From David Weaver writing for The Hill:
The Social Security Administration (SSA) recently released the results of a major study on disability and work patterns. ...
The new study, called the Supported Employment Demonstration, sought to determine whether service interventions could promote success in the labor market for younger adults (that is, under the age of 50) who suffer from mental impairments.
Individuals in the treatment groups received employment support integrated with behavioral health services. These services and supports, known as the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) model, focuses on rapid job placement and eliminating barriers to work. The control group received no direct services or supports.
An important feature of the Supported Employment Demonstration is that it focused on individuals who were denied Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) disability benefits. Thus, the experiences of the control group illuminate the likely outcomes of proposals by Republican leaders and conservative economists that would shrink the reach of such programs. ...
In the third year of the study, the average monthly earnings of individuals in the control group were only $395 — not nearly enough to ward off extreme hardship. ...
Conservatives often emphasize the importance of financial disincentives of disability programs. But, gold-standard random-assignment demonstrations by SSA have not found any effect on earnings from financial incentives embedded in the benefit rules. Why? Because the fundamental problem facing disability applicants stems from the way in which severe health problems, directly and indirectly, interfere with every aspect of employment. ...
Average monthly earnings among those who received employment support and behavioral health services were 40-50 percent higher than for those who received no services — further evidence that individuals with severe health problems need services and support to have some success in the labor market. ...
To be sure, the monthly average earnings of those who received services in the Supported Employment Demonstration were still modest, ranging from $553 to $590. ...
In the idealized view, only full-time work at high levels of earnings is considered a successful outcome for disabled persons. A rethink of disability and work would allow for programs, policy and communications to support diverse work patterns among persons with disabilities, including part-time work, episodic work and less formal work, including volunteer. ...
The problem with Mr. Weaver's position, which he acknowledges, is that policymakers are only interested in programs that knock people off benefits, not programs that help them earn a little more while staying on benefits. By this standard, this study was a near complete failure, just as every other study of work incentives and work assistance programs has been a near complete failure. Even those whose disability claims are denied are too sick to work on a regular basis. They really are sick. The standards to get benefits really are difficult to meet. You can't make rational decisions about Social Security disability benefits until you realize just how harsh these programs are. One of the signs that policymakers don't realize how harsh these programs are has been the endless adoption of new work incentives and the endless funding of demonstration programs designed to put disability claimants back to work. None of it can work. The claimants are just too damn sick to benefit from these efforts in any significant number.
8 comments:
I see the word average used a bunch here. That always makes me suspect. Low performance by a few individuals in the study bring down the overall average. What is more useful is the breakdown of how many earned above a threshold, for this program we could use SGA and how many were under SGA. One wonders if the outcome would look as dire as an average makes it out to be. Zeros do a number on an average, look what it does to an Earnings Record.
In my opinion,only government and private employer contractual partnerships would guarantee long term success for a an impaired or otherwise disabled person. Employers can't be trusted to maintain an impaired person employment despite ADA or other federal laws.
So all these studies are a waste of effort,in my opinion.
It's hard to find a job physically when one has to stand/walk every 15 minutes, and then mental problems on top of it. Who wants to hire someone who is gonna melt down on coworkers and bosses, let alone getting up and down all day? I told the courts who summoned me for jury duty, that a wandering Juror may be a distraction for a trial, let alone one that hates crowds and could have a panic attack at anytime, or not want to get out of bed to do something at all. This is just an example of what people expect from the disabled. We just can't do it sometimes, holding a job with compounded disabilities is impossible to make enough money to sustain oneself. I've tried, 2 weeks on a job before being fired is not a way to live what life disabled people are forced to lead. Whomever says disabled people are lazy are very very wrong in most circumstances, otherwise they wouldn't be approved for SSDI in the first place. As we all know, that is not easy.
So, PAY employers to "employ" the disabled? Kind of defeats the argument of "Sustaining competitive work at an SGA level."
They can always go to ssa and work from home where they can sit stand at will.
Boom! Twofer Tuesday!
Lighten up ya'll
What do you have available for someone who can work 3-4 hours of not necessarily "focused" work that requires minimal typing on a not necessarily consistent basis with flexible hours for maybe 3-4 days a week with consistent blocks of additional days off due to migraines that tend to cluster for 2-3 days about 4-5 times a month?
@ Tim: Supervisor!
12:55, the report on the project is at https://www.ssa.gov/disabilityresearch/documents/SED%20Final%20Impact%20and%20Cost%20Benefit%20Analysis%20Report.pdf In the control group, 64% of people worked at some point during the three years; it was 74% in the treatment groups. There was never a quarter during the study, in any of the groups, where even 9% of people were earning SGA. Even if you exclude the people who didn't work, the best outcome they got with full treatment was 16.5% of workers earning SGA...so more than 4 in 5 workers were sub-SGA even with all the services. And the difference wasn't statistically significant between the treatment and control groups.
For all of this, SSA spent over $22k per full-service participant.
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