From Trends in SSDI Benefit Receipt: Are More Recent Birth Cohorts Entering Sooner and Receiving Benefits Longer? by Yonatan Ben-Shalom, David Stapelton, Alex Bryce, Mathematica Policy Research Working Paper 55:
We provide the first publicly available statistics on the extent to which recent successive birth cohorts enter Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and on cross-cohort trends in the average number of years of SSDI benefit receipt among cohort members. We find that the percentage of each birth cohort entering SSDI by ages 45, 50, and 55 is increasing. Mean years of benefit receipt among all individuals in the birth cohort has grown even more rapidly, due to the combined effects of entry at younger ages and lower mortality after entry. Our findings account for immigration, an important factor that is often ignored in discussions about growth in the SSDI rolls. Annual SSDI awards have declined sharply since 2010, after rising rapidly on the heels of the Great Recession. During the same period, the birth cohort data show a decline in SSDI entry by age 40, and a diminished rate of growth by age 55. Still, in 2014—the last year of our data—the rates of entry by ages 45 and 50 are well above what they were 10 years earlier. Viewing the data from the perspective of cohorts shows that there remains an urgent need to test and adopt policies to reduce avoidable labor force exit and SSDI entry by workers who experience work-threatening medical problems.
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| Trends in SSDI entry by age 40, 45, 50, and 55, as percentage of the size of the birth cohort in the SSA area population at age 20. Click to view full size. |
Those on the right will say that this proves that it's too easy to get on Social Security disability. However, it's not. It never has been and it's certainly not now.
The problem is the near demise of manufacturing in the United States. People with low cognitive abilities or chronic psychiatric problems or other nagging health problems used to be able to hold down jobs in manufacturing, perhaps not as steadily as they would have liked but well enough to avoid having to file disability claims. Without manufacturing, these people have only a marginal ability to be employed. Jobs like Certified Nurse Attendant (CNA) at a nursing home or maintenance mechanic doing minor building repairs are hard to do if you have a bad back. Employers in these fields are less likely to put up with depressed employees with spotty attendance or employees with limited cognitive abilities who just can't seem to understand or remember how the job is supposed to be done. Those "simple, routine, repetitive" jobs aren't plentiful these days.
If you work in an office, you may think that anyone can but that's not so. Those people you went to high school with who just barely managed to graduate or who didn't graduate, you probably didn't hang out with them. You didn't understand their problems then. You certainly don't understand them now. Sometimes, the problems that forced those students to the margins in high school go away or get better. Mostly, they stay the same or get worse. Those people are prime candidates for becoming disabled.
The decline is American manufacturing has been properly blamed for the opioid epidemic, Rust Belt unemployment and the election of Donald Trump. This study is just finding another effect of the decline in manufacturing.
The problem is the near demise of manufacturing in the United States. People with low cognitive abilities or chronic psychiatric problems or other nagging health problems used to be able to hold down jobs in manufacturing, perhaps not as steadily as they would have liked but well enough to avoid having to file disability claims. Without manufacturing, these people have only a marginal ability to be employed. Jobs like Certified Nurse Attendant (CNA) at a nursing home or maintenance mechanic doing minor building repairs are hard to do if you have a bad back. Employers in these fields are less likely to put up with depressed employees with spotty attendance or employees with limited cognitive abilities who just can't seem to understand or remember how the job is supposed to be done. Those "simple, routine, repetitive" jobs aren't plentiful these days.
If you work in an office, you may think that anyone can but that's not so. Those people you went to high school with who just barely managed to graduate or who didn't graduate, you probably didn't hang out with them. You didn't understand their problems then. You certainly don't understand them now. Sometimes, the problems that forced those students to the margins in high school go away or get better. Mostly, they stay the same or get worse. Those people are prime candidates for becoming disabled.
The decline is American manufacturing has been properly blamed for the opioid epidemic, Rust Belt unemployment and the election of Donald Trump. This study is just finding another effect of the decline in manufacturing.
29 comments:
Bingo! My comeback to small business folk who complain that they can't believe that so-and-so gets disability is, "Would you hire them?" The answer is usually a resounding, "No!"
Are you telling me they can't work as a bagger at a grocery store or a greeter at Wal Mart?
So people used to work with chronic health conditions and now they don't.
@9:38 To be a Walmart greeter you have to be able to lift 25 pounds and stand 8 hours. That is set that way to avoid having to accommodate a worker who is injured and receives workers comp from being transferred to greeter unless MMI puts them to at least that level. I've never seen a greeter do more exertion than pull a cart out for someone.
A grocery bagger would have to be able to lift a similar amount and have similar standing requirements.
@9:38
Speaking as a former walmart insider, "greeter" is not a designated position. They are hired as cart pushers, cashiers, or stockers. Greeters are pulled to return to these roles if the need arises at any point during the work shift.
The results I am seeing in my town with a wrecked state worker's compensation system and meaner social security system is a huge gain in people out walking the street everyday. Along with this comes emergency room visits and much more use of the criminal court system and our jails. A state that can't fund a full school week is now talking about deferring money that supposedly isn't there to build two more major prisons due to the projected increase in the prison population. Why don't you come off of all the dogmatic, ignorant rhetoric about Wal-Mart greeters and actually open your eyes and look at what is really happening in our communities. The people you are marginalizing are not going back to work but are becoming homeless and sicker. Maybe we can get it back to Dickens' London with poor houses and gulags and all of you people will finally be satisfied. Just hope you never fall thru the cracks yourself.
It is amazing that people think someone will pay somebody to do "nothing." Even so, Wal-Mart has a maximum of 2 people at a time as "greeter" who are almost always above retirement age and I doubt many of them are only "greeters" while maintaining SGA.
@12:01
Why don't we just get rid of the social safety nets altogether (SSI, food stamps, housing assistance, etc.) and just have a means-based universal basic income with Medicaid? You could cut a large number of government employees, make applying for benefits easier for the applicants (no longer have to go through multiple agencies and programs), allow discretionary spending of the UBI, and knock out a chunk of pending claims as well, thereby reducing wait times for DIB applicants.
Interesting study. I thought the most telling paragraph was near the end where it briefly mentions the effects of obesity on entry into the SSDI system. Reality is that the younger generation is not as healthy as our parents. Obesity leads to/contributes to many disabling conditions. (No judgement here, I am borderline obese myself) And some disabling conditions leads to obesity as the individual can no longer get the exercise they need. They build upon each other until the person is no longer able to work.
@12:01:
BRAVO!
Dear 12:01, you are asking the program to fix problems that it was not intended or designed to fix. Why don't you fix those problems with proper attention and let the disability program handle those who are to ill to work. Your "dogmatic ignorant rhetoric" approach to the program is exactly why the program is not working. Don't ask a disability program that was designed as a partial replacement of wages to cure all the woes of an economically depressed, under educated, area.
I thought that it was interesting how it assumed that the blip in the 80s was solely related to changes in the law and it never mentioned HIV--a condition that at one point led to a large number of young people becoming severely disabled and dying soon after getting on the SSDI rolls (if they lived past the five-month wait) and within a relatively short period of time became a chronic condition--still disabling for some, but with a much lower mortality rate.
Interesting take Charles. Usually I agree. But I do not agree it's mainly due to the decline in manufacturing. I believe there are just more Baby Boomers in the 50-65 range. There are simply more people in those age ranges in possibly the entire U.S. history.
Baby Boomers becoming disabled has caused more problems in the system to no fault of their own. Believe that is the biggest reason for the increasing backlog and number of people getting on SSD/SSI.
That’s the argument Bruce Gibney makes in his book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. The boomers, according to Gibney, have committed “generational plunder,” pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess they created.
3:13 the social security system was working pretty well around here until about the time Speaker Ryan and his crew took power and started underfunding the system. We had hearings at this ODAR within nine months of filing for it with sound decision making by the ALJ's. I love how you guys intentionally destroy a system and then cry it's not working and needs to be privatized. Slowly, people are catching on I believe, however.
@7:12
AMEN!
12:01 PM March 13th:
The nicest compliment I can give is that if you happen to be a lawyer, I’d trust you to represent me. (Vivid and credible advocacy.)
Let's just pay everybody who has a "bad" back, a high school education, and zero motivation to work.
@ 9:29
Do you even know what it entails to get on SSDI with a "bad" back. You can't just be sore from lifting a box, it's a chronic condition that lays people on the floor for days sometimes. Who are you? Paul Ryan?!? If you had a bad back, you would not have said what you just said. Do you think MRI's are cheap? Do you think extensive surgery is cheap? Do you think taking out each individual vertebrae to fix it and return it into the spine is CHEAP? (a lot of that has to be done already before SSDI MAY pay out). Do you think that going through all that AND getting denied for SSDI is uncommon? You're wrong, it is common, and a lot of them can't even stand up. You should probably look into back disorders and how "easy" it is to get on SSDI with a "bad" back. It's not. When you can't stand up, and are in pain 24/7, THEN tell us how much motivation YOU have to work. It's this attitude that make the disabled feel less than everyone else...which in turn, makes it worse. Now, Mr. Ryan, I am assuming. Go back to work since you apparently have the back of Superman.
@2:57 seems people used to work with the same conditions in prior generations.
@ 9:33
Yeah, and they did more substances to deal with that pain and had higher mortality and generally poorer health than the already high-substance use rate, high mortality, generally unhealthy physical laborers of today. Before the current opiate epidemic it was legal amphetamines and weaker opiates, before that opium and laudanum and cocaine, and before all of them and concurrent with them, alcohol, and to a lesser extent cocaine.
Glad to see you pining for a time when physical laborers died even younger after living with even poorer health and overall quality of life but squeezed out maybe one or two more years of productivity for the capitalist machine before doing so.
9:33 We use to have slavery, blood leaching, hangings, chain gangs, and no social security. These and your statement are irrelevant today. 2:57 PM was simply replying to the Rand Paul line that 9:29 AM was possibly paraphrasing: "Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts." I don't know if this statement is based on ignorance or was a dishonest attempt to mislead the voters. I do know that nothing could be further from the truth.
We are only looking at the studies, not the middle ages. Weaker, less willing to work and in the past they worked. Its there, the numbers are there, you can blame the lack of jobs, but the truth is in the study, people used to work.
Face it, Grandpa got up and went to work, would have been insulted at the thought of getting a government check. He had less modern health care, worked harder and longer with less work place rules for health and safety. The work got easier, the medical services got better, why are fewer people working with their conditions?
@12:43
The economic shift from less skilled industries (production of goods) to more skilled industries (services) which took place since the enactment of the Social Security Act supports the increase in claims due to mental impairment. It is rare for a claim to be solely physical. As to your claim work has gotten easier, I see no evidence of this. Not everyone's grandpa jogged to work in the snow, uphill both ways, and worked 37 hours per day 9 days per week. Plenty of modern jobs are physically demanding. Finally, as to fewer people working with their conditions, where did you draw this conclusion from? There may be more recipients as a percentage of the population, but there is no evidence prior generations that (as you acknowledge) lacked adequate healthcare were not experiencing disability at contemporary rates, and were not just being denied based on their lack of healthcare which would document disability.
12:43, In brief, so they can live longer. Disabled people are still able to work. It is the SGA that matters. For example: Patient A is able to work 2 hours a week shredding documents and would make, at the most, $20-40/week in a perfect world. So patient A makes about $160/mo in said perfect world. That is not SGA. Patient B is able to work 4 days a week, but only 2-3 hours a day. Let's just say 12 hrs/week at $10/hr. That $120/week gross. That's a mere $480/month. Again, not SGA. This should make you happy, 12:43, to hear that disabled people do still work, AND are able to live longer here in the 21st century with a program they may have spent years paying into. There's this preconceived notion that disabled people can't work at all. That's not true.
Some folks with anxiety get to the point their main anxiety is losing SSA/SSI and having to go back to work. I am referring to folks w/ skills and education that don't do back breaking work.
@ 3:25 if you do not believe that work has gotten much easier, then you know nothing of work. Even construction has become easier, with air nailers, lightweight saws, rechargeable screw drivers, lift assist on assembly lines, the use of assisted work aids is at the highest point in human history. Also where did I say "they lacked adequate health care" what I stated is that they had "less modern" think of the recovery time for open heart surgery, cancer survival rates, even the progress in knee replacements and should surgery repairs.
They weren't being denied, because they didn't apply. A very simple google search will show that rates of disability applications have consistently gone up. I do not believe that anxiety, back pain, heart conditions, or other mental/behavioral and physical conditions have changed, the people have changed.
Also see the other story on more people working and less applying on this blog.
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