As a physician, I can assure you it already is. But I do anticipate it getting worse.
Yeah, it is a problem already, but more of a that is sad problem, and less of we don’t have the money in social security to cover this. 10 years from now, will we have that be the case?
Then what’s the point of it all? You tax the rich to give money to the poor so they can buy the stuff the rich create in their robot factories? Why even make the stuff then?
And yet somehow, people with legitimate medical issues often lack the physical/mental resources to fight through the disability system to get actually needed support. Buddy of mine suffering from, simultaneously, [diagnosed] fibromyalgia, PCOS, severe depression, anxiety, and a handful more debilitating conditions I can’t even recall because the list is too long, and she’s into year three of her fight for disability. . .
The disability story is interesting to me… The article describes a guy with chromic pain issues from a long life working… but then says he’s only 39.
So I’m wondering… Why does he have those problems?
My grandfather worked at a manufacturing plant until he was 60… Did real, serious business manual labor for decades.
So I’m wondering, what would cause this guy to have these problems? Are they even problems? I mean, ok, you’re in your late 30’s. You start to feel the wear and tear on your body at that age, that you never noticed previously. But so did every other generation before us.
I’m honestly wondering if this is a new problem, or if folks are just weaker than they used to be.
It does say he fell off a roof at one point and never had it looked at. Maybe it’s not the chronic stuff, but a few bad events?
Also, I could see working as a roofer, they might not put much emphasis on long-term employee health. I could see 15 years of swinging a hammer the wrong way doing more damage than 40 years of doing something else the right way.
There’s also the question of generalizing from a few examples.
I think honestly, it is because it is super easy to get disability.
And most states hire companies to go through welfare rolls to see if they qualify for disability. Because, disability are checks from the federal government, and the state pays nothing for them, unlike welfare.
A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on
disability doesn’t cost the state a cent, because the federal government
covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save
money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And the Public
Consulting Group is glad to help.
PCG is a private company that states pay to comb their
welfare rolls and move as many people as possible onto disability. “What
we’re offering is to work to identify those folks who have the highest
likelihood of meeting disability criteria,” Pat Coakley, who runs PCG’s
Social Security Advocacy Management team, told me.
The company has an office in eastern Washington state
that’s basically a call center, full of headsetted women in cubicles who
make calls all day long to potentially disabled Americans, trying to
help them discover and document their disabilities:
“The high blood pressure, how long have you been taking
medications for that?” one PCG employee asked over the phone the day I
visited the company. “Can you think of anything else that’s been
bothering you and disabling you and preventing you from working?”
The PCG agents help the potentially disabled fill out
the Social Security disability application over the phone. And by help, I
mean the agents actually do the filling out. When the potentially
disabled don’t have the right medical documentation to prove a
disability, the agents at PCG help them get it. They call doctors’
offices; they get records faxed. If the right medical records do not
exist, PCG sets up doctors’ appointments and calls applicants the day
before to remind them of those appointments.
This is literally a scheme for state governments to save money on welfare.\
There’s a reason PCG goes to all this trouble. The company gets paid by
the state every time it moves someone off of welfare and onto
disability. In recent contract negotiations with Missouri, PCG asked for
$2,300 per person. For Missouri, that’s a deal – every time someone
goes on disability, it means Missouri no longer has to send them cash
payments every month. For the nation as a whole, it means one more
person added to the disability rolls.
Great. Seems like a great way for a country to work.
Maybe the feds should hire PCG to go through the disability rolls and find people they can revoke and push back to the states.
Yea, I don’t think disability “abuse” is a new thing. I think it has become a go to place for those whose unemployment runs out or for those who are just tired of working. Sadly many who deserve it get mixed in with those who work the system.
And anyone who puts 20 years in the construction industry probably qualifies.
These people literally think they can bullshit God.
One thing I’d be curious about in looking more closely at the correlation between disability and rural settings to determine which way the causation flows. Is it rural folks applying for disability more, or are people with disability more likely to end up living in a rural setting. I know a few folks in my state on disability, and they decided to move from the city to small rural towns after they got on disability. Which makes perfect sense. The same disability income is going to get a lot more apartment/house/trailer in a small town with ultra low property values than it will in a large city.
This is true. Actually, knowing some family members that are on disability, they were strongly urged to move from an expensive city apt to a rural area with much cheaper rent.
But, doesn’t change the fact that rural areas are where those with disabilities are, and the jobs aren’t.
This section of the disability article is key:
Rural America experienced the most rapid increase in disability rates over the past decade, the analysis found, amid broad growth in disability that was partly driven by demographic changes that are now slowing as disabled baby-boomers age into retirement.
It really sounds like a portion of baby-boomers, especially those in rural areas with limited job prospects for older workers (as well as everyone else) went on disability to tide them over until Social Security retirement ages. It certainly appears as if the crash accelerated that process when looking at the animations (though it’s tough to tell).
Interestingly enough, in the Bay Area, rates went down (I believe a thriving economy will do that), but once you get to the rural areas, even in CA, they were up 35% or so.
Fuck shit ass baby boomers
Yeah, this certainly isn’t new. I recall reading an article 5 or so years ago about how disability was essentially evolving into a long-term unemployment program for workers who couldn’t be re-trained and whose jobs had been lost or otherwise automated away.
Actually, it may have been this This American Life episode:
Poor white people want all the benefits in the world until they find out that black people are benefiting them from too.
Literally everything about Trump “economic anxiety” is explained by that simple fact. Whether it’s the “Obama phone” bullshit, or outrage on Fox News that poor people have microwaves, or whatever else.
Poor white people are “victims”. They think poor black people are “lazy”. The victims need government benefits, and they want to make sure that the “lazy” people don’t benefit.
Trump pandered to the “victims” by blaming all their woes on the “lazy”. They all get fucked in the end.
Biblical illiteracy among evangelicals is a real thing. It makes no damn sense, but it’s palpably widespread among them.
Some people have a legitimate reason for going on disability etc, but I also think some people have been brought up too sheltered and/or are just damn lazy.
Anecdotal evidence:
The husband to one of my sisters used to run a business involving a lot of manual labor / heavy lifting etc. At the time of this story it mostly involved renovating/improving floors (Marble, Concrete, etc etc…) (using a very heavy machine that after a few hours of polishing would make a concrete floor look like marble afterwards (you could see your reflection in it, was pretty nice.)
It took a lot of time and was pretty noisy, dusty and not a lot of fun. So, around xmas time one year he has a contract to renovate the floor in a medium sized community centre, which meant working 9+hours for 3 days in a barely heated building, cleaning the floors, spraying it with the solution (that helped make the floor so shiny…) then using the heavy as fk machine all over it. Since it was basically ‘sanding’ the floor it generated a lot of dust, so by the end of the day you were covered in tiny tiny particles everywhere (had to wear a respirator and googles for a lot of it).
My sister asked if I could help out, and on the first day it was her husband, me, and some guy who had applied for the job in the company (since there was a vacancy). So we worked all day, and the hired hand had to be told in explicit terms what to do, as he couldn’t figure anything out…
The second day, new guy was gone, claiming it was ‘too hard’. Hell, if I could do it on my spare time for free, as an IT consultant in my day-to-day job, surely a guy 10 years younger than me who was unemployed could at least finish the damn 3 day job. My sisters husband then told me that he had a hard time finding people to do the job, as most of them would just give up after a few days claiming it was too “heavy” - that said, he had ruined his own back from doing this job.
The pay was really good for this kind of job by the way. Giving up after a single day feels a bit weak. Some time later, the company gets an assignment on the other side of the country, and they travel there with another prospective employee who applied. This guy quits after two days, leaving my sisters husband alone to do the job. GG.
tl;dr; “some young whippersnappers are just lazy and shouldn’t receive benefits.”
What’s weird to me is that the Bible is not a very large book, especially if you cut out a bunch of the begats and repetition, which don’t make for compelling reading or lessons. If you’re a lifelong Christian that goes to church a lot, I have to assume you covered the text a couple of times by adulthood.
How then, do so many Christians remain ignorant of what is in the Bible? I know part of it is that interpretation into modern lessons can be tricky, and the text itself can be contradictory, but how do you get the factual stuff wrong? Like the Bible literally states X on the page, but you think it states Y, or you don’t know the Bible says Z at all?
Because they choose not to learn. It would require extremely hard things on their end of things.
I’ve had “discussions” with evangelicals that basically boil down to:
“Well how much am I supposed to give to the poor and needy? I mean should I become poor myself?”
(mind you the amount in question was effectively nothing at all to them)
I mean… Jesus was pretty clear about it:
“Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”
But giving away all your shit is a tall order. So is getting robbed and giving the dude the shirt off your back. So is turning the other cheek. Love your enemies. These are radical, crazy ideas, even now. Jesus’s path was never an easy one. Hell, one could argue it was never a very realistic one. It’s basically extreme pacifism and socialism.