Slightly over a week ago, the popular National Public Radio show “This American Life” devoted their entire program to examining the Social Security Disability program. The program was dividing into three parts: 1) interviews and analysis focusing on one Alabama county where 25% of the population receives disability benefits; 2) a not-entirely-flattering portrait of the attorneys and advocates who represent claimants in disability proceedings, and 3) an exploration of the private companies whose sole purpose is to identify and move state welfare recipients onto federal disability programs.
Many disability claimant advocates were vocally and voraciously distressed by the piece – the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives even tried to arrange a letter-writing campaign to shame NPR about its decision to run the piece.
As someone whose entire practice centers on Social Security, I also found the program troubling. Naturally, I wasn’t a huge fan of the unflattering characterization of disability lawyers, but lawyer jokes are nothing new. My larger concern was with the content of the program which suffered from two primary defects. First, it under-emphasized the difficulty of qualifying for disability benefits. Specifically, the program failed to mention that for an applicant under the age of 50, an applicant must prove that they are too sick to do any job inAmerica. It’s an extraordinarily high bar, and difficult to prove, particularly when objective medical evidence is lacking due to a lack of medical insurance. The program skimmed over this point, making it sound as if qualifying for benefits was as easy as filling out an application.
Second, the program overemphasized to correlation between job paucity and application density. It is not at all clear that disability application rates increase where unemployment is highest. Moreover, even if that were the case, blaming the unemployed / disabled is blames the wrong party. Consider: Kentuckyhas one of the highest rats of unemployment in the country. It also has one of the highest rates of worker fatalities and on-the-job injuries. So are there more disability applications inKentuckybecause of high unemployment? Or are Kentuckians more prone to disabling, on-the-job injuries that will in turn make them less desirable as job applicants and less able to work? It is exceptionally offensive to blame the workers themselves for the injuries they received due to the employer’s lack of due diligence. Though the show did not come out and make this correlation directly, the implicit assumption that unemployment – not bad employers, dangerous working conditions, lack of adequate health insurance, etc – caused an increase in disability applications was inadequate and misleading.
