This is a thread about Social Security Disability

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esquilax: Jan 3, 2003

mugrim posted:

I listened to it and got distracted a few times, but these people are morons. Hale county, their poster child for "cheats" is also 12% more obese than the state average, in a state that is already top 10 or 5 in the nation. It also skews older. Older fat people are pretty much always going to have diabetes, heart problems, back problems, and weight bearing joint problems.

Being old and fat with diabetes, heart problems, back problems, and weight bearing joint problems typically does not permanently prevent you from performing the essential duties of your own occupation, let alone any occupation.

One of the main points of the article is that many of the people on disability don't have any good alternatives to SSDI or any opportunities to go back to work. Not that they are completely unable to be productive workers. This IMO is one of the best explanations that I've heard of why private LTD insurance has a much higher return-to-work rate than SSDI.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 22:09

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 00:26

esquilax: Jan 3, 2003

Lyesh posted:

Sure it does. If you can't stand up for more than ten minutes at a time, for example, you can't do a lot of factory jobs. If you can't lift a hundred pounds, good luck working in construction. And if you don't have training for jobs that ARE doable with these kinds of limitations, then those jobs are not available to you.

If you're going to go full-out with weird any occupation stuff, you're essentially saying that people with ALS should just get prestigious professorships in theoretical physics. It works GREAT for Stephen Hawking, after all.

And the reason that I frame it that way is that the article is extremely slanted against the fact that without SSI or SSDI, people experience even more hardship than they already do. If you want to augment the program, sure. Go for it. But the problem isn't with SSDI or SSI, it's with the numerous factors in the US that have removed as many social safety nets as possible.

Any occupation (using the technical disability insurance definition) is the definition that SSDI actually literally uses. You are only supposed to be on SSDI if you are unable to perform the work in any occupation. If there are no jobs available in your area, you should be on welfare or unemployment, not SSDI. SSDI is not a replacement for those safety nets but is being used as such because of the reasons listed in the article. That's one of its main points, and seems a cogent one.

What we do with the information that SSDI is being used as that kind of program is a political discussion and the correct response might be to beef up unemployment programs. What I can say is that the return to work programs have been expanded in the past decade (following the lead of private LTD) which helps solve that problem and others, and should continue.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 22:46

esquilax: Jan 3, 2003

Remulak posted:

Also they take level of education and I think skills into account.

Yes, that's all part of the technical insurance definition of "any occupation".

mastershakeman posted:

Unemployment isn't really a safety net, considering it only lasts for 6 months in most cases, and that's assuming you were working before (i.e. people fresh out of school can't get it). Same with welfare - isn't that only available to single mothers at this point?

I think so. The whole social welfare system has been eroded quite a bit, which means that people out-of-work have few alternatives other than SSDI.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2014 00:57

esquilax: Jan 3, 2003

mugrim posted:

It 100% does for many cases, especially if you have all of those things at once.

If your doctor assigns you a lifting limit of 10 pounds or under because of a prior heart attack or stent, you are not capable of even office jobs, assuming you have the education.

Past 50 years of age (ie "Old" by SSDI since 62 is early retirement age) they no longer expect you to retrain for a new career, so it's not "Any job" it's "Any job you are have a strong enough experience/knowledge base for".

The "Any job" thing is bullshit the way you are interpreting it. It's used as verbage, but technically no one, and I mean no one meets that qualification. Missing 4 limbs? Well you could work in the circus as a freak or for performance art. You could just be a lifeless body someone is paid to stare at as long as that has happened at least once ever. While some ALJ's use that verbiage, they're rare even for the assholes to interpret it harsh. I've only heard of one that has ever done that.

I've been using the terms "own occupation" and "any occupation" in the way that they are used by normal professionals that work with disability insurance, and SSDI is based on the fairly standard "any occupation" definition. It's been other people using quadriplegics as an example, and I've clarified like 3 times now that I was using the technical disability insurance definition. I thought you worked with SSDI, are the terms "own occ" and "any occ" seriously unfamiliar to you?

My original point, to restate, is that just because someone is old and fat with back problems and diabetes, even if they qualify as "disabled" under a medical or plain english meaning but that doesn't mean that they should qualify as disabled for SSDI purposes. "Any occ" is a much higher bar to reach, and 25% of working age adults being unable to perform work under the "any occ" definition is an insane amount at the county level. The article goes a long way towards explaining why the rate is so high. It had a secondary effect of explaining a separate issue - why LTD return-to-work rates are higher than SSDI return-to-work rates. People on normal long-term-disability insurance typically have a job that they can go back to, whereas people on SSDI may not.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2014 03:14

esquilax: Jan 3, 2003

mugrim posted:

I do work with it, and it's not unfamiliar to me at all. Your hilarious interpretation of it is though. Or maybe you were just exaggerating to make a point?

If your doctor says you can't lift above 10 pounds (something that severe Orthopedic issues, heart issues, and diabetic neuropathy can require) and you have a sub high school grad education and are older than 50, that's pretty much a slam dunk with the SSA by most ALJs.

By definition, it's not just that you can't work any occupation, but that you can't earn SGA from it. That SGA part is kind of key since pretty much anyone can do anything for a very short period of time. Yeah, maybe technically you can sit and answer a phone a couple of hours a week, but unless you can be expected to earn over 1070/mo from it then it's not truly employable. It is entirely not only possible, but probably that people with lovely educations, who are over 50, have diabetes, have heart issues, and weight bearing joint issues is not physically able to work 107 hours a month at 10 bucks an hour. When you live in a place where everyone is crazy obese and old and uneducated, the idea that a significant portion of the population is not capable of SGA is entirely possible.

Again, I've used nothing except the technical definition of the term as I've said (for the 4th time now). You are just putting words in my mouth and it makes it even worse if you actually understood what I originally meant by those terms and aren't just covering for yourself now. Obviously being unable to lift 10 pounds is an actual disability that makes it easy to meet an any occ definition, I never said it didn't. Saying 25% of the working age population has disabilities that are that severe and long term however, is an really high number that deserves some investigation. The reporter does an investigation into why its a really high number, and handwaving her findings away with something like "their obesity rate is 40% instead of 30%, it's probably right" really doesn't do it justice at all.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2014 04:44

esquilax: Jan 3, 2003

mugrim posted:

Younger fitter people flee because there are no jobs, astronomical obesity rates, lovely rates of education and high school graduation, rural area with limited medical care, etc. I know a lot of places that go 15-20% that are similarly rural and have those confounding variables. A statistical outlier as a rate working adults is going to happen in both directions in an area with less people. Hell, in a rural area that small it could be something as simple as a singular generous ALJ combined with all the other lovely confounding variables. The area has had an almost completely consistent population count for 140 years and a 10% unemployment rate.

Acceptance rates overall are actually lower than they were prior, but more people are applying by rather large numbers. More people are maintaining unemployment and not getting a technical denial for working over SGA because of the economy. This means edge cases are more likely to stay in the hopper long enough to be evaluated.

But here's a better question: What would you do with Hale County?

btw, do you crack down on Utah and it's super low disability rates, wondering how evil their judges are? Shocker I know but rural areas are easy to get high percentages on many different stats because of their low density. What is your theory here?

My theory, which is the one supported by the TAL report, is that many people are using SSDI as an unemployment program, so that areas that are in worse economic shape have higher SSDI enrollment. Compare your SSDI enrollment map to a map of unemployment by county. Keep in mind that people on SSDI generally are not counted as unemployed so high SSDI enrollment wouldn't drive the unemployment rate. Utah is in good economic shape, so SSDI enrollment is low. Rural counties in the midwest are also in good economic shape, so enrollment is low. Rural counties in the south, and in northern MI, are in bad economic shape, so enrollment is high.

The trend that you've noticed, that applications increase and acceptance rates decrease during bad economic times further support the theory. More people apply during downturns because fewer alternatives are available. Fewer applications are accepted because the government is doing its job, and many of these "new" disabilities were not severe enough to prevent people from working when jobs were available.

If the theory is true, than an effective way to "treat disability" is to improve the underlying economic conditions in an area, as opposed to attempting to improve the clinical health of the population. Reopening the mill so that people can go back to work might reduce the SSDI rolls more than starting a county weight loss program.

High SSDI enrollment reflects local economic problems as well as a local clinical ones. From your focus on the economic situation of the county in your last post it seems like you would agree with that.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2014 13:42

esquilax: Jan 3, 2003

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I'm not really sure that this is a substantive difference. If someone loses the job they have or is no longer able to perform available jobs due to a disability, and there are no other jobs in their area for which they are qualified, then they are in fact unable to work because of their disability. A general drying-up of job options might therefore result in more people being on the disability rolls, but if all of those people are in fact disabled and can't work, why is their presence on the disability rolls a problem?

If the only employer in an area is wal-mart, and wal-mart requires you to be able to lift 10 pound weights for the job, everyone who can't lift ten pound weights is in fact unable to find work due to their disability, even if Wal-Mart would only hire ten more people anyway at most and you have 1,000 people who can't lift ten pound weights. In that case you've got 1,000 people who are disqualified from working based on disability, and 990 who are also shut out of the job market due to simple lack of jobs, and both sets overlap to the point of functional indistinguishability.

As I said above, it sounds like the argument you're making is in favor of a new Works Project Administration. But it doesn't seem to be one against SSDI, except insofar as with the advent of a new WPA in this county a lot of people would suddenly become eligible for the newly available jobs and possibly then lose their SSDI benefits.

Said another way: why do you, or do you, consider the operation of SSDI as a backstop to the unemployment system to be a problem? To my mind having some such backstop system is a moral imperative.

I don't have problems with having a good unemployment system, and I don't have problems with the government providing disability insurance. Many of the people on the SSDI rolls are actually unable to work and require the disability income. What I do have problems with the practice of using the government disability insurance program as an unemployment system. Commingling the two means we are misclassifying people and misdiagnosing local problems. The best known problem is that people on SSDI they aren't counted in unemployment statistics, even though many of these people probably should be counted as part of the labor force. They aren't discouraged workers, since they would take a job if one was available. Here's an old op-ed by one of Obama's former cabinet members that criticized Bush for this exact issue in 2003.

quote:

The reality is that we didn't have a mild recession. Jobs-wise, we had a deep one.

The government reported that annual unemployment during this recession peaked at only around 6 percent, compared with more than 7 percent in 1992 and more than 9 percent in 1982. But the unemployment rate has been low only because government programs, especially Social Security disability, have effectively been buying people off the unemployment rolls and reclassifying them as ''not in the labor force.''

In other words, the government has cooked the books. It has been a more subtle manipulation than the one during the Reagan administration, when people serving in the military were reclassified from ''not in the labor force'' to ''employed'' in order to reduce the unemployment rate. Nonetheless, the impact has been the same.
...
The point is not whether every person on disability deserves payments. The point is that in previous recessions these people would have been called unemployed. They would have filed for unemployment insurance. They would have shown up in the statistics. They would have helped create a more accurate picture of national unemployment, a crucial barometer we use to measure the performance of the economy, the likelihood of inflation and the state of the job market.

We don't necessarily need public works projects, but economic revitalization (however that actually happens) is a good way to reduce people from the SSDI rolls. How we economically revitalize areas is a political discussion that's way too broad for this thread. High rates of SSDI enrollment is indicative of economic problems in an area as much as it is indicative of clinical problems in the area. The TAL report was panned for pointing this out, but I think it's a decent thing to keep in mind.

esquilax fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Sep 6, 2014

# ¿ Sep 6, 2014 15:08

esquilax: Jan 3, 2003

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

So your objection is purely technical, then, not substantive? You're not opposed to these people getting public assistance, just the label that assistance gets, for reporting purposes?

The part you seem to be missing is that articles like the Joffe-Walt "expose" are not written to encourage expansion of the unemployment program or technocratic labeling reforms; they're written to encourage the dismantling of the social security system and while replacing it with nothing.

The political fight we're having in this country isn't over how to reform the public assistance system, it's over whether we should have one or not (and I'm not exaggerating in that; look at the details of any of Paul Ryan's budget proposals). So in light of that, I don't have a problem with "using the government disability insurance program as an unemployment system. " These people are in fact sick and cannot in fact find work and we have a moral imperative as a nation to help them.

End of the day, a certain amount of overlap between the SSDI system and unemployment is inevitable -- as was pointed out above, you can always argue that all of them could theoretically learn theoretical physics and be Stephen Hawking and hence are only unemployed, not disabled.

It's mostly technical and somewhat substantive, but the substance isn't along the traditional battle lines.

In general I don't believe in ignoring facts just because they don't support our political views. The facts should inform our opinions, not the other way around. One of the facts that her story illustrates is that SSDI isn't just working like normal private long-term disability insurance except provided by the government, it is additionally working as a kind of unemployment program. It's really easy to twist that facts into "a lot of people on SSDI aren't really disabled", but it also supports points like "the republican president is understating the unemployment rate" and "our unemployment programs are not equipped to handle the evolving needs of our aging population."

# ¿ Sep 6, 2014 16:25

esquilax: Jan 3, 2003

Liquid Communism posted:

Man, you must live in a sheltered set of occupations. Tell that to guys like my dad, a trucker with 3 and a half million miles on his logs who spent the last ten years of his life working the door at walmart because diabetes meant he couldn't pass a DOT physical anymore, and injuries sustained over decades of trucking (and at least one rollover wreck) meant doing physical work on his feet all day just plain wasn't possible. Or any of the people in my old industry, where cooks burn out by 40 because their back, knees, and ankles are too wrecked to be able to stand 10 hours at a stretch while twisting and lifting. Hell, I'm in IT now, and the datacenter work I do would be impossible if I had any kind of further long-term joint injury beyond what I've got.

There are a ton of occupations that aren't sitting at a desk pretending to code while you jam cheetos into your face and drink cases of mountain dew.

Half of the at-work construction workers I know are old and fat with back problems, and most private companies that employ blue collar workers go to great lengths to manage their diabetics and heart patient employees to keep them well enough to stay at work. Being old and fat doesn't prevent you from working under "any occupation" like SSDI requires, although people may additionally have disabilities that do actually prevent them from working.

But thanks for ignoring the entire page and posting personal attacks

# ¿ Sep 6, 2014 17:55

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 00:26

esquilax: Jan 3, 2003

Liquid Communism posted:

I ignored the entire page because, as Hieronymous Alloy and Mugrim have both pointed out, the definition of 'any occupation' you're using in no way matches the interpretation actually implemented by SSDI, and does not address the very point you tried to make. I was responding to very post I quoted, because things like diabetes (which invalidates a DOT physical even if manageable by drugs), and mobility/lifting restrictions can and do prevent people from "performing the essential duties of <their> own occupation."

If you are able to hold a job at Wal-mart or you have the necessary background and ability to work in IT, you generally do not qualify for SSDI. Because, after considering medical conditions age, education, past work experience and any transferable skills, you are able to adjust to other work (which is basically the "any occupation" standard used in private disability insurance).

I said they "typically" didn't prevent someone performing their duties because I was afraid of pedants posting edge cases like "well diabetes means you can't be a trucker!"

# ¿ Sep 6, 2014 18:28

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