobody.
"You might imagine a courtroom where on one side there's the claimant and on the other side there's a government attorney who is saying, 'We need to protect the public interest and your client is not sufficiently deserving,'" the economist David Autor says. "Actually, it doesn't work like that. There is no government lawyer on the other side of the room."

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

SSA tried at one time to have someone as a "devil's advocate" to protect the trust fund at the hearing, but the experiment was done poorly and eventually was struck down in court (essentially, for SSA failing to spend to money to have separate training for the ALJ staff and for the government representatives).

The GR program never came out of the experiment stage and there were repeated extensions of the demonstration project, in large part because of the twin goals of (1.) moving more cases quickly and of (2.) paying less cases. If GR time could be devoted to individual claims, then there could a better defense and less favorable to the claimant decisions. If the GR review of files could separate out probable favorable pay cases and OTRs prior to hearing, then the total docket could move faster. But, it was not humanly possible to do both with the resources that were available. ...

Anonymous said...

It was a well done radio show from the perspective of rather naïve young reporter. She was clearly unaware of the entire culture that surrounds the disability programs. She was shocked that Binder and Binder represented 30,000 individuals last year and was in fact a major force in the U.S. economy.

She also noted how this population remains invisible to most measures of the economic well being. In fact the unemployment numbers decrease as the disability rolls increase.

She also made the discovery that there is only two ways that people are removed from the rolls. They either age out to retirement benefits or die. So much for the fans of the med CDR process.

Anonymous said...

"new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled".

I know from personal experience that the ada will not protect a person from an employer's mistreatment of a person with disabilities. An employer can be a bully who is well favored by law providing they have minimally tried to assist the person with disabilities. In summary,from my experience the ada is very little protection for a peson with disabilities.

Anonymous said...

Yeah don't get Me started on that nearly worthless ada.

Anonymous said...

Imagine what the disability rolls would be if we had a political system that rewarded work and small business. Throw in tort reform and remove government from choosing winners and losers. Add a dash of personal responsibility. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Anonymous said...

People that are disabled, if they have a physical disability, could have a hidden one or two as the case may be, some people seem to think they see a disabled person who gets some sort of disability and think wow that person can't be disabled, they never think or even look at the clock to see how long that person is doing said activity, joint pain can be very real and yet it will not be visible to the naked eye, sure the person might look fat, but that can't be all there is, if they truly do have SSDI and/or SSI and not SS(Social Security is not SSI), then the person in question would have other hidden problems and the suspicious person is just an uniformed jealous busy body whose somewhat prejudiced, cause one can not get SSDI or SSI if one is merely fat, there has to be something else and it would be rated severe too.

Anonymous said...

Disability claims are not an adversarial prodeeding, unlike all other criminal or civil court proceedings. A person has to submit evidence that they are unable to work due to a disability. If they can, they are approved. If not, they are denied. There is no one arguing that someone is not disabled at any level. It is a zero-start process, and if you meet the level of legal disability you are in. It is, to oversimplify it, similar to a drviing test. If you demonstrate you can drive, you get a license. no one is trying to keep you from getting a license.

Anonymous said...

I have seen obesity listed as a primary diagnosis. However, you are correct, weighing 350 lbs and being a 5'3" woman is going to cause all kinds of other health problems. Pain is something MOST people live with on a daily basis. Some people take the disability route while others choose to keep going. Sometimes it is just that simple.

Anonymous said...

@ 8:43 PM, March 25, 2013

My driving test was wayyy more objective and consistent than the hearings and decisions I see.

"Sometimes it is just that simple." Sometimes it is. The converse is true too, though.

Justin