USA TODAY International Edition
Save SSDI for disabled workers, not displaced ones
Some of the Trump administration’s social policies — like trying to kill Obamacare or separating immigrant children from their parents — seem cruel, counterproductive or both. But the administration’s plan to place greater restrictions on disability benefits under Social Security is not one of them.
Under the proposal, laid out late last year, the government would more actively review the claims of recipients to see whether they should continue receiving benefits.
Specifically, it would create a new category of recipients who are deemed to be disabled but whose condition is likely to improve over time. People in this category would be subject to more frequent reviews and a greater likelihood of seeing their benefits disappear.
There’s good reason to believe that the program has been stretched beyond its original intentions. In 2012, the Social Security Administration’s inspector general estimated to Congress that fraudulent claims were costing taxpayers nearly $ 1 billion a year.
Some of the fraudsters are people who fail to report salaries and pensions they are collecting alongside their disability benefits. Also of concern is the nature of claims. Several decades ago, the top cause was heart disease. Today, it is by far and away “musculoskeletal” problems. That’s a category heavy on back issues, which can be debilitating, or not so much. Millions of working Americans have back problems.
The administration’s plan has set off alarm bells among liberals who see it as an attack on a vital social safety net. Based on the administration’s estimate that the new approach should save $ 2.6 billion over a decade, they say that hundreds of thousands of people in the program out of 10 million could be kicked off.
It’s true that more people would see their benefits vanish under this program, and increased scrutiny would lead to some paperwork headaches. But Social Security Disability Insurance ( SSDI) was never intended to be a welfare program for displaced workers.
In theory, the number of disabled persons should be relatively constant, impacted only by the size and age of the population. However, the number of people coming onto Social Security disability rolls surged with the last recession and has partially subsided in the years since.
The fact that more people are found to be disabled during recessions and fewer people are disabled in good times, even as the population ages, suggests that many people view the program as a kind of alternative to unemployment insurance. What’s more, once people get accepted, they tend to stay in the program.
The proposed changes should not be regarded as another Trump effort to punish the poor. Rather, they should be seen as an effort to put some limits on a program that has transformed from little- used disability safety net into a broadly abused extension of unemployment benefits.