Right. Just as with the university example above, some employers might be willing to go this far, but most are not, and the law can’t be written to assume that most employers are going to make that sort of accommodation.
A lot of people on disability can and do work. In fact, I have a close relative who was on private disability and one of the reasons she was hoping to switch from that to social security was so that she could work some.
Also, approval is not that easy. I know people with well-documented legit physical and mental disability who lost all their cases.
Personally I’m pretty much disabled- more due to discrimination than actual ability, but I’ve never attempted to file for disability benefits. If its as easy as everyone implies, maybe I should. I’m sure there are a lot of people like me who are unemployAble due to employers unwilling to consider us due to irrelevant health issues but not looking to take advantage.
Also, after 15 years of working for the company, they fired me due to my disability. I got a lawyer. 6 months later they settled.
Unless your disability is on the compassionate allowances list.
My brother in law was in a motorcycle accident that caused some neurological damage. He got two years disability out of his employer. And tried to get on disability, but failed both on initial application and appeal. As he should have, he was using his time disabled to finish his undergrad degree with a full load, applied for and got into a masters program. Its hard to convince me that someone who can handle a full course load can’t hold a job - any job.
(My sister tried the same thing when she was first in recovery - she did have some pretty serious health issues from alcohol abuse - but four years later she is back to work within her career.)
Then he got bladder cancer. When it came back - it was distant metastasis. He was approved in weeks.
One of the issues is that some situations can be recovered from, but they can take time to get on your feet - and they can take retraining - and both of those take money and support. My sister was living with family, she had a way to make it. My brother in law went the student loan route - and later he had us.
My aunt is on SSDI for depression - she did work for years, but its impossible for her to hold a job now. She’s in and out of hospitals and pretty heavily drugged most of the time. But her household income is more than the SSDI income - her husband works. He does blue collar work and is prone to layoffs - so SSDI is really important to them for Medicare for her hospitalizations. But her SSDI determination is made independent of his income. If he were a Vice President at 3M, she could still get SSDI, even though his insurance and income would be adequate to cover them both.
DDS? ODAR? The field?
Fear Itself, I have diffuse systemic scleroderma myself. It does not seem to be on the Compassionate Allowances list. Has that changed or did she fit in some other category? I am thankfully, and amazingly, still employed (my job even let me work remotely from rehab) but disability is my backup plan if I do not get better enough or quickly enough so any info would help. (Fortunately, I am responding to treatment and the organ damage detected at first has stopped and even reversed).
I agree that the high numbers in a bad economy do not indicate fakery. If I applied for a job even if I was much better, but still used a cane and struggled to stand from chairs, who would take the chance of hiring someone like me? I cannot guarantee what I can do from day to day or that next week I will still be able to do a job I can do today.
Functionally unemployable in this economy does not mean unable to do any job in any capacity ever. It means realistically you need assistance to get by, not how things work in an ideal world. Can disabled people probably do some kid of labor at times? Sure. It is just a matter of where this magical make work job that fits all a person’s shortcomings, even as they might change and expand, going to come from? I have learned all too well that a condition might allow you to do something sometimes, that is not enough. You have to be able to do it all the time to count on yourself and for employers to count on you.
Exactly. The severe cases you see are people with very limited motor control, who live in wheelchairs (which they may or may not be able to pilot themselves), may not be able to speak, etc. There are a number of causes of it, including exposure to infection while in the womb, and complications during childbirth (such as oxygen being cut off to the newborn’s brain for a time).
In my friend’s case, he’s much less profoundly affected than many. He has problems mostly with fine motor control – for example, if he’s eating, he has to use one hand to steady the other as he raises the fork to his mouth. He walks with a bowlegged, sort of shambling gait. He has a very minor speech impediment. However, despite all of this, he’s actually pretty quick on a keyboard, and it never seemed to prevent him from doing his job in IT…until he had to find a new one at age 53.
Hello Everyone,
As per usual I’ll chime in on a disability thread and perhaps give some perspective from someone who is disabled.
The very first thing that I would like to make clear, because it really does bother me a lot, is that Social Security Disability is not welfare. It is a benefit based upon your working income. The benefit amount is based upon the amount you contributed to the system over your working life. It is much like an insurance policy.
The second point is, I and almost every other person I have met who is on Disability would rather be working. It is very hard to reconcile the fact that you are no longer contributing, but rather receiving. It bothers me day in and day out, but it is what it is.
I am positive that there is fraud in the system. There are those faking a disability to receive benefits. I, for the life of me, cannot figure our why sometime would do this. I am grateful for the benefit I receive, but it is a very small fraction of my income that I had when I was working. It is very though to live on the monthly benefit. It does cover the basics, but there is no dream of any luxuries, vacations, etc… And the hardest part to grasp is that it will never get any better. Your shot at the “American Dream” is over. It’s quite depressing.
Getting approved for Disability is very difficult. In my case it took FIVE YEARS to get approval. During that time I was let go from my job, the one I was injured at. I had no insurance and no income. Most of my savings was depleted during those five years, used to survive. If it wasn’t for my family it is quite possible I would have ended up homeless while waiting for approval. I was denied once and scheduled for a hearing in front of a Federal Judge. The strange part is, the hearing took all of ten minutes. He asked me only a few questions. He read my medical file and said “Mr. OBBN you are clearly disabled, you are approved”. And that was it. Why someone at Social Security couldn’t have made that same decision years ago if still a mystery.
Approval for Social Security is based on many factors. Your age is one major factor a well as not only your ability to work, but your ability to work in the profession you are trained and qualified in. Meaning, I was a lineman for BellSouth. My twenty years of work experience was felds work and technical work. My disability might very well allow me to be, say an attorney, but I obviously am not qualified to do that type of work. And my age precludes a reasonable shot at doing something like that.
Being disabled doesn’t necessarily mean that you are confined to a wheelchair or stuck in bed. I am able, on occasion, do limited work around my home. I can even do occasional projects with my boys in the garage. I mentioned this in a thread a while back asking a question about cars. One member here basically called me a fraud because I am able to do some things. Well, there lies the problem. On a"good" day I am able to do a small project around the house or maybe help one of my sons with something. But who knows when that day will be here. I might be fine today, but don’t count on me for the next four days because that 45 minutes of activity I did caused so much pain that I can barely move.
Not to mention the effects of the medication. I might look absolutely fine to you and that pisses you fof because you are sure that there is nothing wrong with me. Yet what you don’t realize is that I have enough morphine and percocet in my system to kill most non tolerant adults. Because of that I’m able to move around fairly well at that moment. But you sure as hell don’t want to see me when that morphine wears off and I am in the fetal position in pain. You don’t want to be there when friends are freaking out begging me to go to the hospital because they are seeing the real pain for the first time. Or how about the fact that I am always, and I mean, always tired, no matter how much sleep I get because of the sedating effects of the morphine. Or how waking up at a decent hour in the morning is almost impossible because most nights I don’t sleep because of the pain.
I write the last paragraph because that is why working any job is almost impossible. There isn’t one employer that I know of who would put up with any of that. They won’t accept that you can only make it in an average of the days a week because sone days you can’t move. They won’t accept you coming in late because sleep wouldn’t come all night. And none would accept an employee taking strong opioids while at work and being half out of it because of it. Not to mention, if you disclose your injury you can almost forget about being hired. You have to disclose it otherwise you’ll end up explaining why you have to rest, can’t lift something etc. You won’t believe how fast an employer will run from a prospective hire that has a injury. I can’t blame them, they run the risk of a Workers Comp claim, insurance problems etc… they cabnet let you operate machinery or drive their vehicles because of your medication. The liability if too great. Bottom line, trying to find full time employment is difficult if not impossible, especially if your professional field requires physical work.
To sum up, I am very grateful that Social Security is there for me. The employees of Social Security have been very helpful and very understanding. I can’t say enough about them. Living on Disability sucks big time, I would give anything to return to work and get my career and my pride back. But that isn’t going to happen, not unless there us done major medical breakthrough. But I and the vast majority of us on disability are here because of some unfortunate bad luck in our lives. None of us want to be here and we certainly don’t deserve the stigma that seems to come with being on Disability. And never forget, no matter how secure you feel you are one tragic event away from joining us. I how that it never happens to you out anyone you know, but if it does I am sure that you would want others to be understanding and not judgmental.
Dammit, I missed the edit window. I apologize got the spelling errors, I hope you can figure out what I meant. My tablet, Swype input and auto-correct all conspire against me! I am really sorry.
I found this new Atlantic Wire article quite interesting.
Key takeaways for me are that while applications are up, the percentage approved is actually trending downward a bit. It also points out that the increased applications track with the aging of the population of boomers - 29% of whom are now experiencing arthritis - or “musculoskeletal system and the connective tissue”, the most common reason for disability.
(The end of the article also has a bit of Republican bashing that can be ignored)
I’ve worked in SS disab for 27 years. Thought the TAL piece very well done. Couple of observations - it was necessarily superficial. One hour is nowhere near enough time to comprehensively discuss this complicated program. Second, it was aimed at a general audience.
Sure there are plenty of hardworking folk who are no longer able to work. But by no means are such folk the majority of claimants. The best term I have been able to come up with to describe the greatest portion of applicants is “losers at the game of life.” And I don’t mean that as the insult it might sound. These folk are the least successful members of our modern society, and are looking for assistance wherever they can find it - whether it be unemployment, TANIF, charity, whatever. With the ending of so many welfare programs - and so much medical and rehabilitative services, SS is the last possibility remaining. The show was spot on in describing it as a de facto welfare program (for not all, but a great percentage of applicants/recipients).
It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the program that it is economically driven. Is it just a wacky coincidence that claims in MI and OH skyrocketed in the 80s and 90s as instrustries laid odd thousands, closed factories, and offshored jobs? Many many - if not a majority - of claims I see left their last job for reasons other than medica d. elopments or an inability to do the physical/mental requirements of that job.
One thing I think they could have pointed out is the effect of age. IME, the single greatest factor in a claim being successful is for the claimant to be over 50. And the idea of “no sedentary jobs in my area” is pretty much a red herring. As I read the disability program, you can move to where the jobs are (and job vacancies and hireability are irrelevant.) Yes, I realize that in the real world the poor and uneducated are less mobile. But SS disab is NOT the real world.
Personally, I do not think the majority of claims I see fit the legal definition of disability. But what does our society wish to do with these folk? What jobs are there for the bottom 10% of your high school class? How about the portion of that 10% that proceeds to make just about every bad decision possible - abuse some substances, get pregnant, drop out, get a conviction or 2… Shouldn’t be surprised at such a life arc, as many of these folk lack any positive role models, and many experienced various abuses.
People like this are not exaggerated exceptions. I see them day in and day out in my job, and there are millions of them. What does our society wish to do with them? Right now they are applying for (and getting) SS disability benefits.
And don’t underestimate the value of an SSI check. There are a lot of folk out there managing to make do on extremely small sums of money. Just because you and I wouldn"t wish to, doesn’t mean folk aren’t doint it. And don’t ignore the SS family, where mom, dad, gramma, and the kids are all “disabled” and drawing monthly checks.
Final point - where is any call to reform the program? There are many large groups who benefit from its current status, and work hard to have it maintained or expanded. Advocacy groups for the poor, elderly, young, “disabled”… Lawyers definitely. Various portions of the medical professions benefit from an expansive definition of compensable disability. Private insurers and states want to shift folk off their rolls onto SS. All these folk are regularly lobbying to maintain the status quo. Who is organized to push in the other direction? Some Republicans saying these folk w/o shoes should pull themselves up by their nonexistent bootstraps? Or fantasizing that private charity is a practical replacement?
Sorry for the typos - having problems wrasslin w/ my recently “updated” phone!:smack:
Unable to work because of one’s medical condition is the standard for disability.
As has been repeatedly explained on this thread, that threshold rises and falls inversely with the unemployment rate, because of the effect on marginal cases (too disabled to work unless they get a certain degree of accommodation).
QED.
I was recently talking to a relative in the USA who is considering applying for SSI.
She is an able bodied young woman of 25 who is barely squeezing by working as a waitress, she has panic attacks at work so bad she has to rush to the toilet to vomit or put a broken piece of anti-anxiety med under her tongue and hope it takes effect fast enough so she can go back out on the floor. She says it is getting worse and she doesn’t know how much longer it will be before she is fired.
She managed to scrape enough money together months back to go see a doc and get a script, she has been stretching it ever since since she doesn’t have enough money to go see a doc again. There is nothing physically wrong with her, and she CAN work but her anxiety attacks make it hard to work. All the jobs she is qualified for are service jobs where she MUST interact with strangers(customers).
Would she be considered a cheat?
Yes, it has been hypothesized that the above would explain the trend, but it hasn’t been backed up by anything other than conjecture. Aside from the fact that many laws prevent the disparate treatment of the disabled, there is significant evidence that those marginal cases do not make up the bulk of cases we are seeing. Listen to the TAL piece. Many of the anecdotal cases are about disappearing relatively well-paid low-skill jobs, not lack of accommodations. Those jobs will continue to disappear regardless of how the economy is doing, so this trend is not a matter of the working disabled being pushed out by employers trying to maximize efficiencies. Especially since such accommodations would likely be legally mandated in some cases. Additionally, the trend is most stark between disability APPLICATIONS and the unemployment rate, not approvals. That trend shows more of a willingness to be classified as disabled (eg. to apply for disability) for some rather than a true disability (eg. getting disability), as defined by the government, preventing one from working. There is also the fact that many people apply for disability only when their unemployment runs out.
Regardless, focusing on the above misses the point. The issue is less about marginal cases (which I admit certainly do exist), and more whether unemployability, due to lack of desirable job skills, rises to the level of disability. If we are to accept that disability can and should be given to those who theoretically cannot find another job because of a lack of job skills, then we are potentially opening a HUGE can of worms for a few reasons:
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It doesn’t encourage efficient use of human capital or economic resources. The most deleterious of which are these towns that are basically economic deserts that subsist largely on government handouts. A town where 25% of the people are on disability should not exist. It’s a town on life support that should die a rightful death that would allow those people to move to a place where they can all be more productive, even if they still need a government check.
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The nature of work has fundamentally changed in such a way that nearly all people who don’t constantly evolve will eventually become “unemployable”. I get the economic reality that a janitor with a bad back may not be able to work in that capacity forever, but there are plenty of jobs that one can do with a bad back in many circumstances. The real question is that how much can we demand that those people adapt to survive? I think having a blanket label that covers a 20-something with panic attacks, a guy with health problems due to a meth overdose, a double amputee war vet, and a kid with Down syndrome as if they are all equally deserving of support is problematic to me.
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Given that a minimum wage job pays roughly $15k/year, likely doesn’t have health insurance, and requires one to work, and disability on average pays $13k/year and does have health insurance, disability is a far more attractive option to some than it should otherwise be.
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It distracts people from the real issue that economic changes have made a growing number of people in this country economically uncompetitive. I think there are real changes that can be made in terms of directly addressing this issue rather than just funneling these people into the economic purgatory that disability often is. I was reading an comment by a disability lawyer who described his average client as follows:
“My typical client is over 50, has at most a GED if that, has worked heavy strenuous jobs with lots of lifting, carrying etc. I’d say about 10% of them are completely illiterate, 25% marginally literate and some are actually mentally retarded”
Let’s take him at his word. The appropriate questions to ask in my mind are how these people got through life “marginally illiterate”, and what do we as a society do when there are no jobs for people like that in the future? That’s a bigger question than whether disability payments bankrupting our country (they won’t), or if millions of people are scamming the system (they aren’t). We should really be focused on how to turn the unskilled and marginally disabled into more productive members of society.
Is she pursuing therapy beyond meds? Does she know that CBT can be very effective in treating anxiety? Is she looking into schooling for something she can do to minimize her need to serve strangers?
If so, then hopefully she won’t need disability for very long. If not, then yes, it’s a little cheaty to me.
Awesome post, brickbacon. What absolutely sucks, IMO, is that I have not seen or heard anything close to this type of analysis being conducted in the legislative/administrative/media spheres.
What you say makes sense IMO. But what chance does sense have against monied interests?
I was speaking with a vocational expert recently, asking what jobs really existed and paid decent wages that a high school dropout could perform. When I was young, dropouts could earn a living wage at a garage, in a factory, as a tradesman. He said the last such job was truck driving, and it had been so competitive that they were generally requiring at least a HS diploma, and just about any criminal conviction would knock you out of the running. So factor into the equation our “law-and-order” approach, where the best solution to social problems is locking people up…
SS disability - including SSI, is extremely appealing when compared to part-time minimum wage work with no possibility of promotion and no medical benefits.
There is a very small minority of claimants’ lawyers with client bases like that. I’m happy to assume the attorney questioned is one of them. However, there are far more attorneys - including the biggest volume firms - who appear willing to represent anyone who walks in the door. They to put little to no work into it, and hope they draw an ALJ who will pay a claim that - in my opinion - doesn’t come close to meeting the standards. And there are effectivvely NO requirements of professionalism by attorneys, and no enforcement/penalties for ineffective or meritless representation.
grude, your relative certainly would not be a cheat (IMO) for applying for SSI. Hell, anyone can apply, even if they are working fulltime. It no longer surprises me to ask someone when they last worked and have them say, “I had to take off work to come here today.” There are no penalties for applying, other than having your claim denied. And then you can apply again.
Also, if she has social anxiety, working as a waitress might not be the best work for her. Maybe waitress work is realistically the only or best work she can find. But if she could perform the requirements of some work with less social and other stress - in a factory or back office, say, then IMO she does not fit the SS definition of being “disabled.”
You bring up another important factor addressed above - the interplay with access to health care. Leave aside the cases of fibromyalgia, migraines, PTSD - where objective evidence is lacking and treatment is less certain. There are huge numbers of folk with objectively diagnosed conditions such as hypertension or insulin, who are unable to get their needed medications. Yes, there is the contributing factor that a huge percentage of these folk are morbidly obese smokers, but it boggles my mind that in a country as rich as ours, poor folk cannot get medications for unquestionably demonstrated medical conditions.
Another factor - one person on TAM said the people in that town “lived hard” or some such thing. I would wager no less than 70% of the claimants I see smoke, and at least 50% of them are morbidly obese. If you ever question whether America’s obesity crisis is real, get a look at a cross section of SS disability claimants. Not all by any means, but a clear majority of the thousands I have personally encountered. Heck, you can eat, smoke, and drink yourself onto disability. But if a 400# smoker is complaining of COPD, sleep apnea, high blood pressure, and back and knee problems, well, it is hard NOT to let thoughts of personal responsibility enter into your decision-making.
A complicated issue indeed. And one I have seen ZERO efforts towards meaningfully addressing. IMO there are at least 100 surgical changes that need to be done to the SS disability programs. But each of those hundreds of cuts would directly affect some moneyed interest group, which would oppose any such claim. Not a recipe for intelligent reform at any time in the near future.
There’s a scene in Russell Crowe’s Cinderella Man where his character, boxer Jim Braddock has to go get public assistance, as his family has no food. Very reluctantly, he does so. But he feels a sense of shame and failure. (Aside: after he wins a fight he waits on the same line and gives the same amount of money back.) Those scenes fit with stories I’ve heard from my own family. They were extremely poor, living in the worst Manhattan tenements. My parents and uncles told me that many of the people they knew collected public assistance, including some of them, but it was always the very last resort, and was viewed as a very temporary thing: a week, a few weeks or a couple of months. Also, a degree of embarrassment was attached to it. So the people were really trying desperately to find any work they could. That is not the case today. Somewhere along the line, public assistance became something to not be ashamed of, and then sort of an entitlement. That is why we are where we are. It’s a sad state of affairs.
What???
The NPR radio show said SS is not represented by lawyer or counsel. It went on to say there is a 35% probability of an application being approved if applicant is not represented by a lawyer, but is 70% if applicant is represented by a lawyer.
SSA usually has field attorneys present at ODAR proceedings. I don’t think they are actually there in a representative capacity, though; more as adjuncts to the ALJs.
Non sequitur pop culture reference, allusions to The Good Old Days… how are you, Starving Artist?
The standard for collecting unemployment benefits is generally along the lines of “unable to find employment despite a good faith job search”.
Anyway, they’re not two separate things. To simplify things an awful lot, there are two ways to qualify for SSDI. The most obvious is to have a presumptively disabling condition, like quadriplegia. The other, and more common one, is to have an impairment which disqualifies you from doing work that is actually available in the economy.
Let’s say you’re a 50 year old lawyer, and one day you injure your back, undergo surgery, and are permanently medically restricted from lifting over 30 pounds. Vocationally, that’s not a big deal; you can still do your job.
Now, let’s say you’re a 50 year old construction worker with no high school education, and you suffer the same injury. Does it really make sense to apply the same standard for disability to construction-you as lawyer-you? Of course not. A manual laborer who can no longer perform manual labor has little or no employment opportunity, while a skilled professional who cannot perform manual labor is hardly impaired at all.
Does that help?