Posted on 08/21/2011 5:01:13 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
Laid-off workers and aging baby boomers are flooding Social Security's disability program, pushing the financially strapped system toward the brink of insolvency.
Applications are up nearly 50 percent over a decade ago as people lose their jobs and can't find new ones in an economy that has shed nearly 7 million jobs.
Much of the focus in Washington has been on fixing Social Security's retirement system. The trustees who oversee Social Security urge Congress to shore up the disability system by reallocating money from the retirement program, just as lawmakers did in 1994.
This year, about 3.3 million people are expected to apply for federal disability benefits. That's 700,000 more than in 2008 and 1 million more than a decade ago.
The disability program is also being hit by an aging population — disability rates rise as people get older — as well as a system that encourages people to apply for more generous disability benefits rather than waiting until they qualify for retirement.
Retirees can get full Social Security benefits at age 66, a threshold gradually rising to 67. Early retirees can get reduced benefits at 62. However, if you qualify for disability, you can get full benefits, based on your work history, even before 62.
Today, about 13.6 million people receive disability benefits through Social Security or Supplemental Security Income. Social Security is for people with substantial work histories, and monthly disability payments average $927. Supplemental Security Income does not require a work history but it has strict limits on income and assets. Monthly SSI payments average $500.
Last year, Social Security detected $1.4 billion in overpayments to disability beneficiaries, mostly to people who got jobs and no longer qualified, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
www.ssa.gov/disability/
www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=12375
www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-724
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
they give ssi to all residents, legal or not
Well, if SSD goes broke and no money is there then disabilities claimed are sure to drastically decrease.
Disability payments under Social Security Disability, the amount of which reflect your contributions to the system, are earned, not given away.
Tell me if I am wrong. It might help, greatly, if the clowns in D.C. would allow business to prosper and thereby start hiring, again.
The article stated that Congress significantly watered down the eligibility standards in the 1980s.
I’ve had several greedy mom’s try to sign up their healthy one year olds for SSI because of their eczema. Mostly for kids mild enough that they wouldn’t have even brought them to me had they, instead of Uncle Sugar, been paying my bill. I do enjoy sending the state back those “Heck no!” responses.
The trustees who oversee Social Security urge Congress to shore up the disability system by reallocating money from the retirement program, just as lawmakers did in 1994.
It's easy for those in the know to make the system work.
If they're not accepted, lawyers will happily take the case for a cut of the winnings. This is big business.
I knew someone who was collecting - along with the other eleven siblings in the family. All of them were 50 and younger. Social Security would be supporting some of them for 30, 40, 50years.
The problem is Social Security was never set up to support all the people who wanted to live on welfare forever without having to have children. Dems don't care about the elderly - or those paying into the current system who will get screwed. They care about the former welfare types who now are 'disabled'...
People who really are disabled and need the money - might have to do without when the eternally dependent bankrupt it. If that happens, the disabled without family - and the elderly without family to take them in - will die.
The only people who will be fine are those milking one more welfare program...
The next few years are likely our last chance to meaningfully reform entitlements. If we don't then whole system collapses -- assuming it is not too late already.
You know, I thought the system wasn’t going to collapse until Generation X started to draw benefits from it. Right now, it doesn’t even look like Baby Boomers will be collecting it in their seventies. So we’re going to have millions of old people with no income at all in a decade or less...
I know someone whose legs were both amputated and he receives SSI. If you tell him his brain is not dead and he can still use his hands, that he can still be productive in a desk job or such, his reply is why should he work, since he is able to make it financially without working on what the goverment gives him vis SSI.
A friend of mine collects it here in N.Y. where I think it’s about $900.00 per month along with many other benefits attached because he’s an alcoholic. His wife collects her own SSI because she is stressed.
And those are the Americans (I did not even touch on the recent arrivals from Somalia collecting SSI (that's another story)
Here’s How I Helped A Single Mom With an 9th Grade
Education and No Medical Training Win Her
Daughter’s SSI Case
By Jonathan Ginsberg (attorney/author)
$29.95
Susie now receives a monthly check from SSI and Medicaid eligibility for Tammy.
school psychologist who diagnosed Tammy with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)
http://www.child-disability.com/
Child Disability Report - including sample forms for ADHD, Learning Disabilities and Asthma/cardiac
I know of quite a few young men and a few young women on disability solely because of drug and alcohol abuse. Other than that they are all healthy and could easily hold down a job.
They laugh about it and party on the disability money.
They all used lawyers to get on disability and can advise newbies on which lawyers push applications through with the best chance of success.
I am not sure how much they watered it down but it did need to made a bit easier. I sprecifically remember one poor kid who was in a wheel chair. He never had walked and never would. they dicided he could work at jobs where he could sit down and work.
I had mixed feelings on that. He may have been happier knowing he was working and earning his own money. But there is no real astigmatism on a worke who hap paid in and was entitled to it.
The kid was completley happy doing the work on his own even tho he had paid taxes for the money he got.
Cheaters cost Social Security billions
December 06, 2008
The Social Security Administration has fallen behind in reviewing the medical conditions of 1.7 million Americans on its disability rolls, potentially paying up to $11 billion in benefits to people who are no longer disabled.
Federal law requires Social Security to periodically evaluate the status of the 7.3 million people who draw checks from its Disability Insurance Trust Fund and the more than 4 million disabled adults who are paid Supplemental Security Income from the Treasury.
More
To read earlier stories about the challenges many face receiving Social Security disability insurance benefits, go to “Battling for benefits.”
Those assessments, called continuing disability reviews, or CDRs, are supposed to weed out those who aren’t disabled.
Social Security also has fallen way behind in keeping the Supplemental Security Income program honest.
the agency isn’t catching as many payment errors as it used to, which last year contributed to $3.9 billion in overpayments.
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2008/12/disability_fraud_saps_social_s.html
This summer when I called SS regarding regular retirement SS, every time I called and every person I talked to with SS, without excpetion asked several times “did I want to sign up for SSI”.
No damn wonder its broke with these gubmint fools looking for more ways to piss the money away.
February 18, 2011 7:23 PM
Federal fraud: Healthy workers took disability
By Sharyl Attkisson
(CBS News) You have no doubt noticed it when you get your paycheck, the deduction for Social Security taxes.
Some of the money goes to pay workers when they become disabled, meaning they are unable to work, but some are continuing to collect disability payments even after they’ve returned to work.
Federal disability — about $170 billion per year — is intended for those with medical conditions so severe they can’t work at any job. Today, so many people claim to fit that definition, 17.9 million people are getting checks.
By the government’s own estimate, fraud and other improper payments ate up $25 billion in disability payments between 2005 and 2009.
One case involved a Michigan woman. She qualified for disability because of mood and personality disorders. Seven months later, she found work as a letter carrier but kept on taking disability checks, a total of $37,000.
A Pennsylvania woman collected disability checks even as surveillance video showed her working as a mail clerk. Total cost: $19,000 in fraudulent payments.
Adding insult to supposed injury, nearly all the people the GAO tracked down had gotten a little extra bonus: $250 in federal stimulus money — intended for disabled people.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/18/eveningnews/main20033639.shtml
The head of Social Security, Michael Astrue, wouldn’t agree to an interview. Instead of explaining how he’s fighting fraud, he criticized the GAO. Last year, he told Congress that the screening tool that detects when someone’s gone back to work generates too much information.
“That we can’t possibly follow up on ‘the leads’ that would come from that in any- certainly not in my professional lifetime in the agency,” Astrue said on Capitol Hill Aug. 4, 2010.
Still looking for answers, CBS News went to the White House budget office. They wouldn’t agree to an interview either.
Due to privacy protections, CBS News hasn’t been told the ultimate fate of the TSA agent in California. By the time investigators caught up with her, she’d defrauded taxpayers out of $108,000, all while earning $50,000 a year at her federal job, collecting a $250 stimulus check and living large in a house listed for $1.8 million.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/18/eveningnews/main20033639.shtml
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