Timesizing® Associates
[Commentary] ©2002-04 Philip Hyde, Timesizing Wire, Box 117 Harvard Sq, Cambridge MA 02238 USA (617) 623-8080 - HOMEPAGE

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Disability and “disability”
For current disability news, see ‘Additional disability news’ below first long story  

America has another little secret besides the highest incarceration rate in the developed world and a huge homeless population - never mind workers' comp (7/26-28/2003 #2), welfare and unemployment:  There are now more than 53 million disabled Americans (12/11/03 WSJ, A19), of whom 11% (5.7 million, Jim Lehrer's News Hour, PBS 7/29/2003) are "on disability" - all this despite huge untapped potential in the area of job design and unprecedented medical and computer technology to offset every kind of disability, as demonstrated by the continuing contributions of quadriplegic physicist Stephen Hawking. Re the solution, see "New tools to help patients reclaim damaged senses - Tiny and powerful, the devices are moving out of the laboratory," by Sandra Blakeslee, 11/23/2004 NYT, D1).  Re the problem, this article -

• Laid-off workers swelling the cost of disability pay - Most from low-end jobs - Number rose by 2.4 million in a decade [to 5.42m], pushing pricetag to $60B last year, by Louis Uchitelle, 9/02/2002 NYT, front page.
  [Last year's 5.42m has become 5.7m on disability (Jim Lehrer's News Hour, PBS 7/29/2003). Disability is another distortion in our society caused by our failure to design and implement a mechanism to automatically adjust our workweek downward as our worksaving technology mounts upward, and spread the free-time benefits to all Americans in the form of easier full-time employment and financially secure leisure rather than stressed-out overwork next to financially anxious under-employment.]
  Millions of low-skilled workers have turned to federal disability pay as a refuge from layoffs in recent years, doubling the benefit's cost and, with little notice, making it by far the government's biggest income-support program. Most of those qualifying for the benefits, part of the Social Security system, never got past highschool and held jobs like factory worker, waitress, store clerk, laborer or healthcare aide. Their numbers have grown to 5.42 million today from 3m in 1990, swelling the program's costs to $60 billion last year. That far surpasses unemployment insurance or food stamps or any other similar program. "Show me a highschool dropout, particularly a male, who is over the age of 40 and is not working and there is a 40-45% chance that he is on SocSec disability insurance," said David Autor, an economist at MIT.
  It's not that disabling injuries are occurring more frequently. Research by a number of economists indicates that the growing numbers signal instead a reliance on disability benefits by low-end workers who had ignored their ailments as long as their limited skills brought them steady employment. Some who would have gone on welfare [if it hadn't been "reformed"] now apply for disability pay instead. "When you are a person who has lost a job, and you can't find another, and you are home sitting on the couch," said [Judge] Morley White, an administrative law judge in Cleveland who rules on disability claims, "you become preoccupied with ailments that do qualify in many cases as legal disability but while you were working did not come into your mind."
  [The dumbing of America proceeds apace. We have not only made it easier for people to earn a dishonest living than an honest one - hence our world record prison population, 2.1m in lockup, 6.6m including probation/parole - but we have apparently made it easier to people to be parasitic hypochondriacs than handicapped self-supporters. This is what our much-touted " low unemployment rate" doesn't tell. Maybe this frontpage article in the NY Times will wake up English-speaking economists to the fact that "time is of the essence" and if we don't share the vanishing worktime and cut the outdated thinking about "technology creates more jobs than it destroys" and the attempts to ridicule the "lump of labor fallacy" - which is actually a shrinking employment truism at current levels of worksaving technology - our bloated prison-industrial complex and swollen disability rolls are going to get even worse. For many of us, George Dubya has already made it embarrassing to be an American, far surpassing the "Ugly American" syndrome of the 50s and 60s. How much further do we want this to go? It's no longer a mystery what kind of design mechanism we need at the center of our economy to automatically balance our share of market-demanded work per person. That design challenge has been solved by the Timesizing program. We already have two major and hosts of minor American companies that practice this approach, at least in primitive form. But what will it take to jog our economists and analysts into this way of thinking? They are sooo far from it now, they are wandering in a desert of ineffectuality. With them clogging the media, we will never made any signficant human progress. They refuse to even think about the problems of the concentration of wealth or even the concentration of work and skills. Everything is supposed to be solved by mere growth and expansion, and in the GDP, they count as "growth" some pretty gross and destructive, even self-destructive, behavior. Their world and their imaginations are small. Their homo economicus is a ridiculous caricature. They pull six-figure salaries for nothing. When will they get off their fat mental butts and make some serious contributions to human progress?]
  Neither Congress nor the White House has challenged the skyrocketing cost of disability insurance, which will go up an additional $9 billion this year, reaching $69 billion, the Social Security Administration estimates.
  [If we don't start making it easier for Americans to support themselves, we taxpayers are going to have to do it, and do it with bigger and bigger taxes. And at our levels of technology, we probably need a definition of "full-time employment" that is only 20-30 hours a week per person. Instead, we're lengthening the workweek per person, as Juliet Schor points out in today's op eds.]
  By comparison, the agency expects to pay out $382 billion in traditional old-age pensions in 2002. [Although it] finances both pensions and disability payments through the same payroll tax...the debate on the financial health of Soc Sec has focused on the much larger pension system.
  [Guess the disabled have been a little private preserve of votes for whoever quietly favors the system.]
  ...The surge in the disability rolls started with the early 1990s recession, and the numbers climbed steadily as layoffs became more common, even in the boom years of the late 90s.
  [So much for the much vaunted American "efficiency" of layoffs and the supposedly "reformed" American work rules that we're constantly trying to shove down Europe's throat.]
  Hard times over the last 18 months produced another surge in the disability rolls, which grew by nearly 400,000 people in that period, unevenly across the country. State officials process the disability claims, acting as agents for Soc Sec, and some states have been more generous than others. "In tough times, there is a tendency at the state level to cut people a little slack," said Charles Jeszeck, a labor economist at the GAO.
  The rising numbers of people on disability take some of the gloss off the prosperity of the late 1990s. Unemployment fell and in the [supposedly] tight labor markets, jobs went begging, even at the low-paying end.
  [Why shouldn't jobs go begging at the low-paying end when so many of our children in poverty have parents with multiple low-paying jobs? If you can't make ends meet on the low-paying end, you look for some alternative - disability, crime, homelessness, suicide.]
  But the Labor Dept. counts as unemployed only those people actively seeking new jobs. When people stop looking and drop out, including people who go on the disability rolls, they no longer count as unemployed.
  [Hence the rose-colored glasses with which America looks in the mirror.]
  Those dropouts surged...in the late 1990s. There were so many of them that if they had been counted..., the unemployment rate would have been higher, perhaps by as much as half a percentage point, according to new reserach by Dr. Autor and Mark Duggan, a U. or Chic. economist....
  The 5.42m people on disability pay, receiving $819 a month on average, is equal to 4% of those who hold jobs today. That increased from 2.5% in 1990, after barely rising at all in the 1980s, although Congress broadened the definition of disability and made proving it easier in 1984. It became particularly easier in the cases of back trouble and mental health problems, which can now include depression, manic behavior and other "mood disorders." Back trouble and mental stress are the two most cited ailments in disability awards....
  [We know a lady on Rhode Island shore who's on disability for "back trouble," yet she's out in her garden daily, tending and bending.]
  75% of those on disability have [only] a highschool diploma or less education, the Soc Sec Admin reports. Their limited skills mean they are often still without a job 5 months after being laid off - the minimum time required to file for disability pay.
  [Of course, the grasping executives of the 80s and 90s, undisciplined by labor shortage, cut training budget after training budget and passed along the costs of training to taxpayers and individual job applicants. This is one of the big changes in the Timesizing program.]
  Magnifying the problem, the low skilled find themselves mostly holding jobs that require physical exertion, Judge [Morely] White said, and any ailment becomes an obstacle to landing the next job. So they turn to disability....
  [So the disability program functions essentially as a government subsidy on illness, and as Milton Friedman says, whatever you subsidize, you get more of.]
  ...On a windy day on the docks in April 1997, a rear door of a tractor-trailer swung into [Gregory] Jordan's back. "I completely blew a disk out," Mr. Jordan said, explaining that he had gone back to work after the accident and had continued on the job until Christmas, when the pain finally forced him into a hospital and he learned the extent of his injury. Workmen's compensation payments soon started, and they will continue alongside the disability checks.
  [Aha, so workmen's comp is different from and parallel to Soc Sec disability, and you can get both.]
  Like old-age pensions, disability pay is based on former earnings and not on need, as welfare is.... "No employer is going to hire me and take on the liability that I represent," Mr. Jordan said....
  [So now we see another dimension of FDR's tragic mistake in 1933. He turned away from work sharing, which would have balanced, for the level of technology of the time, job seekers and job openings, would have disciplined employers by making them anxious enough for employees that they would implement on-the-job training all over the place (as they did later when disciplined by the War), and would have played to America's strengths all round, and instead, FDR played to America's weaknesses, with government intervention in industrial accidents a la Workmen's Comp and Social Security disability, government intervention in old age a la Soc Sec old-age pensions and government intervention in unemployment a la Unemployment Insurance and government intervention in poverty a la minimum wage. Not to mention the alphabet soup of artificial government makework programs like the WPA, CCC, NRA, TVA.... - when all he had to do was referee the private sector and keep it in better trim, job seekers with job openings, by sharing the vanishing work, thus making the private sector clean up its own mess and take responsibility for its own infirmities, instead of passing more and more of the costs of that mess and those infirmities onto the taxpayer. And later the 30-hour workweek could have been indexed to technological advance via comprehensive unemployment so it would adjust automatically to any rise in unemployment, welfare, disability, forced retirement, incarceration.... In short, it could have been gradually design-enhanced toward some variation on the Timesizing program design.]
  "Pain is the most argued thing in disability cases," Judge White said, adding that "98% of the people who come before me truly believe they are disabled."
  [This is the most insidious thing about these programs. They subtly encourage one to accentuate the negative.]
  
  • ...Soc Sec officials attribute the rise [in the disability rolls] to the large number of aging baby boomers.
  • In addition, many women have gone to work, thus becoming eligible for benefits.
  The rules require a disability applicant to have held a paid job for a total of 5 of the previous 10 years and to have earned wages for 25% of the time since age 22. The earnings in these years then become the basis for calculating disability.
  [Notice that this arbitrary age setting of 22 means that the US government has, in this legislation, set a nationwide lower-limit standard on worklife per person.]
  ...Despite the baby boomers [however,] the average age of people on disability has fallen.
  • ...Younger people increasingly qualify on the ground of mental illness.
    [Great, we're subsidizing mental illness among Americans. What a way to strengthen the future of a nation!]
    
  • With the average age falling, the disabled are remaining on the rolls longer, and that has swelled the numbers.
  • Congress helped in this process by making it harder for Soc Sec officials to declare people cured and no longer eligible for disability.
    [And we have the nerve to criticize Europe for needing "labor market reforms"?! "Physician, heal thyself!"]
    
  • ...Lawyers [now] increasingly help applicants with their claims, earning fees if the claims are awarded.
    
  • The disability payments themselves have been rising at a faster rate than the pay of most low-end workers,
    [thanks to our frozen 1940-era workweek]
    gradually making paid employment less attractive for the unskilled, said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard University labor economist.
  • There's another lure, particularly for the unskilled who often work without company-paid health insurance.
    [And according to a recent news item, that category is increasing.]
    Two years after the disability checks begin to arrive, Medicare coverage kicks in free.
    [So America is going to get its shorter workweek in the worst possible, most poverty-spreading way, by having spoiled employers convert full-timers to part-time to save on benefits, especially health insurance, and then America is going to get its universal single-payer health insurance in the worst possible way, by incentivizing the working poor to go on disability and after two years of that, automatically get Medicare. Brilliant.]
    
  One approach to trimming the [disability] rolls that might not be dismissed as mean spirited is a proposal by Kenneth Apfel, a commissioner of the Soc Sec Admin in the Clinton years, that would combine disability pay with retraining and part-time work....
  [A good idea but still, just another over-specific bandaid for another over-specific problem. We have a huge general problem, another aspect of which is sicktime overuse leading to disability-system overuse, the focus of 9/03/2000 #2. The problem is too many people who need to support themselves and too few market-demanded jobs at the 40-or-more-hours/week level to allow them all to support themselves. Let's quit kidding around, and share the vanishing work - let's cut the workweek, using a flexible market-based system such as Timesizing. Then we can gradually dismantle all these costly and overlapping detailed programs that are trying to solve a big top-central problem at the bottom and sides, and having the opposite effect to what is intended: they're spreading pain and costs, not reducing them.]

1. Disability cases last far longer as backlog rises - Reform plan stymied - Most appeals succeed, but waits can go on for years, by Erik Eckholm NYT, A1.

1. Disability rates are up sharply, pointer (to A7), WSJ, front page.
   ...for working-age Americans over the past two decades, and obesity appears the prime suspect, Rand says.
   [target -]
   Researchers link sharp rise in disability rates for younger adults to obesity, by Ron Winslow, WSJ, A7.
   Disability among Americans in the prime of their working lives has risen sharply in the past two decades, another consequence of the nation's obesity epidemic.
   Researchers at the Rand Corp., the nonprofit Santa Monica CA thinktank, found a 40-50% rise in recent years in the number of people from the ages of 30 to 49 whose ability to care for themselves or perform routine tasks was limited by disability.... The study appears in the current issue of the journal Health Affairs..\.. Several factors may be contributing to the rise in disability, says Dana Goldman, director of health economics at Rand and the principal investigator on the study. But there is "evidence to support that obesity may be a primary reason," he says....
   [Never mind the deepening dearth of jobs and the fact that they got kicked off welfare at the 5-year lifetime limit.]

• Democrats and the disabled, by Albert Hunt (one of whose 3 children is severely disabled), WSJ, A19.
  "Disability" covers any individual with "a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities." Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA], 1991 [blowout].
  ...If the High Court follows its recent decisions, it'll...further chip away at the protections of the ADA, enacted in 1991, the most notable of the first President Bush's domestic legacies. More than a few of the judges tapped by his son want to further dismantle much of this landmark legislation.
  There are 53 million disabled Americans, half of them severely afflicted....
  [53m sounds high to us. That would, after all, be one in every six Americans (current official population, c.290m).]
  Conservatives used to rail against judicial activism, but now the[ir own activist judges] are dismantling the disabilities protections enacted by Congress, often under the [cloak] of states' rights. ... Sound familiar?...
  The real agenda of these conservative activists is, under the guise of states' rights, to eviscerate the power of Congress to expand civil rights for minorities.
  The disabled are the most visible victims of this effort; that should be a campaign issue in 2004. Simply put,
  • should the rights and protections of tens of millions of Americans with disabilities be legislatively and legally expanded
  • or should they be curtailed by a bunch of activist judges?

• Barriers toppling for disabled medical students - Balancing the needs of students without sacrificing [patient] safety, by Linda Villarosa, NYT, D5.
  ...In the past, students with physical disabilities were rarely accepted to medical school, and they rarely completed it. But now...a growing number of students with disabilities...are thriving in medical school. ...The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 allowed disabled students access to every level of education.... A survey of the American Council on Education notes that the number of full-time freshmen with disabilities has increased to 11% from 7% from 1988 1998. "As a result," \said\ Martha Smith, project coordinator of the Center on Self-Determination of Oregon Health & Science University..."these college students with disabilities are part of the next wave of students who say 'I can go on to professional schools.'..."

• Avis plans free add-ons for disabled - Disabled Americans spend $13.6B on 32m trips each year, by Kortney Stringer, WSJ, D10.
  ...a Harris Interactive survey found.... The study estimated that travelers with disabities would spend at least twice what they currently spend on travel and tourism annually if airlines, hotels and other travel activities were more accessible and accommodating....

• More disabled say care falls short, by Kelly Greene, WSJ, D4.
  The number of older, disabled people with unmet medical needs is rising, with many requiring more help with basic activities and desiring more of a say in their care, according to AARP. One-third [33%] of 1,102 people with disabilities surveyed, all of whom were at least 50, said they had postponed needed healthcare in the past 12 months because they couldn't afford it....
  [Haven't we all! But doncha love the way the Wall Street Journal makes it sound like they have a choice? "They posponed it" - till when? Postponement implies choice and It's not a "postponement" when it's put off forever. That's a steep increase from the 21% of disabled people who said they were postponing care 5 years ago in a survey conducted by the same pollster, Harris Interactive Inc., Rochester NY. The latest survey was conducted in September, as part of a larger report on independent living and disability that AARP released today.
  ...Disability rates have fallen slightly for the 65-plus population in recent years.... Amoung the survey respondents,
  • 68% had a disability limiting their physical mobility,
  • 21% had a vision or hearing impairment,
  • and 18% had a cognitive or emotional condition....
  Almost half of those surveyed were receiving help with daily activities, such as cooking, bathing or shopping, most often from unpaid family members.... The study has a margin of error of 3%....

• New York says those on welfare are increasingly hard to employ - Hindered by addiction, AIDS or disability, by Leslie Kaufman, NYT, front page.
  As the willing and...able have been prodded off public assistance...they have left behind peers hobbled by addiction, disability and AIDS..\..NYC officials say..., a complaint that is increasingly voiced by welfare administrators across the country.... The number of people on public assistance with AIDS in NYC has nearly doubled in the last 3 years and now hovers at nearly 14,000. The city exempts all HIV-symptomatic individuals from any work and training requirements to get their benefits. The Bush plan offers no such wholesale exemptions for them..\.. More than half of public assistance cases involve individuals who meet the city definition of being capable of only limited work or no work at all. Even those able-bodied people still on the welfare rolls are increasingly likely to be illiterate or to stubbornly refuse work assignments despite fiscal penalties, city officials say.
  Since 1996, when the city began requiring able-bodied welfare recipients to work for their benefits, the number of people receiving public assistance has plummeted by more than two-thirds. Now, city officials say, comes the hard part. "...We have gotten down to a core group that is mostly willing but not always able to go to work...," said the commissioner of the city's HR Administration, Verna Eggleston. The agency administers the federal welfare program and Safety Net, the program for the impoverished who have exceeded the 5-year federal limit or otherwise do not qualify for federal funds.
  ...Part of the dispute between the city and the federal government...revolves around who should be exempt from work. pResident Bush's plan calls for 70% of those receiving federal welfare dollars to be engaged in some kind of work activity. The plan exempts people over 60, women with children under 3 months, and children who are eligible for aid but whose parents are not eligible, for example, because they are not citizens. If the standards under the proposed Bush plan were in place today, the city's HR Administration calculates, the city would have only 45% of the eligible caseload working.
  ..\..Former officials of the Giuliani administration say the "unengageable" element of the welfare population is rising because the city is playing reclassification games. For example, individuals with relatively mild disabilities like asthma or arthritis, who were counted as able-bodied 3 years ago, are now counted among those whose work abilities are restricted....
  Beyond the issue of defining who should be considered able to work, city officials say there is the question of just how flexible the program that brings these people to work should be, and how to define work. The Bush administration's plan, for example, gives addicts 3 months of recovery time in which they are exempt from work requirements. But the city [says] drug and alcohol abusers, for example, can be in residential treatment programs for up to a year and be considered, in effect, [employed] by the city....
  But substance abuse is just one of many areas in which there is dispute over what kind of programs can be counted as work. In recent years, the city has started a therapy and job training program called Pride, which is mandatory for those on welfare with disabilities severe enough to affect whether they can work but too mild to get them income support from the federal government. ...The catch..is that the therapy part of Pride would not currently be counted toward meeting the 40-hour workweek under the Bush program....
  [Further -]
  Report: NYC welfare cases hard to employ, AP 11/29/02 05:17 EST.
  ...Welfare rolls have dropped by 2/3 since 1996, when the city began requiring that able-bodied people on public assistance work up to 35 hours a week in exchange for benefits....

• [if true, a positive item -]
  Employers are reaching out for disabled workers to fill positions in tight labor market, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, F8.
  Allan Feldman, a disabled employee from Work Inc. in Quincy, has worked at the Sears, Roebuck store in Braintree for three years. [photo caption]
  ...With competition for workers at a record high,
  [What planet is Diane living on? The competition for workers was at record highs only during the world wars. This may be a stock bubble, but there's still a record labor surplus throughout the global economy. However, if what slight reduction in under-employment this bubble has occasioned is actually helping the disabled, great! We saw on Monday that it seems to be helping ex-convicts - see "With unemployment low, a new group is in demand: Ex-cons," 4/24/2000.]
  employers are turning to people with disabilities to fill mainstream entry-level jobs as well as positions requiring top skills.
  [Betcha this is news to a lot of disabled people.]
  The Bureau of National Affairs Inc., a research information group and think tank in DC, reports that nearly 40% of US employers have had trouble finding professional and technical workers, 1½ times higher than it was two years ago.
  [But employers are by now so spoiled by labor surplus, they expect to pluck the exactly right employee off the rack with no training. And this think tank is probably employer-oriented, not to say -biassed.]
  As a result, more employers are reaching out to workers they might not have considered in the past. "Companies are more willing to hire people with disabilities now than they have ever been in the past, but there are not enough applicants to meet the demand," said Hank Cheney [no relation to Dick we hope], president of Work Inc., a Quincy vocational training, placement, and advocacy organization.
  [He's da mon to contact, folks - he thinks there's a shortage of you, sooo his numbers in Boston area 617 are... 439-0431, 723-2088, 443-0441 (Boston proper) and 254-4094 (Brighton) from the Verizon 2001-2002 phonebook.]
  The nonprofit agency serves about 1,000 disabled clients daily. Of those, 600 are in training and employment programs. The remainder [400] work at private companies or have been placed in residential programs and are not employed.
  Five years ago, Work Inc. placed approximately 50 to 80 people in entry-level jobs per year. This year, it expects to place 200. "Getting someone who is able to work, helping them to find a job, and knowing that they will be able to keep it is really our goal," Cheney said. "Our best are always leaving us, which is what we want to see. As they become skilled, they move on. The goal is to always keep people moving forward."
  Charles Riley II, editor in chief of NYC-based WE Magazine for people with disabilities, had difficulty finding companies to interview when he published his first list of the best employers to work for. "I had to go out and find them," he said. "Now those companies come to us. So things have changed tremendously...."
  Riley credits two factors with driving the current push for inclusion: the low unemployment rate and the recent passage of The Work Incentives Improvement Act, viewed by workplace activists as the first bill to address the many employment concerns of disabled Americans. It is also the most far-reaching legislation for the disabled since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act a decade ago.
  The measure, signed into law by Pres. Clinton in December, awards states $150m over five years to develop programs that offer support for disabled residents who want to work. Even more important, the bill permits workers with disabilities to keep their Medicaid and Medicare benefits while they are employed. In the past, once a disabled person was accepted into the Social Security Disability or Supplemental Security Income Program, he became eligible for Medicare or Medicaid but could earn no more than $700 per month. If s/he earned more, financial support from the government was cut off....
  Although the US unemployment rate is now 4.1%, the lowest in 30 years, the unemployment rate among the nation's 54m [compared later figure of 5.4m and then 5.7m on disability benefits - so this 54m, which would be 19% of a total US population of 280m (one in five Americans disabled??), may be a misprint for 5.4m] disabled residents of working age is now 71%, reports the National Organization on Disability in DC....
  This year, the list \of\ the top 10 firms for disabled employees to work for...included: Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Caterpillar, Charles Schwab, Ford and Booz-Allen Hamilton....