More On British Plan To Cut People Off Disability Benefits

From the Evening News of Edinburgh, Scotland:

A new disability test aimed at ending Britain's "sicknote culture" is not about punishing people, Work and Pension Secretary Peter Hain insisted today. ...

The Government says the new medical test, to be introduced in October next year alongside the new Employment and Support Allowance, will assess what an individual can do - rather than cannot do. ...

"This is about giving people opportunities because you are better off in work, the evidence shows that."

Mr Hain said: "We know that many people want to work - work is good for you and your long-term well-being and we don't think it's right that in the past people were effectively written off.

"We want to work with people to get them back into jobs and help them stay there.

"Currently, there are many people sitting at home in the belief that they are unemployable, with no life choices or long-term prospects because they do not think their illness or medical conditions can be catered for in the workplace.

"But this is just not the case. Many people with such conditions are perfectly able to take up successful careers, if the right support is in place.

"That is why I have introduced the new assessment. It will not only accurately identify a person's physical and mental ability, it will offer advice on the type of help and support a person may need so that they can find sustainable work. ...

Mr Hain said it was "nonsense" to suggest that someone would be able to claim incapacity benefit simply because they were overweight.

The Guardian newspaper quoted Hain as also ridiculing disability benefits to those suffering from acne.

I am sure that when this new plan is implemented Britain will still have a much more humane Social Security disability program (or should I say programme?) than the United States, but the language used in defending this is so eerily similar to the language used in the United States that I find it depressing. There is the same talk of promoting what people can do instead of concentrating upon what they cannot do and of giving "opportunities" to the disabled. It is all defined as "helping" the disabled. There is no way to describe this as anything other than bull, whether it is the United States or the United Kingdom.

The cheap shot attacks upon the obese and those suffering from acne are especially bothersome. Mr. Hain can easily ridicule giving the concept of giving some moderately obese person disability benefits -- when the ridicule is done in the abstract. Could he so easily ridicule a real 500 pound woman who is in agony because of severe arthritis in her weight bearing joints? He can ridicule the idea of disability benefits for acne in the abstract, but could he so easily ridicule a real person suffering from an extreme case of acne conglobata?

Prospects For Passage Of Labor-HHS Appropriations

The Labor-HHS Appropriations bill that includes funding for the Social Security Administration was vetoed by the President. Override of the veto failed by only two votes in the House of Representatives. There was no veto override in the Senate, but the bill had originally passed in the Senate 75-19, which strongly suggests that the Senate would have voted to override.

Probably, all Democrats have to do is to get two members of the House of Representatives to switch their votes. Democrats are planning to cut the bill down so that it will only contain $11 billion more than the President had requested instead of the $22 billion in the bill vetoed by the President. Would that not be enough to induce two Representatives to agree to override a veto of a new bill? I am no expert on such matters, but it seems like a reasonable possibility. Of course, we have no idea how much the Social Security Administration would get in this new bill.

Britain To Throw One Million Off Social Security Disability Benefits

From Reuters:

The government is to change the way disability is assessed in the hope of removing thousands of people from long-term incapacity benefit, Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain said on Monday.

A new test to be introduced from October will check people's abilities rather than disabilities, he said.

"The old test has been reliant on a physical incapacity. The new one is going to test people as to what they can do," Hain told the BBC. ...

Around 2.7 million people claim the benefit for not being able to work at an annual cost of 12.5 billion pounds.

The number on the benefit has trebled since 1979 and the government wants to reduce those claiming by one million people. ...

Hain said the changes were designed to help people, not to punish them.

Who Wrote The Social Security Act?

From the Watertown, Wisconsin Daily Times:

With the baby boomers now retiring at an ever accelerating pace, concerns over funding the program well into the future are certainly going to intensify.

But, we'll leave that debate for another time. Right now we want to go back to a topic we've covered several times in this column over the years and that is about the “Father of Social Security” who just happens to be the late Edwin E. Witte, a native of Watertown. ...

Edwin Witte was born on a farm in the town of Watertown back in 1887. He was a graduate of Watertown High School and then received his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1909 and his doctorate in 1927. He was a statistician for the Industrial Commission in Wisconsin for a short period of time and then moved to Washington where he became secretary for Congressman John M. Nelson. By 1914 he was a special agent for the Committee on Industrial Relations for the Department of Labor.

He became secretary of the Wisconsin Industrial Commission in 1917 and remained there until 1922 when he took over as head of the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Library. He was then the first director of Unemployment Compensation for the Wisconsin Industrial Commission in 1934.

It was shortly after that, he was called upon by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to become executive director of the President's Commission on Economic Security which was ultimately the sponsor of the Federal Social Security Act of 1934-1935. It was during this period that Edwin was on leave from his professorship at the University of Wisconsin. ...

There was a real sense of urgency to this historic legislation and Edwin was leading a team of 20 to 30 experts who were working day and night. ...

When it was all said and done, it was the leadership and the work of Edwin E. Witte that crafted this country's Social Security Administration and its wide reaching programs.

News From The Campaign Trail

Presidential candidates keep talking about Social Security. I keep getting e-mail suggesting that I should post something about what the candidates are saying. I have felt that the candidates' talk is nothing but sound and fury signifying nothing, but I am certainly posting about other things that are no more likely to matter, so let me write something, however reluctantly.

Bloomberg reports that Republican candidate Fred Thompson has been saying that we need to cut Social Security benefits. He also advocates private savings accounts, but has not said how private savings accounts may be achieved since he opposes a tax increase. His position sounds essentially the same as President Bush's position, which plays well with those who might vote in a Republican primary, but it is completely unworkable. If you want to carve private accounts out of the current tax rates, you are looking at massive cuts in current benefit payments and that is not going to happen, as Thompson knows well.

Democratic candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama have been proposing an increase in the cap on earnings subject to the FICA tax to bring the Social Security trust funds into long term balance. This position has been harshly criticized by Paul Krugman of the New York Times and others because it buys into the preposterous notion that Social Security is little more than a Ponzi scheme.

Where The Money Goes

The Social Security Administration has released its Performance and Accountability Report For Fiscal Year 2007. It includes this interesting information showing how Social Security's administrative budget is spent:

• Disability Insurance 24.5%
• Supplemental Security Income 29.8%
• Old Age and Survivors Insurance 29.6%
• Other (including Medicare) 16.1%

To understand what the Social Security Administration is, you need to ponder the fact that less than 30% of the agency's operating budget is spent administering old age and survivor's benefits.

The Real Effect Of The President's Social Security "Reform" Proposal

From the Wall Street Journal:

...[T]he [Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive] survey shows most Americans are skeptical about whether Social Security will be available to them in retirement. While 56% of those ages 55 and older think it will be available, fewer than 20% of those younger than 55 believe they will be able to rely on Social Security.

Want To Study Anatomy?

Many of the people reading this blog are involved in one way or another with Social Security's disability programs. Basic medical knowledge is essential to those of us working in this field, yet few of us have received any systematic medical education.

Here is a chance to study medicine at its most basic level -- for free. The University of California at Berkeley has posted videos online of Professor Marian Diamond's course lectures on anatomy and physiology. I have not had a chance to watch much of it yet, but what I have watched seems fascinating. Just judging by the size of her class -- for a topic that most people would shy away from -- I would say that she has to be an excellent lecturer.