Free Republic

A handicap ramp in front of a Fountain family's house is in the middle of a neighborhood squabble. Vincent and Heidi Giesegh say their neighbors are threatening legal action if they don't remove the ramp. They say the next door couple is worried that the ramp will hurt the value of their home. The Giesegh's say they need it for their 16 year old daughter Kirsten who has Cerebral Palsy. "As she goes into her spastic modes, we could just tumble down the stairs and both of us could get massively hurt," said Heidi Giesegh. The Giesegh's neighborhood doesn't have...

PEMBROKE PINES (CBS4) – The security video shows a 14 year-old mental patient being escorted down a hallway when a Pembroke Pines police officer reaches in and grabs the girl. The girl whirls and swats at the officer, and he proceeds to punch her in the face. The officer’s blow to the mentally disturbed teen snapped her head back, and appeared to be delivered with full force. Other officers join in, wrestling the girl to the ground and spraying her with Mace.

More than 76,000 workers went on the federal government's disability program in July, according to the latest data from the Social Security administration, bringing the total number of new enrollees this year to 534,038. Although that is down somewhat from the same month last year, enrollment in the Social Security Disability Insurance program remains sharply higher than it has been historically. Since 2009, an average of about 1 million workers have gone on SSDI annually — a 31% increase from the average enrollment over the previous 10 years. As a result, a record 8.9 million workers are now collecting disability...

Recipients of federal disability checks often admit that they are capable of working but cannot or will not find a job, that those closest to them tell them they should be working, and that working to get off the disability rolls is not among their goals. More baffling, most have never received significant medical treatment and not seen a doctor about their condition in the last year, even though medical problems are the official reason they don't work. Those who acknowledge they're on disability because they can't find a job say they make little effort to find one, according to...

Organizations condemn the movie for using the facial feature to make a character appear more evil. Disney's The Lone Ranger is facing a fresh round of controversy over one of its characters, but this time Johnny Depp's portrayal of a Native American isn't the subject of the outrage. Instead, charities are upset that William Fichtner's Butch Cavendish features a cleft lip, a prosthetic that may have been added in part to make him appear more sinister. According to the character synopsis, Cavendish's "terribly scarred face is a perfect reflection of the bottomless pit that passes for his soul."

I live like a disabled person even though I'm physically healthy... and now want a surgeon to cut my spinal cord: Rare condition has made woman, 58, disown her legs * Chloe knew at 4 she was different and wanted to live as a disabled person * She wanted to wear leg braces like her aunt, hurt in an accident * Aged 9, she caused an accident to stop her own legs from working * Now she enjoys the excitement of downhill skiing - because she might fall * She spends most of her time in a wheelchair, but is...

INDIANAPOLIS — A professor at an Indiana college says he has found film footage showing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt being pushed in his wheelchair, depicting a secret that was hidden from the public until after his death. Ray Begovich, a journalism professor at Franklin College south of Indianapolis, said Tuesday he found the eight-second clip while conducting unrelated research in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The National Archives and the FDR Presidential Museum and Library couldn’t say for certain if other such footage exists but both said it is at least rare.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recently had gastric bypass surgery to help him lose weight.The American Medical Association’s decision to call obesity a “disease” instead of a medical condition could make it harder to discriminate against fat employees, The Wall Street Journal Law Blog reports. Now that obesity is a disease, people with body mass indexes of more than 30 are almost certainly covered under The Americans with Disabilities Act, attorney Jon Hyman told the Law Blog. That 1990 law says employers have to provide disabled workers with “reasonable accommodations” to help them do their jobs. It also makes it...

Has “crackhead” become the disparagement de jour? Should addiction be treated any different than other disabilities? William Halliday was a recovering addict and his employer, Geoffrey Van Toen, would not let him live that down. Halliday had a second job as a sales agent for Van Toen Innovations, an automobile broker, checking with car dealerships to get the best deal for Van Toen’s clients. He had been in 14 residential addiction recovery programs in 23 years, having relapsed and been hospitalized many times. He had experienced homelessness, joblessness and been estranged from family and friends. When he began working for...

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...