[ed. Personal and societal issues associated with an increasingly disabled population.]
by Heather Kovich
- excerpt:
Payments to the disabled and their families make up about 20 percent of new Social Security awards every year, with retirement benefits constituting most of the rest. Even though Social Security remains in surplus, with the amounts taken in from taxpayers exceeding the amount owed to them, American politicians fret about the impending bankruptcy of Social Security and blame the aging baby boomer generation. Annual awards to disabled workers, however, are increasing. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2010 one of the two Social Security programs paid out $124 billion in benefits to 10.2 million people.
In the 1980s, before Doug’s life unraveled, he was making a good salary at an engineering firm in Seattle. His work was complex: he helped build a crane for NASA that assembled orbiters at Kennedy Space Center and an underwater crane for nuclear submarines. He and Laurel married in 1983 and she brought three children into the marriage. Doug quickly came to consider them his own. They owned a house in the working-class suburbs south of Seattle. But in the winter of 1996, when the tingling started, Doug’s life started to fall apart.
He felt it first in his right arm: little electrical pinpricks in the tips of his fingers that shot up to his elbow, causing an aching heaviness at his shoulder. After months of physical therapy the pain had only worsened and spread. An MRI showed the cause of the problem: his spine was collapsing around his spinal cord, crushing many of the nerves, and strangling the cord itself: cervical spinal stenosis. It was bad luck—there was no injury that caused it, no family history that would have predicted it. A neurosurgeon operated to stabilize the vertebrae and take pressure off the spinal cord, but the cord had suffered permanent damage and the pain never lessened. He started drinking to dull it, the drinking affected his work. Eventually he lost his job.
He spent his severance on a drafting table so that he could continue to do part-time work from home. Then, too disabled to support himself completely, he applied for Social Security Disability Insurance.
***
Before 1956, when Social Security expanded to include disability benefits, disabled workers had to rely on their families or on state welfare for financial subsistence. The 1956 federal bill was controversial—it was expensive, and many politicians thought that paying the disabled not to work would lead to laziness. But Henry Jackson, a senator from Washington, passionately argued for the benefit: “It should be clear to all of us that no matter at what age a person becomes totally and permanently disabled, he needs Social Security payments worse than a person who retires at sixty-five in good health. The worker who is disabled early in life usually has accumulated less savings than has an older person. He has more dependents to care for than has an older worker whose family has grown up and left home… Retirement after one’s working years can be planned for. Disability strikes without warning.” President Eisenhower signed the bill, giving rise to SSDI, which allowed workers to collect their Social Security prior to age sixty-five if they became disabled. In 1974 the program added Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, which provided minimal payments to the disabled, including children, who had not contributed enough to Social Security to qualify for SSDI.
Doctors were leery of the bill. They worried that they would be put in the uncomfortable position of deciding whether their patients, people they may have known for years, were eligible for this income. To deal with this concern, applicants are now often sent to doctors who work for private staffing firms that contract with the government. This was my job, “independent medical examiner.” On the basis of a forty-minute interview and examination, I was supposed to determine how disabled an applicant or “claimant” was.
Read more:
Photograph via Flickr by John Williams
by Heather Kovich - excerpt:
Payments to the disabled and their families make up about 20 percent of new Social Security awards every year, with retirement benefits constituting most of the rest. Even though Social Security remains in surplus, with the amounts taken in from taxpayers exceeding the amount owed to them, American politicians fret about the impending bankruptcy of Social Security and blame the aging baby boomer generation. Annual awards to disabled workers, however, are increasing. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2010 one of the two Social Security programs paid out $124 billion in benefits to 10.2 million people.
In the 1980s, before Doug’s life unraveled, he was making a good salary at an engineering firm in Seattle. His work was complex: he helped build a crane for NASA that assembled orbiters at Kennedy Space Center and an underwater crane for nuclear submarines. He and Laurel married in 1983 and she brought three children into the marriage. Doug quickly came to consider them his own. They owned a house in the working-class suburbs south of Seattle. But in the winter of 1996, when the tingling started, Doug’s life started to fall apart.
He felt it first in his right arm: little electrical pinpricks in the tips of his fingers that shot up to his elbow, causing an aching heaviness at his shoulder. After months of physical therapy the pain had only worsened and spread. An MRI showed the cause of the problem: his spine was collapsing around his spinal cord, crushing many of the nerves, and strangling the cord itself: cervical spinal stenosis. It was bad luck—there was no injury that caused it, no family history that would have predicted it. A neurosurgeon operated to stabilize the vertebrae and take pressure off the spinal cord, but the cord had suffered permanent damage and the pain never lessened. He started drinking to dull it, the drinking affected his work. Eventually he lost his job.
He spent his severance on a drafting table so that he could continue to do part-time work from home. Then, too disabled to support himself completely, he applied for Social Security Disability Insurance.
Before 1956, when Social Security expanded to include disability benefits, disabled workers had to rely on their families or on state welfare for financial subsistence. The 1956 federal bill was controversial—it was expensive, and many politicians thought that paying the disabled not to work would lead to laziness. But Henry Jackson, a senator from Washington, passionately argued for the benefit: “It should be clear to all of us that no matter at what age a person becomes totally and permanently disabled, he needs Social Security payments worse than a person who retires at sixty-five in good health. The worker who is disabled early in life usually has accumulated less savings than has an older person. He has more dependents to care for than has an older worker whose family has grown up and left home… Retirement after one’s working years can be planned for. Disability strikes without warning.” President Eisenhower signed the bill, giving rise to SSDI, which allowed workers to collect their Social Security prior to age sixty-five if they became disabled. In 1974 the program added Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, which provided minimal payments to the disabled, including children, who had not contributed enough to Social Security to qualify for SSDI.
Doctors were leery of the bill. They worried that they would be put in the uncomfortable position of deciding whether their patients, people they may have known for years, were eligible for this income. To deal with this concern, applicants are now often sent to doctors who work for private staffing firms that contract with the government. This was my job, “independent medical examiner.” On the basis of a forty-minute interview and examination, I was supposed to determine how disabled an applicant or “claimant” was.
Read more:
Photograph via Flickr by John Williams
