From
The Economist:
Thomas Scully has a busy law office in Lake County, Indiana. He mainly practices disability law, with good reason. Lake County is home to steel mills. Workers have aching backs and hands warped by machinery. Mr Scully helps them win Social Security Disability Insurance (DI), which provides cash and, after two years, access to Medicare, government-subsidised health insurance meant mainly for the elderly. DI is not supposed to be a safety net for the jobless. “I tell clients”, Mr Scully explains, “disability insurance is not unemployment insurance.” But they should be forgiven for being confused.
Politicians like to deride expensive programmes. DI may be the least discussed and most muddled. The programme is severely strained. The number of awards has spiked in the downturn, rising 28% since 2007. This surge follows decades of growth. DI accounted for about 10% of Social Security spending in 1989 but 18% by 2009. This is not because beneficiaries are bending any rules; the real problem is that the rules are a mess.
The article goes on to make a classic argument about the Social Security program which I will paraphrase: "It's much easier to get disability benefits now than it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s; therefore the program has run amok." A more sensible take would be to first examine what was going on in the late 1970s and early 1980s to determine whether that was some golden age. It was not. Disability standards were preposterously tight in those days, by far tighter than anything before or since. The problem is not what is going on now; the problem was what was going on then, but that does not make for an interesting story.
Of course, the author is right in saying that discussions of Social Security disability benefits are frequently muddled.
