This is a thread about Social Security Disability

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > This is a thread about Social Security Disability

Calenth: Jul 11, 2001

Let's talk about the other side of it: there are a few kinds of relatively legitimate systemic abuse that happen *after* you're eligible. I do a lot of work with people who are already on SSDI and these are some of the problems I've seen.

The most prevalent I've seen are various forms of representative payee abuse. The idea behind the representative payee program is that some people on SSDI -- especially people with mental illness, brain injuries, or other similar conditions -- will also be too disabled to handle their money appropriately themselves, so they can choose someone else to be their representative payee instead.

On the surface, that makes sense, and there is need for some kind of program. The main problems I see stem from two fundamental issues with the rep payee concept: the first is that many people who need representative payees don't have anyone in their lives who they can trust to act for them, and the second is that there aren't really any rules about conflict-of-interest.

In practice, a large percentage of people on SSDI end up living in "assisted living" facilities or nursing homes, usually without much of any external support network. In such cases, it's not infrequent for the administrator of the home to become their representative payee, partly because there's nobody else to do it and partly because it's a lot easier for the administrator if they just get the checks directly, so administrators will pressure residents to make them their representative payee. The residents are supposed to be allotted a minimum "personal needs allowance" of $30 to $60 or so per month (the exact amount varies a bit by state), but if the administrator of the facility is also the rep payee, the administrator can just decide how to spend that money, too ("I think you need to spend your money on copayments for this long list of drugs my facility has a contract with the pharmacist to provide you"), leaving the recipient with no actual income at all (presuming they're even bothering to keep a decent, honest accounting of personal needs allowance payments). And then they can't buy things like toothbrushes or a candy bar or a taxi ride or a long-distance phone call to family.

This also makes it very difficult for people to leave abusive facilities, because they either have to find a new representative payee and go through the process of asking the SSA to switch them over, or they have to appeal SSA to approve them not having a representative payee -- a process that can result in the re-evaluation of their eligibility for SSDI and even a loss of their benefits if they are found now capable.

There are some private organizations who will act as an "organizational representative payee" for people, usually at the cost of what seems like a small fee -- $20 or $40 per month, which is a small fraction of the overall SSDI/SSI check. In practice, however, since many of these people are not receiving their whole check, but only their "personal needs allowance," that $20 monthly fee might be half or two-thirds of their actual discretionary income for the month.

There are some programs that exist to monitor for possible rep payee abuse -- outright theft, for example -- but that kind of thing is a relatively small issue at least from what I've seen personally. It does happen, but it's the legal, systemic abuse that hurts and financially marginalizes far more recipients. It's just that nobody ever hears about these problems because the people they hurt are at the margins of American society and don't have the resources to make their grievances known.

Hollismason posted:

The best advice I can give is get a lawyer and request information on a Disability advocate, they Government pays people and organization to be these and their really helpful for navigating the system.

Every state and territory has a "Protection & Advocacy for People with Disabilities" system, though it goes by different names in different states -- essentially legal aid for people with disabilities. For example, in New York it's http://www.disabilityrightsny.org/ , in California it's http://www.disabilityrightsca.org/ . If you're having problems with the SSA, including overpayments or other "I need a lawyer" issues, call the local P&A in your state.

Calenth fucked around with this message at 13:05 on Sep 2, 2014

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Calenth: Jul 11, 2001

OctaviusBeaver posted:

That's what made me interested enough to click on this thread. Anyone want to tell me if/why it is wrong or right?

Here is a link for those interested: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/trends-with-benefits

The short quick answer is that it's an article written by an immensely privileged white girl who's so removed from the problem(s) she's trying to report on that fundamental, basic premises for the debate are presented as if they're huge insights.

quote:

At first, I thought Ethel's dream job was to be the lady at Social Security, because she thought she'd be good at weeding out the cheaters. But no. After a confusing back and forth, it turned out Ethel wanted this woman's job because she gets to sit. That's it. And when I asked her, OK, but why that lady? Why not any other job where you get to sit? Ethel said she could not think of a single other job where you get to sit all day. She said she'd never seen one.

I brushed this off in the moment. I was getting in my car. It was getting late. And also, it just did not seem possible to me that there would be a place in America today where someone could go her whole working life without any exposure to jobs where you get to sit, until she applied for disability and saw a woman who gets to sit all day. There had to be an office or storefront in town where Ethel would have seen a job that's not physical.

And I started sort of casually looking. At McDonald's, they're all standing. There's a truck mechanic, no. A fish plant, definitely no. I looked at the jobs listings in Greensboro-- occupational therapist, McDonald's, McDonald's, truck driver heavy lifting, KFC, registered nurse, McDonald's. I actually think it might be possible that Ethel could not conceive of a job that would accommodate her pain.

It is that gap between the world I live in and Ethel's world that's a big part of why the disability program has been growing so rapidly. A gap that prevents someone from even imagining the working world I live in, where there are jobs where you can work and have a sore back, or, in her husband Joseph's case, damaged nerves in his hands.

Lookit that white girl understandin' a thing. Look at it. You should shut the gently caress up, white girl! Shut up until you understand the problem a little better!

More substantively, though, there are just a lot of problems with her reporting.

quote:

Since the series aired, experts have rushed to document the facts and urge corrections: the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities here, here, and here; the Center for Economic and Policy Research here and here; the Shriver Center here; law professor James Kwak here; Media Matters here; disability rights activists here; and legal services advocates here. Over 120 organizations have signed on to a call for NPR to retract the series, and to top it off, no less than eight former commissioners of the Social Security Administration wrote an open letter outlining their �significant concerns,� saying they �could not sit on the sidelines and witness this one perspective on the disability programs threaten to pull the rug out from under millions of people with severe disabilities.�

According to these sources, applications are up due to the recession, but the approval rate held steady. Experts attribute growth in the real number of people receiving benefits to demographics: the aging of the baby boomer generation, the timing of women joining the workforce in greater numbers. Evidence does not actually show a meaningful shift of people from the tightened welfare rolls to the disability system. There are historic and medical reasons why the most common types of disabling conditions have changed since the 1950s. Disabled people are not simply choosing to lounge around rather than get a job, since around 60% of SSDI applicants are denied and around 50% of even those denied remain persistently unemployed. If people are qualifying in greater numbers, it is because they actually qualify: they are disabled. Hale County is in many ways is not representative of larger trends. And, crucially, if Joffe-Walt had found out even the most basic facts about how the disability determination process works, she would know that the definitions are in fact stringent and that it is a legitimate part of that process to consider a person�s education level and employability.

http://jenniferlaurenkates.tumblr.com/post/47129642807/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-neutral-story-but-there-is

quote:

It turns out that Joffe-Walt�s reporting very closely tracks a set of talking points disseminated by a handful of linked think tanks and echoed by astroturf groups. The same talking points showed up late last year in Nicholas Kristof�s NY Times columns asserting that Kentucky parents were purposely preventing their children from learning in order to preserve their SSI benefits (this was largely debunked, and subject to a critical response by the Times� Public Editor). A few years ago a story from the Baltimore City Paper hit all the same �surprising� insights that Joffe-Walt did, down to a similar section on obscure companies that help identify people who may qualify for disability assistance. (And in the mid-90s, there was a startlingly similar media frenzy which led to a staggering number of children losing their benefits before being revealed as based in fantasy and anecdote more than fact.)

There is, of course, a particular agenda at work here: the dismantling of the social safety net. Policy papers and op-eds like the following, with similarly misleading statistics and examples and calling for �reform� of SSDI and SSI, have been issued by the libertarian Cato Institute, the conservative American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation, as well as the more centrist Center for American Progress and Brookings Institution. These are consistently based on work by Joffe-Walt�s main sources, the economist team David Autor and Mark Duggan, as well as Mary Daly, another economist she cites later in the series, and Daly�s partner Richard Burkhauser.

Despite what Joffe-Walt claimed, this isn�t hidden or new information: the same actors have been saying the same things for years. They�d like to radically restructure these disability programs, turning them into private insurance products or block granting them to the states along with reduced funding, sometimes questionably recast as �waivers.� And this think tank echo chamber is heavily subsidized by Peter G. Peterson, a billionaire investor who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to dismantle Medicare, Social Security, and recently the disability programs that are the subject of the NPR series.

Right while Joffe-Walt�s pieces were airing, Washington was poised to weigh these very issues. The dollars Peterson spends to promote deficit fearmongering help manufacture a budget crisis (the fiscal cliff, "Fix the Debt"), but Mitt Romney�s loss signaled popular support for raising revenue from the rich who have paid too little in taxes, and against the logic of austerity. In a calculus designed to get those tax measures through, Obama again is testing the waters to see if he can get away with proposing a budget that includes some cuts to the social safety net. While Democratic lawmakers have pushed back, they may be looking for an excuse to give in. In the midst of these decisions, Joffe-Walt�s piece seeds questions about whether the disability programs are too generous, whether some undefined number of people really don�t need them, whether some cuts to SSDI and SSI might not be so bad.

http://jenniferlaurenkates.tumblr.com/post/47129642807/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-neutral-story-but-there-is

Basically, it was a poo poo article, written by an ignorant shill, to attack programs that help the sick and elderly, for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful.

There's actually a growing problem with NPR; due to long-term budget cuts it's becoming increasingly reliant on wealthy corporate donors, which is why it's started occasionally putting out articles like that one. See, e.g., http://ourfuture.org/20140608/the-koching-of-america-and-of-pbs-tia-lessin-of-citizen-koch , http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/has-npr-joined-peter-petersons-crusade-against-social-security-and-medicare , etc.

Calenth fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Sep 5, 2014

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 12:44

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > This is a thread about Social Security Disability