Earlier this year I had a big piece about the disability system. That system is a disaster: To oversimplify somewhat, it tries to enforce an all-or-nothing definition of disability — either you’re incapable of working, or not — and has become increasingly lax when it comes to doing so.
There’s little debate that this approach discourages work; for one thing, working too much can prove you’re not disabled and thus make you ineligible for benefits. Disability might even be to blame for a big part of the decline in labor-force participation. We need a more flexible approach that takes account of folks in the gray area, those whose conditions make work difficult but not impossible.
Well, a new study provides still more evidence that disability is becoming a general-purpose welfare program rather than a support system for those who truly can’t work. When the economy goes south, people who otherwise would have worked end up on disability instead, and these enrollees tend to be in the aforementioned gray area:
We find the Great Recession induced nearly one million SSDI applications that otherwise would not have been filed, of which 41.8 percent were awarded benefits, resulting in over 400,000 new beneficiaries who made up 8.9 percent of all SSDI entrants between 2008-2012. More than one-half of the recession-induced awards were made on appeal. The induced applicants had less severe impairments than the average applicant. Only 9 percent had the most severe, automatically-qualifying impairments, 33 percent had functional impairments and no transferable skills, and the rest were denied for having insufficiently severe impairments and/or transferable skills.
This is especially troubling because people who get in disability rarely get back off it. Unlike some other safety-net programs, disability is simply not designed to provide temporary help during economic crises. It’s designed for people who are unable to work over the long term.
You can see my full piece for a wide variety of suggestions for reform, as well as a lot of other evidence the current system isn’t working.