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On May 31, the Associated Press reported that Medicare looks a little better and Social Security doesn't look any worse. The Medicare inpatient care fund should last until 2026, two years longer than previously estimated, and Social Security will be solvent until 2033, as predicted last year. Depending on the media outlet this information was reported as positive ("It's not as bad as we thought") or gloomy ("Only two decades left to come up with solutions"). What wasn't reported so much as glossed over was the fact that the Social Security Disability Insurance program's trust fund will be exhausted by...

(CNSNews.com) - The total number of people in the United States now receiving federal disability benefits hit a record 10,978,040 in May, up from 10,962,532 million in April, according to newly released data from the Social Security Administration.

The number of Americans receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) more-than doubled over the past two decades, from 5.2 million to 11.7 million by the end of 2011. The number of residents receiving disability insurance from the Social Security Administration (SSA) varies from state to state. In West Virginia, close to one in every 10 people aged 18 to 64 was receiving SSDI benefits from the federal government, more than three times the rate in states like Utah and Alaska.Click here to see the states with the most Americans on disabilityThe proportion of eligible workers applying for disability benefits also...

You know what the IRS is really great at? Breaking its own laws. In addition to targeting conservative groups, the corrupt government agency has also been singling out disabled veterans. They do this by using banks to launder and then stealing the veterans’ disability checks. Shameful. The Veterans Disability Act of 2010 exempts VA disability from withholding of any sort. But the IRS has been stealing disabled veterans’ money anyways. Kevin Lake is a 60% disabled veteran of the Iraq War. A few months ago, he noticed that his VA disability check had not been deposited, and that his bank...

The latest Social Security Administration data document that Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) rolls reached a record high of 8.85 million in March 2013, an increase of 1.6 million or 21 percent since the start of the Great Recession in 2007. This recession-induced growth exacerbates the long time trend in SSDI program growth that has resulted in its real expenditures increasing sevenfold, from $18 billion (2010 dollars) in 1970 to $128 billion in 2010, a trend the CBO reports will result in program insolvency as early as 2016. This long running disability epidemic, which hit its pandemic stage in the...

This map of Britain (at link) reveals the “work-shy” spots around the country where people claiming incapacity benefit claimants are actually fit enough to work. The Government introduced tough new health tests for those who claimed to be too unwell to get back into employment two years ago. Since then, some 203,000 (30 percent) out of 700,000 receiving the old Incapacity Benefit were declared fit to find work. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said Birmingham had the biggest number of claimants capable of work. Of 14,640 claimants, 5,180 were fit. …

Lesley University is not nearly so isolated, but it has the same mandatory policy about its student cafeteria. There was a problem however. Several students had Celiac disease. They needed to eat gluten free in order to not get sick. So naturally they told the college and the college allowed them an exception to the mandatory cafeteria plan, letting them keep the money and use it to buy gluten-free food off campus. Right? No, the students sued the college to mandate that the college accommodate them. I don’t feel sorry for Lesley because, frankly, I still bear a grudge against...

It happens all the time. I head out to the nearest mall to work through my weekly honey-do list. After spending five minutes securing a parking spot, I walk to my destination. As I pass the handicapped parking spaces located a hop and a skip from the entrance — the spaces reserved for people in wheelchairs, or really old people with walkers, or other genuinely handicapped people — I notice a car pull into one. It’s one of those Seinfeld moments, and I turn into George Costanza. Almost. The first thing I do is stop and take a look at...

Hiding The Unemployed: Disability And The Politics Of Stats Wendy McElroyApril 26, 2013 Some statistics cannot be understood without being set within a political framework, because they reflect politics as much as, or more than, they do reality. The unemployment rate is an example and a cautionary tale. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the seasonally adjusted official unemployment rate for February fell to a four-year national low of 7.7%. While the White House cautiously congratulated itself, Republicans quickly pointed to what is often called the real unemployment rate; it stood at 14.3%.The BLS looks at six categories...

The nation's disability rolls continued to climb sharply, as 76,983 workers enrolled in the Social Security Disability Insurance program in April, according to new data from the Social Security Administration. More than 300,000 have joined the program so far this year. The number of workers on permanent disability is now a record 8,865,586, a net increase of one million in just three years. Today, 6.5 workers are on disability for every 100 who have a job. That's double the ratio from two decades ago.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Social Security's disability program is overwhelmed by so many claims that judges sometimes award benefits they might otherwise deny just to keep up with the flow of cases, according to a lawsuit filed by the judges themselves. The Social Security Administration says the agency's administrative law judges should decide 500 to 700 disability cases a year. The agency calls the standard a productivity goal, but the lawsuit claims it is an illegal quota that requires judges to decide an average of more than two cases per workday. "When the goals are too high, the easy way out...

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. The vast majority of...

The White House said Friday it is proposing a 13.6 percent increase in funding for the handling of veterans benefits, an effort to reduce the Veterans Affairs Department’s massive backlog of disability claims. ~snip~ The number of pending claims filed by veterans seeking compensation stood this month at 885,000, 70 percent of which have been pending for more than 125 days. Veterans can wait a year or more for a decision at particularly overloaded regional offices, among them Baltimore...

Almost as many people signed up with the federal government's permanent worker disability program as got jobs in March, according to two sets of government data, continuing a troubling trend throughout the Obama recovery. Last month, 81,804 workers left the workforce to join the Social Security Disability Insurance program. So far this year, nearly a quarter million workers have joined the program. Over the past four years, 4 million left the workforce to go on disability. Even after accounting for those who dropped out of the program because of death or retirement, the ranks of the disabled have shot up...

(CNSNews.com) - The federal Disability Insurance Trust Fund, which takes in money via a federal payroll tax and pays it out in disability benefits, ran a record $31.2 billion deficit in calendar year 2012, according to the Social Security Administration. That means the trust fund has run a deficit in each of the first four years of the Obama presidency. For fifteen straight years before Obama took office—from 1994 through 2008—the Disability Insurance Trust Fund ran a surplus. In 2007, for example, it ran an $11 billion surplus and in 2008 it ran an $889-million surplus.

(CNSNews.com) - The number of American workers collecting federal disability payments climbed to yet another record of 8,853,614 in March, up from 8,840,427 in February, according to newly released data from the Social Security Administration. That means there are more than 3 times as many Americans taking disability payments as there are people living in the city of Chicago, which according to the Census Bureau has a population of 2,707,120. March was the 194th straight month that the number of American workers collecting federal disability payments increased. The last time the number of Americans collecting disability decreased was in January...

The greatest irony here is that those older arthritics fall into another group besides "most likely to file for disability". That group is "the Republican party". Here's how people in different age groups voted in 2012.

To all freepers on social security disability, when checking my direct deposit into bank account. I was reduced by $136.65. Has this happened to anyone else.

The government in Britain recently did something interesting. It asked everyone receiving an “incapacity benefit” — through a disability program slowly being phased out under new reforms — to submit to a medical test to confirm they were too disabled to work. A third of recipients (878,000 people) didn’t even bother and dropped out of the program rather than be examined. Of those tested, more than half (55 percent) were found fit for work, and a quarter were found fit for some work. But that’s Britain, where there’s a long tradition of gaming the dole. Americans would never think of...

A Rhode Island couple has revealed how they were moved to tears when Pope Francis kissed their disabled eight-year-old son in front of thousands of people in St. Peter's Square on Easter Sunday. Paul and Christina Gondreau of Johnston and their five children, including son Dominic who suffers from cerebral palsy, attended Easter Mass at the Vatican. An usher directed Dominic and his mother to an area designated for handicapped children, said Paul Gondreau, a theology professor at Providence College who is teaching this semester in Rome. When the pope's vehicle arrived, the usher motioned to the driver to stop...