CNN Money On Increase In Disability Claims

    There's a piece in CNN Money on the increase in the number of disability claims. It's not as unbalanced an article as most but the author still lists the recession first as a causes for the increase. The idea that economics explains anything and everything has gotten so strong in the minds of so many people that it's hard to get them to look at the compelling evidence that demographics is the overwhelming explanation for what is happening here.

Thoughts On Reviewing A 1374 Page File

     It hit me yesterday afternoon that critics of Social Security's disability determination process have little idea what is involved in the process. There seems to be an eagerness to jump to the conclusion that almost anyone who says they are disabled is found disabled. In the view of these critics, it's nothing but thinly disguised unemployment benefits. These critics are told this by experts at think tanks who produce impressive looking reports. This narrative fits in with the general worldview of a lot of people who work in white collar jobs, people who seldom interact in any meaningful way with those who hold down blue collar jobs, the kind of people who file most Social Security disability claims.

     This hit me yesterday afternoon as I was reviewing the file that Social Security has on one of my clients. It runs to 1374 long, tedious pages, detailing this person's health problems over a time period of about seven years. It includes incredibly personal details of this client's life and a mind-numbing amount of detail about this client's medical history. Multiple health problems, multiple doctors, multiple hospitalizations, multiple emergency room reports and more medical tests than most people can imagine. There are duplicate copies of some records because Social Security doesn't have enough personnel to weed these out. Many of the records are hard to read because they were faxed or simply because Social Security stores the records in a low resolution digital format to save money on storage space and bandwidth. If you haven't tried to do it, you just can't imagine how complicated it is to try to follow such a complicated narrative over such a long period of time reading these sort of records. Some of the health problems sound serious at first but turn out to be minor. Others start out sounding minor but end up being major. A health problem may seem to have been resolved only to crop up later. Health problems interact with each other in complex ways, both medically and in how they relate to Social Security's rules. No, most files don't run to 1374 pages but a more typical length is still 500-600 pages and usually involves more than one impairment and possibly a red herring or two. How many of the experts at think tanks or the critics who listen to those supposed experts have ever tried to wade through files like this? I'll take an educated guess that the answer is exactly zero. How much can you know about the process if you haven't done this?

     I may disagree with others who spend time reading these files but I respect them because I know they have a firm grounding in reality. The think tank "experts" and the critics who listen to them simply don't know what they're talking about. It's not easy to get on Social Security disability benefits. The process has plenty of flaws but every reasonable effort has been made to make it rigorous and maybe some of these efforts have been unreasonable. Social Security works hard at this. They're been trying to refine their processes for decades. You can't mull these problems over while drinking a cup of coffee and come up with some wonderful idea that no one has even though of.  There aren't easy solutions.

A First Look At The President's Budget For SSA

     The President's recommended budget for fiscal year (FY) 2014, which begins on October 1, 2013, provides for a 7% increase in administrative funding for the agency over FY 2012 and "Establishes a dependable source of funding for Continuing Disability Reviews and Supplemental Security Income Redeterminations." I don't yet know what is meant by a "dependable source." Chained CPI is in the budget, of course.

     Update: I'd like to give you detailed budget information but I can't just yet. Social Security has tried to post this information on its budget website but the links aren't working. Perhaps it's a work in progress.
   Further Update: I can now see the detailed numbers on Social Security's website but only by switching from Foxfire to Internet Explorer. Some weirdness that I don't understand. At the bottom is an extracted page showing the most important numbers. You can click twice on the page to view it full size. Here are some other items I found, quoted in the order I came upon them:

• The language provides for the use of up to $1,000,000 derived from fees charged to non-attorneys who apply for certification to represent claimants.
• Beginning in FY 2014, the budget proposes to remove discretionary funding above the base amount of $273 million from the Limitation on Administrative Expenses (LAE) Account and instead, provide a mandatory appropriation for program integrity activities in a newly established Program Integrity Administrative Expenses (PIAE) account. These mandatory funds will be in addition to amounts provided to the Social Security Administration (SSA) in the LAE account and will be available for two years. In 2015 and beyond, the proposal would replace both base and cap funding for program integrity and the cap on discretionary appropriations would be lowered by a commensurate amount.
• Full funding of the FY 2014 President’s Budget will allow us to resume mailing Social Security Statements to all eligible workers 25 years old or older.
• Key Performance Targets: Initial Disability Claims Completed (thousands) FY 2012 3,207, FY 2013 2,970, FY 2014 2,851; Reconsiderations Completed (thousands) FY 2012 809, FY 2013 803, FY 2014 725; SSA Hearings Completed (thousands) FY 2012 820, FY 2013 836, FY 2014 807; Average Speed of Answer (ASA) [on Social Security's 800 number] (seconds) FY 2012 294, FY 2013 455, FY 2014 482
• The Budget proposes to amend the Social Security Act to limit access to the "Death Master File" to prevent this information from being used to file fraudulent claims for benefits or tax refunds. This proposal provides that death information that we maintain may be used by agencies, subject to such safeguards as the Commissioner of Social Security determines are necessary or appropriate for the purpose of public health or safety, law enforcement, tax administration, health oversight, debt collection, payment certification, disbursement of payments, and for the prevention, identification or recoupment of improper payments.
• The FY 2014 President’s Budget proposes a technical correction relating to when Social Security benefits stop due to divorce. A parent and stepchild may receive benefits on the record of a worker, but, if the marriage terminates in less than 10 years, they are no longer eligible for benefits. Currently when a stepchild’s parent is divorced and no longer eligible for benefits from a former spouse, benefits for the parent terminate in the month before the month in which the divorce becomes final. However, benefits for the stepchild terminate one month later, in the month the divorce becomes final. This proposal would provide equal treatment for the stepchild and his or her parent; both benefits would end in the month before the month in which the divorce becomes final.
• The FY 2014 President’s Budget takes other critical steps to finds savings in government programs by making smart reforms that root out duplicative or wasteful spending, such as reducing an individual's Disability Insurance (DI) benefit in any month in which that person also receives a state or Federal unemployment benefit. This proposal would eliminate dual benefit payments covering the same period a beneficiary is out of the workforce, while still providing a base level of income support. Enacting this offset would save $1 billion over 10 years.

A Spring Haiku

     Former Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue submitted the following haiku via twitter to an NPR show that was celebrating National Poetry Month:

Early April. 

Winter drums cold tunes. 

The old word pile sheds its slush. 

What burns is unseen.

I Know! Public Service Jobs. That's The Answer!

     From Joe Klein writing in his blog at Time:

Back during the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney tried to make the argument that President Obam was soft on welfare reform. He missed the target. Welfare abuse has shifted to Social Security Disability. ...

Now, to be sure, there are workers who fit the program’s inevitable intent: older workers who suffer serious injuries and need support until they reach the age of eligibility for social security. There are others whose medical or mental disabilities make them clearly unable to work. But the government has gotten sloppy about admissions. ...

The 55-year-old construction who hurt his back has my sympathy—I’d be in favor of lowering the eligibility age for both Medicare and Social Security a few years in such cases. But there are plenty of non-back-breaking jobs that construction worker can hold in the interim.

Indeed, in all but the most severe cases, there are public service jobs that can be done as a way of paying back—and a way of culling the scam artists. All too often, the scammers find support on the left from people who believe that free enterprise is inherently unfair and the “victims,” even the unworthy poor,  deserve any help they can get. That sort of thinking is insidious and morally deficient.

"Ersatz Unemployment Insurance Or Welfare"

     Charles Lane writing in the Washington Post:

[Disability Insurance Benefits under the Social Security Act] spending has tripled since 1970, relative to the economy’s size, and it now approaches a full percentage point of gross domestic product. ...

An aging labor force explains some of the program’s growth; older workers are more likely to become disabled. But a growing body of economic and journalistic evidence suggests that SSDI reduces work incentives, because of its permissive eligibility criteria and relatively high benefits, as compared to low-wage workers’ potential earnings.

Once a backup plan for dying or incapacitated workers near retirement age, SSDI now serves as ersatz unemployment insurance or welfare — particularly attractive, and particularly hard to give up, in a sluggish economy. ...

The longer we wait to reform SSDI, the more it will drain the Treasury and erode the workforce.

     Here are some ideas that might be pursued:

• Make it crystal clear in the law that the mere inability to obtain a job is irrelevant. You have to be unable to perform a job whether it's there or not.
• Make the standards tough so that two-thirds of claims get turned down. Maybe a few more should get on benefits on appeal but make them wait a couple of years.
• Make benefits low. They shouldn't be anywhere near what a person was earning before becoming disabled. 
• Give huge incentives for the disabled to return to work. Let a person on benefits keep their full benefits for a full year after they return to work. Let them get back on benefits very easily for many years thereafter if they have to stop work. 
• Give people drawing benefits access to rehabilitation. We can call this Ticket to Work.

     Wait, I just described current law.

Kira's Story

Now We Know What's Wrong With Social Secuity Disability. It's A Case Of Hysteresis!

     From the Wall Street Journal:

The unexpectedly large number of American workers who piled into the Social Security Administration's disability program during the recession and its aftermath threatens to cost the economy tens of billions a year in lost wages and diminished tax revenues.

Signs of the problem surfaced Friday, in a dismal jobs report that showed U.S. labor force participation rates falling last month to the lowest levels since 1979, the wrong direction for an economy that instead needs new legions of working men and women to drive growth and sustain a baby boomer generation headed to retirement.

Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist for J.P. Morgan, estimates that since the recession, the worker flight to the Social Security Disability Insurance program accounts for as much as a quarter of the puzzling drop in participation rates, a labor exodus with far-reaching economic consequences. ...

Former truck driver James Ottesen, who began receiving monthly payments in 2009, said, "I'm not real happy" about being on disability. "It kind of reminds me of welfare." He said he would "like to get re-educated to do something" because "my body is broke but my mind is not."

But even if the 53-year-old Ohio man learned of a job he could do with herniated discs, he said, the government disability program feels like "a blanket covering you, and to walk out from it…at my age, it's a little intimidating." ...

It is no longer a theoretical problem, said David Autor, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has studied the disability program. The economy has a case of hysteresis, he said, created by the permanent transfer of workers to disability rolls.

Many newcomers to the disability roster are low-wage earners with limited skills, Mr. Autor said, and they are "pretty unlikely to want to forfeit economic security for a precarious job market."