The American Association for Disability Policy Reform
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Our treatment of disabled and impaired persons in the United States is much in need of reform. For its entire history, the Social Security disability program has been plagued by problems:
The principal cause of these problems is simple: except in extreme cases, there is no reliable method for evaluating a person's motivation (effort) or claims of pain, fatigue, depression, anxiety and the other subjective factors which determine whether or not a person can work (details). The Social Security Administration's attempts to create rules for determining the presence or absence of disability have failed badly (details) and the Administration makes matters worse by doing a very poor job of collecting information on most applicants (details), misclassifying their previous occupations, and using occupational data which was unreliable when it was collected and now is 25 or more years out of date (details).
Meanwhile, we are missing some of our best opportunities to help those who are unemployed and want to return to work. Vocational rehabilitation is badly neglected, with less than 1% of what we spend for disability benefits being spent for vocational rehabilitation (details). As a result, many who are unemployed, have no marketable skills, and are threatened with homelessness and would like to return to work see no other option than to apply for disability benefits.
Surely we can do better than to submit our disabled and impaired citizens to the current disability lottery. On learning that a person is not working our first step should be to have trained individuals visit the person to determine why he or she is not working and what might be done to help him or her return to work. Once that has been done,
For $555 billion a year, we could do much better than we are doing now. Reform is badly needed.
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Last reviewed on 2/1/2021.