The Rise of Disability: What is the Solution?

[_cinepro]

To recap, two serious, big solutions for dealing with the rise of disability have been brought up on this thread:

1. Provide all of our citizens with excellent healthcare so that if anybody has a disabling accident or sickness, they receive the proper care. With proper healthcare, the disabling effects of any number of conditions can be mitigated, prevented, and eliminated.

According to the report, people on SS Disability do get their health care covered, but that doesn't seem to be successful in helping them return to the workforce.

Drastically reduce the size of our military and military involvement. Millions of U.S. citizens--literally millions--have joined the military in exemplary health, but are now receiving federal disability benefits. If we want our healthy young Americans to live healthy productive lives, we need to stop sending them to foreign wars where they get their limbs blown off.

The report (and this thread) are discussing Social Security Disability benefits. Military/veteran disability benefits are administered by the VA administration, and contribute 0% to the problem being discussed.

http://www.benefits.va.gov/compensation/

http://www.military.com/benefits/vetera ... ation.html

[_Analytics]

To recap, two serious, big solutions for dealing with the rise of disability have been brought up on this thread:

1. Provide all of our citizens with excellent healthcare so that if anybody has a disabling accident or sickness, they receive the proper care. With proper healthcare, the disabling effects of any number of conditions can be mitigated, prevented, and eliminated.

According to the report, people on SS Disability do get their health care covered, but that doesn't seem to be successful in helping them return to the workforce.

If you get SSDI benefits, you get Medicare health benefits after 24 months. My point is about everybody getting excellent health care, not disabled people getting Medicare benefits after being disabled 24 months, which they would then likely lose if they go back to work.

You will note that the author needed to go to the Deep South to find a town where a third of the folks are disabled. If these folks would have spent their lives eating healthier, exercising more, and having excellent healthcare to treat medical conditions early, they would have had far, far, fewer health problems later on (giving them a healthy dose of good-old Yankee industriousness, entrepreneurism, and integrity wouldn't hurt either).

According to the article, many of them stay on disability because making $12,000 on disability with health insurance is better than slaving at McDonald's for $15,000 without health insurance. Allowing people to keep their health insurance if they return to work would be a wonderful help, wouldn't you think? Raising the minimum wage wouldn't hurt either.

If somebody were to go in and offer these guys decent jobs with decent health benefits, most of the ones who could would suck it up with regards to their disabilities and work. If the private market refuses to do so, a good-old FDR work program designed to rebuild America's infrastructure would be a great way to allow these folks to be productive.

Drastically reduce the size of our military and military involvement. Millions of U.S. citizens--literally millions--have joined the military in exemplary health, but are now receiving federal disability benefits. If we want our healthy young Americans to live healthy productive lives, we need to stop sending them to foreign wars where they get their limbs blown off.

The report (and this thread) are discussing Social Security Disability benefits. Military/veteran disability benefits are administered by the VA administration, and contribute 0% to the problem being discussed.

I thought the topic was "the Rise of Disability" and naturally assumed that the hundreds of thousands of people who have been returning disabled from Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to that.

But even if you want to look at only part of the overall problem and focus only on those receiving SSDI benefits, the fact of the matter is that we are all still interconnected, so it seems quite naïve to declare with finality that the boondoggle that is our military-industrial complex contributes 0% to the problem. If we could take an It's-a-Wonderful-Life trip into a world where we didn't spend trillions of dollars and millions of lives on pointless wars, what would America look like? Lower taxes? A smaller government? A balanced budget? More money available to provide excellent healthcare to all? More consumers? More workers? Less unemployment? Less disability?

[_cinepro]

According to the article, many of them stay on disability because making $12,000 on disability with health insurance is better than slaving at McDonald's for $15,000 without health insurance. Allowing people to keep their health insurance if they return to work would be a wonderful help, wouldn't you think? Raising the minimum wage wouldn't hurt either.

The ultimate problem according to the article, and I suspect they're right, is that there just aren't jobs for these people. The growth in disability isn't so much a result of that many more people being "disabled", it's a shadow welfare system that allows some people that might otherwise be working to get government checks but not be counted among the "unemployed".

Although that paragraph does illustrate the interesting situation employers can be in when they end up competing with the government paying people not to work. There is always a cost to such programs.

(Obviously I'm not saying that's everyone on disability; the article only points out the strong likelihood that it might be part of the problem and no one is talking about it).

If somebody were to go in and offer these guys decent jobs with decent health benefits, most of the ones who could would suck it up with regards to their disabilities and work. If the private market refuses to do so, a good-old FDR work program designed to rebuild America's infrastructure would be a great way to allow these folks to be productive.

While that be good for unemployment in general, I don't think proposing manual labor jobs is going to get you kudos from the disability crowd.

[_Analytics]

The ultimate problem according to the article, and I suspect they're right, is that there just aren't jobs for these people. The growth in disability isn't so much a result of that many more people being "disabled", it's a shadow welfare system that allows some people that might otherwise be working to get government checks but not be counted among the "unemployed".

I partly agree. The reality is that there are certain health statuses that are in a somewhat wide gray area between being clearly disabled and clearly active (i.e. non-disabled). For people in that gray area, some would prefer a disability check to working, but many would prefer to work. But if you are the kind of guy that wants to work but can't find any, you might as well take the disability check. So perhaps the bigger part of the problem is that there just isn’t work, the disability problem per se wouldn’t be part of the problem if they were more healthy. Despite the article’s implications, you need to have pretty bad health to qualify for federal disability payments.

If somebody were to go in and offer these guys decent jobs with decent health benefits, most of the ones who could would suck it up with regards to their disabilities and work. If the private market refuses to do so, a good-old FDR work program designed to rebuild America's infrastructure would be a great way to allow these folks to be productive.

While that be good for unemployment in general, I don't think proposing manual labor jobs is going to get you kudos from the disability crowd.

It doesn’t have to be manual labor. To the extent somebody is capable of making a positive contribution to society, I would invent a job for him to do that, and make doing it a requirement for getting the check.

[_cinepro]

Despite the article’s implications, you need to have pretty bad health to qualify for federal disability payments.

If only that were the case.

Listen to act 2 here:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-a ... act=2#play

Start at 30:50.

[_ajax18]

To the extent somebody is capable of making a positive contribution to society, I would invent a job for him to do that, and make doing it a requirement for getting the check.

Now you're talking. That's the first real possible solution I've seen proposed yet.

[_Analytics]

To the extent somebody is capable of making a positive contribution to society, I would invent a job for him to do that, and make doing it a requirement for getting the check.

Now you're talking. That's the first real possible solution I've seen proposed yet.

As Karl Marx said, "From each according to his ability!"

[_cinepro]

Resurrecting this old thread with some good news:

Disability Applications Plunge as the Economy Strengthens

The number of Americans seeking Social Security disability benefits is plunging, a startling reversal of a decades-old trend that threatened the program’s solvency. It is the latest evidence of a stronger economy pulling people back into the job market or preventing workers from being sidelined in the first place.

The drop is so significant that the agency has revised its estimates of how long the program will continue to be financially secure. This month, the government announced that the program would not run out of money until 2032, four years later than its previous estimate last year. Two years ago, the government had warned that the funds might be depleted by 2023.

In addition to stronger economic growth, the drop reflects newly tightened standards for eligibility and the increasing number of baby boomers who are leaving the program because they have become eligible for Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare.

[_ajax18]

This had to be my favorite thread ever. How did you find it? I thought we lost them when it was converted from the Off Topic Forum to spirit paradise.

It's hard for me to remember how politically bleak things looked when this thread originally started. What an incredible difference!

I wish I could resurrect the thread where Breitbart initially reported on Jesse Jackson Jr.'s $8700 /month in congressional disability and look at the skewed answers from snopes on how this wasn't true.

[_Maksutov]

This had to be my favorite thread ever. How did you find it? I thought we lost them when it was converted from the Off Topic Forum to spirit paradise.

It's hard for me to remember how politically bleak things looked when this thread originally started. What an incredible difference!

I wish I could resurrect the thread where Breitbart initially reported on Jesse Jackson Jr.'s $8700 /month in congressional disability and look at the skewed answers from snopes on how this wasn't true.

Junior is/was a dirty boy. You could broaden the focus if it was really about corruption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_A ... _of_crimes