Unfit For Work?
 

By Chana Joffe-Walt

In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. People on federal disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.

In other words, people on disability don't show up in any of the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing. But the story of these programs -- who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that -- is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It's the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.

For the past six months, I've been reporting on the growth of federal disability programs. I've been trying to understand what disability means for American workers, and, more broadly, what it means for poor people in America nearly 20 years after we ended welfare as we knew it. Here's what I found.
LINK

It's where all the people who work for a living go as the retirement age is raised.

As I get older and my Crohn's disease gets worse, I may be forced into this situation.

My neighbor down the road has nothing wrong with him except that his aging mother gave him the money to hire an attorney after he was turned down for disability so that he could appeal. He was putting a caution cone in a truck when he worked for the Toll Rd claims the truck was going too fast and hurt his shoulder. :rolleyes:


I have seen him building a stone fountain in his yard, hanging 2 inch plywood in his barn and other things. He is 46 he is gonna be on disability for the rest of his life. :mg:

I am sorry you have a problem Pete, you are an apple to this guy's orange.

Now, if a private insurance company were to have to pay that claim they'd document him doing all that and take him to court. It's all a mess.

Don't know ow things work over there, but:

Over here there are a lot of myths about disability / incapacity benefits. There are, it is true, some people who are claiming despite the fact that they can and should work. But they are a wildly outweighed by the numbers of people who could and should be given benefits and who aren't. They are outnumbered by the people who are partially disabled from work and whose symptoms are erratic (this particularly applies to people with chronic illnesses/conditions and people with mental health problems).

Everybody always knows someone who is gaming the system. They stick out like a sore thumb when we cast our eyes around to see what is fair. But we just don't see the many, many people who are struggling along on their disability pittance for no other reason than that they cannot work, or cannot work all the time.

There is over here, a similar problem with the unemployment figures, and there were, for a while a lot of people who should have been classed as unemployed who had been somehow shunted onto disability benefits and therefore off the figures. But it was never as big a problem as we were told it was. Just as it isn't as big a probem as we are told it is now.


What i find far more troubling, personally, than the idea that a few people have managed to get out of working and wrongly claim disability, is the absolute fact that thousands upon thousands of people in my country have been removed from that system and refused those benefits on the grounds they are fit for work when they patently are not. The majority of claims for disability or incapacity benefit under this new system are initially refused and then accepted on appeal (costly for the tax payer and unnecessarily stressful for the client).

be careful what you wish for when scouring away the gamers. Theymay be the more visible but they are not the most prevalent. Their presence however offers impetus and context for a much colder society, in which we simply cease to help those that need it.

And maybe some people aren't totally unable to work. A the new tests assess, maybe they can stand upright for 10 minutes unaide,d maybe they can walk 100 yards, maybe on that day, for the person with MS or cancer, maybe that day they can clean their house from top to bottom. The fact that on three other days of that week they can't even drag themselves from bed notwithstanding, they are now 'Fit for Work'.

So much nicer, so much fairer, to them as well, we are told. Rather than consigning them to a life on the wasteheap, they'll be helped back intio a productive life. Except the help doesn't help (look up the Atos scandal in the UK), and the jobs aren't there anyway.

So all that happens is a bunch of people are thrown off that benefit and onto a job market in which 100 % fit and healthy 20 years olds are queueing 100+ to a job interview.

Careful what you wish for. It isn't just the guy with fake bad shoulder that pays the price. It's the young mum struggling with serious post natal depression and the cancer patient in brief remission, or the man who went blind with glaucoma two years earlier and is now scared of leaving his house. And the fifty-five year old whose rheumatoid arthritis comes and goes between ok and completely incapacitated. They're the ones who suffer in our quest for 'fairness'. And they outnumber and outweigh the fake bad back and the pretend depression.

They are also the mothers of the severely handicapped, who are capable of work themselves, except that their children's disability benefits are not remotely enough to pay for their care, so they are forced to be unemployed in order to make up the difference.

I tell this to those who complain about the methodology of the FAFSA in determining what types of aid students/families are eligible for. Yes, they may KNOW of those playing the system (and wink wink nudge nudge of course we know it too and try so very hard not to get jaded and to keep in compliance with the law...but some playas are awfully good playas. We can't throw them out because we think they're playing...they have to meet the criteria of "fucked it all up on their own") but the rules are made, and changed, and made again...trying to serve the greater good. And anytime you do that you will find players. And anytime you do that there is someone who really DESERVES the aid but can't get it because of certain other rules. It's hard to watch sometimes, but keep in mind we MOSTLY see the students who ARE in trouble and ARE losing their eligibility and ARE trying to play the system. For each of them there are plenty more who use it to great self-benefit. It's a constant work in progress but efforts are made and implemented nearly every year to improve it, to drive out the players.

Unfortunately, as Dana also pointed out, too many judgment calls are made without really knowing that individual situation.

I know a guy who has an arm that doesn't even work. He hasn't been able to successfully get disability. Now, I am sure there is much more to the story than I know. I know a guy who seems pretty damn healthy to me who has been on disability for years. Now, I'm sure there is more to that story than I know.

I try to keep the mind open but it's awful easy to get jaded.

Especially since one of the bigger worries on my mind is that my depression will, finally and absolutely, render me incapable of holding a job. I do believe that we are once again heading into an optimistic situation and that change may still come. However, how much is the effed-upness of this current department and how much of it is just the progression of my (diagnosed) severe and chronic depression? I don't know. I really do not know. I like to believe that most of it is the pressure here, but as things go through my mind I wonder. Through therapy I am learning coping skills. But will those skills work if things just keep progressing?

Just my two cents.

About half of my patients are on medicare. They are generally under 40 years of age, and have no physical health concerns. They have never been in a psychiatric hospital, nor have they been medicated for an indentifiable psychiatric illness.

They are on disability because they are junkies, and promised half of their start-up lump sum back payment to a "disability attorney."

I sincerely dislike seeing my tax dollars at work in this way.

I know a lot of very seriously mentally ill people who NEED to be on disability. they are so crazy that simple manual labor is beyond their capabilities. But not these folks.

Now, of course, being a junkie really is a full time job. You don't have any time left to do anything but steal shit or prostitute for enough money to buy drugs, and then there's all the time spent finding a place to shoot up, and surely, they are running quite a few infection control risks, and then they nod out for hours before they have to start the whole cycle again.

Same here, I have had it since 1982 and it was the worst when I was 25. Discovered by accident that marijuana gave me better symptom relief than the steroids and opiates the doctor prescribed.

Could someone tell me that when the crash happened some time around 2008 it was bad bankers. dodgy sub prime loans and mortgages and governments in cahoots with the investment industry that was the problem.
Now it's a witch hunt on the poor and benefit claiments, public sector workers, and everyone now has to pay for with "austerity measures" and tightening their collective belts.
That was some spin to turn it around and find a new enemy get the proles to fight amongst themselves and blame the poor cos if you claim benefit you must be a scrounger, this seems to be the new mantra.
The UK Tory coallition govt are getting us back to Victorian values all right we'll soon be sending kids up chimneys again, we can't have kids wasting time at school when they could be working now can we?

:mad2:

There are so many myths and half truths about the Social Security disability program(s). The person who wrote that article seems to have fallen for many of them.

More people want to get affirmation of their own personal system of belief than they want to get the truth - especially if it's not their brand of the truth. A significant percentage of people in America today want to do away with what remains of this country's social safety net. I have my theories as to why this may be so, but bottom line, I really have no idea.

It would appear that many people besides Romney and his wealthy patrons have come to the conclusion that their fellow Americans are con artists - lazy, lying cheats who will go to any lengths to wallow in an endless shower of money and benefits rained down upon them by Uncle Sam and paid for by struggling billionaires who can barely juggle the payments on their 5th Jaguar, their 4th villa in France, and the cost of buying most of Congress.

The above is proved true by the lack of disabled people and older workers getting hired for jobs. Thanks to the ADA and EOE and the rest of the gov't alphabet soup, employers would jump at the chance to hire a 62 year-old worker with a disability. It couldn't possibly be that actually employers would rather hire someone else and there's no way of proving discrimination either way, so why bother?

I think a country where survival of the fittest and social Darwinism is held in such high esteem will get its just desserts - maybe later, but probably sooner. Apparently there are many who believe the result will be some kind of utopia. Maybe so. Even the society arrived at in Lord of the Flies must have felt utopian to the victors.

I should write a fucking book. Been dealing with ssdi for my son. Spent 5 HOURS in Chester. No one spends 5 hours in Chester. End result is that l got the issue rectified going forward, but apparently they feel a $5400 fine/penalty from my son is fair compensation for their fucking stupidity. I am beyond pissed.
Another lawsuit you say? Uggghhh.
The good news is that we won his suit from the accident. He was awarded $100,000. The bad news is that he will probably not see any of it. After the lawer takes his cut & deducts expenses, the Insurance companies now get to to recover what are called reimburible expenses. Basically, they get to recover their losses BEFORE him. Since his medical bills were so high, odds are it was all a waste of time effort and life.
Considering that l have zip. There is now no money to care for him after l am gone. He'll probably end up in a group home or worse.
I may have to make some seriously unbelievable decisions before l pass to prevent that nightmare.

That should not fucking happen in a country as wealthy as the USA.

Dana (and everyone else) please take five minutes and watch this video. The country, America, is not wealthy. A handful of people in this country are. Please watch this to see just how effed up this is.

Here's a criticism of that NPR show which caused them to change the web version.

I'll help with that book, Classic. Which does your son qualify for? SSI or SSDI? I'm hoping SSDI, since at least his disability check would be a little bigger and way off in the future, he'd get your social security survivor's benefits (if they even still exist then).

As for group homes or any other type of assisted housing - unfortunately I come as the bearer of more bad tidings. The non partisan Center for Budget and Policy Analysis just put out their latest report on housing for the disabled and low income seniors. Thanks to the sequester, 140,000 households will lose their housing vouchers this year alone.

The Housing Programs have been under attack for some time now and this is only the latest in a sequence of blows. If no changes are made to the budget cuts required by the sequester, 500,000 families headed by those with disabilities and low income seniors will have lost their housing by 2021.

When I think of your son, when I think of my friend Clarity Rose (also brain injured) back in Colorado Springs, when I think of so many I know who suffer from disabling conditions, it just breaks my heart. How much lower can people go than to attack some of the most defenseless and vulnerable people in our society – the disabled?

Every disability brings its own unique hardships to those who suffer from it, but brain injuries just suck so bad. Even a “mild” brain injury can be completely destructive to a person’s ability to function. And most of the time, people with brain injuries look just fine, even appear to act just fine if you don’t see them often or if you’re not around to witness the tremendous effort that goes into accomplishing the smallest thing.

“Looks OK to me. My brother hit me on the head with a baseball bat when I was 6 and I’m just fine."

Yeah, other that big hole where your compassion and decency used to be.

I'll help with that book, Classic. Which does your son qualify for? SSI or SSDI? I'm hoping SSDI, since at least his disability check would be a little bigger and way off in the future, he'd get your social security survivor's benefits (if they even still exist then).

As for group homes or any other type of assisted housing - unfortunately I come as the bearer of more bad tidings. The non partisan Center for Budget and Policy Analysis just put out their latest report on housing for the disabled and low income seniors. Thanks to the sequester, 140,000 households will lose their housing vouchers this year alone.

The Housing Programs have been under attack for some time now and this is only the latest in a sequence of blows. If no changes are made to the budget cuts required by the sequester, 500,000 families headed by those with disabilities and low income seniors will have lost their housing by 2021.

When I think of your son, when I think of my friend Clarity Rose (also brain injured) back in Colorado Springs, when I think of so many I know who suffer from disabling conditions, it just breaks my heart. How much lower can people go than to attack some of the most defenseless and vulnerable people in our society – the disabled?

Every disability brings its own unique hardships to those who suffer from it, but brain injuries just suck so bad. Even a “mild” brain injury can be completely destructive to a person’s ability to function. And most of the time, people with brain injuries look just fine, even appear to act just fine if you don’t see them often or if you’re not around to witness the tremendous effort that goes into accomplishing the smallest thing.

“Looks OK to me. My brother hit me on the head with a baseball bat when I was 6 and I’m just fine."

Yeah, other than that big hole where your compassion and decency used to be.

Bastards. They're all fucking bastards. God, I hate them. I really do. I'd forgotten what it was like to have this boiling rage just under the surface. I'd forgotten just how bad it gets when they get their way.

We're following you down into the pit and we're increasing our speed.

The unfairness of it burns a hole through any decency our societies have managed to claw together. Not good enough that people be shattered by circumstances beyond their control, or that the very weakest and most vulnerable be made to suffer the most insufferable cuts, they must also carry the moral and emotional blame for society's ills.


I've been into my austerity thread twice this morning intending to post an article about the impact on poorer families but I just don't have it in me to set that stall out again.

I hate them, I hate them, I hate them. They are lacking in compassion and decency.

Maybe that is their disability...

I heard this recently:


Corporate Taxes as a Percentage of Federal Revenue
1955 . . . 27.3%
2010 . . . 8.9%

Corporate Taxes as a Percentage of GDP
1955 . . . 4.3%
2010 . . . 1.3%

Individual Income/Payrolls as a Percentage of Federal Revenue
1955 . . . 58.0%
2010 . . . 81.5%

Bend over, we'll drive.

Corporations don't pay tax, they collect it. 100% of taxes paid by corporations are passed along to consumers. Lower corporate taxes means lower prices to us and less rationale to affect politics via the tax code.

Maybe you have heard of the Tillamook Cheese Factory.
It is a producer of cedar cheese on the Oregon coast and a tourist stop.

Tillamook and the surrounding area are not growing in population.
It is no longer a major port for the timber industry (almost dead).
Head Start, etc., programs are being cut back due to cuts in funding.

Right now, work is under way to expand Runway 13-31 at the Tillamook Airport
(federal and state money) to accommodate large freight transports.
This multi-million $ construction is only to accommodate the Tillamook Cheese Factory.

Now this:
The Oregonian
Lori Tobias
January 06, 2012

Announcement of cuts at Tillamook Cheese Factory jolts coastal community

Adak will certainly find a way to justify this waste of corporate welfare.
.

Rather an inefficient network. Why not cut and package in Tillamook where it's aged, rather than Mountain Home? Be that as it may, I'll bet the answer to the change is in Salt Lake City. What did Salt Lake City offer the cheese company to move their operations there? Oh and how much of that offer comes from federal money... or Bain?

Rather an inefficient network. I suspect it was an efficient tax break. Not making a finished product in one place. The largest manufacturer of electric blankets was in my town. They made a few parts in other towns to beat that tax.

[grouch]So it would be in effect a consumption tax but easier to collect than a VAT? Speaking of politics in the tax code, are there not businesses like hedge funds which are presently focused less on consumers and more on stripping businesses and gaming the tax code anyway? I feel like I need to question much libertarian received wisdom because it appears the middle-class has disappeared by following certain conservative policies without skepticism. In my gut, I see the government and corporations working together against the interests of humans. We may be the consumers, but we are also the product being bought and sold.[/grouch]

I will never understand why your son, who is genuinely disabled had to fight for benefits, and my 20 year old otherwise healthy junkies all get SSDI and Medicare.

Dude, did you see what happened to the middle class in that video? ^

I don't understand that, either. Drug addicts and alcoholics are not eligible for either SSI or SSDI. The merest hint of that in your medical records and they turn you down. I'm also surprised that a 20 year old junkie would have worked and paid enough into the system to qualify for SSDI and medicare, rather than the SSI that a person of 20 would normally qualify for.

The differences that exist between the big cities of the North East versus the rural regions and small towns of Colorado boggle my mind.
Is corruption that rampant in places like Philly and NYC? Here people on SSI/SSDI must go through a re-certification process every couple of years or so. Do people pay off doctors to give a diagnosis of complete and permanent disability? And if so, where do they get the money to do that on an income of $720.00/month?

Serious question. I can't understand how different it is here from the way it works there.