I eat too much and collect disability..... SUCKERS
Posted on 12/03/2012 4:18:35 AM PST by Kaslin
Americans are very generous to people with disabilities. Since passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990, millions of public and private dollars have been spent on curb cuts, bus lifts and special elevators.
The idea has been to enable people with disabilities to live and work with the same ease as others, as they make their way forward in life. I feel sure the large majority of Americans are pleased that we are doing this.
But there is another federal program for people with disabilities that has had an unhappier effect. This is the disability insurance (DI) program, which is part of Social Security.
The idea is to provide income for those whose health makes them unable to work. For many years, it was a small and inexpensive program that few people or politicians paid much attention to.
In his recent book, "A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic," my American Enterprise Institute colleague Nicholas Eberstadt has shown how DI has grown in recent years.
In 1960, some 455,000 workers were receiving disability payments. In 2011, the number was 8,600,000. In 1960, the percentage of the economically active 18-to-64 population receiving disability benefits was 0.65 percent. In 2010, it was 5.6 percent.
Some four decades ago, when I was a law clerk to a federal judge, I had occasion to read briefs in cases appealing denial of disability benefits. The Social Security Administration then seemed pretty strict in denying benefits in dubious cases. The courts were not much more openhanded.
Things have changed. Americans have grown healthier, and significantly lower numbers die before 65 than was the case a half-century ago. Nevertheless, the disability rolls have ballooned.
One reason is that the government seems to have gotten more openhanded with those claiming vague ailments. Eberstadt points out that in 1960, only one-fifth of disability benefits went to those with "mood disorders" and "muscoskeletal" problems. In 2011, nearly half of those on disability voiced such complaints.
"It is exceptionally difficult -- for all practical purposes, impossible," writes Eberstadt, "for a medical professional to disprove a patient's claim that he or she is suffering from sad feelings or back pain."
In other words, many people are gaming or defrauding the system. This includes not only disability recipients but health care professionals, lawyers and others who run ads promising to get you disability benefits.
Between 1996 and 2011, the private sector generated 8.8 million new jobs, and 4.1 million people entered the disability rolls.
The ratio of disability cases to new jobs has been even worse during the sluggish recovery from the 2007-09 recession. Between January 2010 and December 2011, there were 1,730,000 new jobs and 790,000 new people collecting disability.
This is not just a matter of laid-off workers in their 50s or early 60s qualifying for disability in the years before they become eligible for Social Security old age benefits.
In 2011, 15 percent of disability recipients were in their 30s or early 40s. Concludes Eberstadt, "Collecting disability is an increasingly important profession in America these says."
Disability insurance is no longer a small program. The government transfers some $130 billion obtained from taxpayers or borrowed from purchasers of Treasury bonds to disability beneficiaries every year.
But there is also a human cost. Consider the plight of someone who at some level knows he can work but decides to collect disability payments instead.
That person is not likely to ever seek work again, especially if the sluggish recovery turns out to be the new normal.
He may be gleeful that he was able to game the system or just grimly determined to get what he can in a tough situation. But he will not be able to get the satisfaction of earned success from honest work that contributes something to society and the economy.
I use the masculine pronoun intentionally, because an increasing number of American men have dropped out of the workforce altogether. In 1948, 89 percent of men age 20 and over were in the workforce.
In 2011, 73 percent were. Only a small amount of that change results from an aging population. Jobs have become physically less grueling and economically more rewarding than they were in 1948.
The Americans With Disabilities Act helped many people move forward and contribute to society. The explosive growth of disability insurance has had an opposite effect.
The guy down the street is on the registry for a violent sex offense. He has a “brain injury” from a work accident but does not seem to have any problem doing anything, driving, etc. He has cornered me a few times and he is the most conniving liar I have ever encountered. In one of his conversations he complained about how long it took to get on disability (presumably the only thing he wasn’t lying about).
For a while my wife worked for a law firm that specialized in getting disability for people. Basically people are applying for disability when their unemployment benefits run out. And getting it.
Tongue in cheek.
This is my standard line to my wife when I watch a twenty something young lady park her dad's caddy (with handicapped plate) in a HC spot and jumps out and runs into the grocery store.
No thats work you know hurts to much.
Quite a few.
Men are fired first, hired last, in order to protect the correct ratio’s.
“I use the masculine pronoun intentionally, because an increasing number of American men have dropped out of the workforce altogether.”
Well, in my experience, women get paid more than men, and get promoted over men nowadays, all while men are being told that the opposite is going on. Plus every man in the workplace has to tiptoe around hoping to avoid sexual harassment charges. I’m not surprised some of them are staying home.
I eat too much and collect disability..... SUCKERS
There is a large group of Americans — of all colors — who are very happy with the ADA / disability system we have. Sit on your ass and collect as many government checks as possible. Its the new American Way. People have no shame anymore.
I know a 30’ woman married to a welding inspector. He makes good money. They have two kids 13 and 10. She has RA and is on disability. Says she cannot stand to work, yet she makes every school fund raiser, PTO function and seems to have no problem lifting anything or standing for hours working a concession stand and going hunting on their deer lease. Even her kids get a monthly check for her disability. The system is broken.
Kicker, she claims to be a staunch conservative and other than this talks like one and votes that way, or says she does.
I know. I’m just always amazed that guys (or women) can claim that with a straight face.
“I know a 30’ woman “
I suppose being 30 feet tall in and of itself would be a disability.
Insurance? There is no legitimate role for government in insurance. It is impossible for anyone to successfully protect people from their own follies. The result of trying to protect people from their own follies it to fill the world with fools. Everybody suffers the consequences. The nation and its economy who follow the path of socialism are inevitably doomed by their own folly.
They collect also a lot of times with the same types of problems. They learned what works.
:) 30’s - can I get a disability for typing?
50! lol I found out a long time ago if you are a white male over 40 you are not only up sh$t creek without a paddle you dont even have a boat!
You are absolutely right just need to move the age back a few years.....
I do not get this.
I was in an accident at work, that ended up with having five major surgeries in three years, but in California you can only collect benefits for to, so when I was cut off I still had two surgeries to go.
SS told me I was not eligible for disability because although I had the right number of quarters, they weren’t enough in the last years.
So how are these people doing this, is it lying?
Ok, I just don’t get it.
“. However, I see men and women that successfully claim disability for illnesses that ARE NOT the result of military service. For instance, claiming diabetes when you have a family history doesn’t wash in my mind. Just because you are on AD when the condition manisfested does not mean it is the result of military service.”
It is my experience that the VA does a pretty good job of weeding this out...
The most common disability situations I would see were back pain and and bad knees.
Both of these are highly correlated to obesity and obese women in their late 40’s anf 50’s were basically so fat that their knees were breaking down and unable to allow mobility for a 40 hour work week even in an office setting (supposedly unable to get to all levels of the file cabinet and back and forth to the file cabinet).
Maybe it's the way women are built, but their knees seem to be more vulnerable to malfunction when they are obese.
These days these obese folks seem to have diabetes as well.
At age 50 I got to see the SSDI situation from the other side as a combination of neurological symptoms, including the mystery illness, ME/CFS and severe orthostatic intolerance (inability to sit for long without blood loss to the brain requiring a lie-down) rendered me unemployable.
It took two years with a lawyer to receive retroactive SSDI payments back 18 months with the lawyer taking a statutory cut from the back payment.
In the 1930’s the average poor person would starve before he would accept charity.
Today, we have people like this in the poor areas:
http://wildandwonderfulwhites.com/family/
This family systematically enrolls its members into disability on the premise of “mental illness”.
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