Economy puts additional pressure on Social Security disability program

There are the Washington, D.C.-based kinds of ideas for "reforming" Social Security programs, like raising the retirement age or raising the eligibility age for Medicare, and then there's reality.

Laid-off workers and aging baby boomers are flooding Social Security?s disability program with benefit claims, pushing the financially strapped system toward the brink of insolvency.

Applications are up nearly 50 percent over a decade ago as people with disabilities lose their jobs?in an economy that has shed nearly 7 million jobs?and can't find new ones.[...]

Claims for disability benefits typically increase in a bad economy because many disabled people get laid off and can?t find a new job. 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.

"It's primarily economic desperation," Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue said. "People on the margins who get bad news in terms of a layoff and have no other place to go and they take a shot at disability."

Able-bodied unemployed people are being shut out of jobs just because they are unemployed. Imagine the difficulty that a laid-off disabled worker faces. The Social Security administration is desperately going after overpayments to scrape together more money for the program that is only going to see increased demands, meaning longer waits for people applying for assistance.

One potential solution would further jeopardize the Social Security retirement system, borrowing from it in order to shore up the disability side. With Social Security's long-term solvency already being shortened by a payroll tax holiday, likely to be extended, that proposal could only undermine the program further, creating the kind of crisis that foes of the system have been waiting to exploit to eviscerate it.

Another alternative, of course, would be a real jobs program that got these workers back into jobs and revenues back into the government.

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/QHYwKNOpqe4/-Economy-puts-additional-pressure-on-Social-Security-disability-program

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