And raiding other money chests as well.
Corporations and their elected handmaidens never sleep in their quest for another way to shift costs and life burdens from the haves to the have nots. And they continue to get away with it because “we the people” have been in a very long slumber.
US Treasury reports: Social Security Income disability program approaching insolvency. Why? The ratio of beneficiaries to workers is rising. Why? Too few workers or a higher percentage of disabled Americans? That question is outside the purview of Treasury.
The US Labor Department has the data on the Employment:Population ratio. In 1970 (before the first Nixon recession), EmPop was 58%. Today, in the sluggish US economy it’s 59%.
Treasury publicly reports on applications, awards, and total disability beneficiaries. The number of beneficiaries has ballooned from five million in 2000 to almost nine million in 2014. Obviously the ratio of covered disabled Americans to total population has significantly increased in the past fourteen years. How many beneficiaries are disabled workers? All but about one million. In 1970 the number was approximately 1.8 million. The US population in 1970 was 205 million and today it’s 319 million. Why has the number of disabled workers eligible for SSD quintupled when the population has only increased by a bit over 50%? How is it that after over forty years of OHSHA, safer cars, safer home, and amazing advances in medical treatments, the rate of disabled adults has mushroomed?
Okay, some of that increase is because the death rates for accidents and certain chronic health conditions have been reduced. But there’s another important part to the story. ProPublica has it: The Demolition of Workers’ Compensation. It’s an eye-popping, and extremely well-written, piece of investigative journalism. A must read. Now.
I will only contribute a smidgen to how the SSD pot of gold was raided without public awareness.
Over the past decade, state after state has been dismantling America’s workers’ comp system with disastrous consequences for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer serious injuries at work each year, a ProPublica and NPR investigation has found.
The cutbacks have been so drastic in some places that they virtually guarantee injured workers will plummet into poverty. Workers often battle insurance companies for years to get the surgeries, prescriptions and basic help their doctors recommend.
Note: Over the past decade … Gee, that looks a lot like the time-frame when the number of SSD beneficiaries shot up. Bingo!
Not to be overlooked in the ProPublica report:
Workers’ comp was born in the early 1900s as a “grand bargain” forged by business and labor as awareness grew about the grisly workplace accidents that came with industrialization.
“As the work is done for the employer, and therefore ultimately for the public,” President Theodore Roosevelt said in 1907, “it is a bitter injustice that it should be the wage-worker himself and his wife and children who bear the whole penalty.”
In return for a measure of a security, workers gave up their right to sue their employers — even in cases of gross negligence — protecting businesses from lawsuit judgments that could bankrupt them. By 1920, nearly every state had enacted workers’ comp laws.
The granddaddy to the New Deal social programs, if you will. Was this “grand bargain”system broken? Not really. Definitely aggravated by the continuing and increasingly dysfunctional US health care “system.” But medical costs for disabled adults are embedded in Medicare and Medicaid, both of which also have financial challenges (that the GOP continuously remind us of and Democrats look for but have yet to find major solutions).
Like the Waltons and Walmart stockholders that grew wealthy on cheap labor that had to rely on SNAP and Medicaid to make ends meet (aka socializing operating costs), employers have done the same thing with workers’ compensation costs. Employers reap the reward of lower work comp insurance costs and pass actual operating costs onto SSD, Medicare, and Medicaid and injured workers and their families. (And remember workers pay half the payroll tax for SSD.) (California workers also pay all the cost for the short term disability program.)
Are there individuals that scam the disability programs? Sure. I’ve even known a few that did so for a few months. However, they’re as prevalent and/or destructive to the system as fraudulent voters are to elections. The real crooks are those that rig the voting systems and socialize costs that are their responsibility.
Now that the private sector has looted SSD down to the point of insolvency, who is going to pay to fix yet another “neoliberal” fine mess?
