From What Factors Explain the Drop in Disability Insurance Rolls from 2015 to 2019? by Siyan Liu and Laura D. Quinby for the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College:
From What Factors Explain the Drop in Disability Insurance Rolls from 2015 to 2019? by Siyan Liu and Laura D. Quinby for the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College:
5 comments:
A .3%~ drop? Hardly worth mentioning.
That's more like a 40 percent drop
Based on this chart, the outlier is not ‘15-‘19. The percentage has simply returned to the norm. The outlier is ’06-‘12.
12:09 is correct that we don't really want to look at the peak incidence rate to its currebt low point, because the Great Recession caused a one-time, albeit very large, spike of new disability awards.
But compared to the pre-recession period, incidence at the end of this chart is still well below, say 2005. 2005: 5.99 2019: 4.37. Incidence continued to plummet in 2021 and 2022 to 3.61. Some of that is COVID-related constraints on the SSA adjudication system. The Trustees expect a recovery all the way to 2005 levels by 2026, but that's just a guess.
here is the series as presented by the SSA actuaries:
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/2023/LD_figVC3.html
Sweet spot for disability is age 45-60
1945-1964 each year at least four million births, wouldn’t hit 4 million again until 1989. Bottomed out at less than 3.2 million 1973-1976.
Fewer people in the age range likely to become disabled than a few years back.
Net migration to the US has been falling every year since 1998 so we aren’t replacing the declining size of the workforce with new green card and other work visa holders.
With a shrinking workforce coupled with improved technology it is easier to accommodate some impairments. What used to take a decent amount of typing on a desktop computer is now a few taps on a touchscreen, that opened some doors for people who couldn’t perform frequent fingering. New devices are reducing a lot of lifting and carrying.
Years ago a vocational rehab counselor told me of business owner who refused to buy one of those thick soft rubber mats for an employee with back issues because if that employee got it then the rest would want one. My friend’s counter-argument was you’ll probably earn back the costs pretty quickly because it will likely cut down on people having back, hip, knee, ankle and foot problems. Owner didn’t care.
My local gas station cut operating hours because staff was hard to hire at what they offered and the owner was having to cover shifts. I told him I knew a person who would probably apply if could use a stool while checking people out. He acted like I had suggested he offer his kid as a burnt offering. After a few months of covering shifts, there’s a stool there now but my friend found a different job before that.
Tight hiring market for a lot of positions has removed a lot of resistance to accommodations.
A number of states and cities raising minimum wage increased the gap between what work pays and what disability pays and wages have been inching up in some positions increasing that gap.
Rural areas have tended to have higher disability rates. Driving longer distances to lower paying jobs especially when gas is high makes the spread between wages and disability benefits lower, that means less incentive to keep going until you just can’t. People making six figures are underrepresented in hearing level cases because they aren’t going to go from $10,000 a month to $2700 a month until they are out of options so when they do file, they tend to get an award at DDS.
So shrinking workforce + increased chances of getting accommodations + greater financial incentive to try to delay applying shrinks the pool.
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