It sickens me to share that, in their ongoing jihad to transfer all the nation’s wealth from the poor and middle classes to the 1%, Republicans are warring against disabled people applying for benefits. Republicans are exaggerating the issue of fraudulent applications way out of proportion.
Having failed in numerous frontal assaults on Social Security, the Republican congressional leadership several years ago adopted a new strategy for dismantling the program: attack and demonize Disability Insurance, which they consider to be its soft underbelly. With last week’s passage of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, they drew blood.
We’ve been hearing it for years now: Disability Insurance is overgenerous, fraud-ridden, a well-intentioned program that’s mutated into a form of middle-class welfare. Criteria for awarding benefits need to be tightened, or the $150 billion DI trust fund will go bankrupt. The traditional solution for imbalances in Social Security’s trust funds—shifting money between the DI and the Old Age and Survivors’ (OASI) fund—shouldn’t be used unless “substantive reforms” [Murdoch delinked] are implemented.
How wonderful, then, that according to the Wall Street Journal [Murdoch delinked], “Social Security will get its first upgrade since the 1980s to fix Disability Insurance,” thanks to a kumbaya moment between the White House and congressional Republican and Democratic leaders. The two-year Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, which just passed the House and the Senate, shifts money into the DI trust fund to keep it from running out of money in 2016.
In exchange, however, it launches a veritable national jihad against those dreaded disability fraudsters.
According to a summary of the House bill, it “prevents evidence submitted by unlicensed or sanctioned physicians and health care providers from being considered when determining disability.” It expands a pilot project to investigate fraud, in which “Cooperative Disability Investigations (CDI) units, jointly run by the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), and consisting of staff from local SSA offices, the OIG, State Disability Determination Services (DDS), and local law enforcement, into a nationwide program.”…
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Republicans have made it even dif ficult for disabled people to get the benefits they have earned with their payroll deductions. It’s already very hard. For over 2.5 years I often had to choose between food and medicine. I had to pull a tooth myself. The judge said my case was so obvious that I should have been approved from day 1.
Democrats need to stop giving Republicans tactical victories when threatened with government shutdown. That Republicans gave up a lot to drive in this wedge, but that does not ease the suffering of disabled people, whose benefits are withheld.
13 Responses to “Republicans Declare War on the Disabled”
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Going back to, once again, St.Reagan, the ploy of vastly overstating (as in "Welfare Queen") fraud is a GOPig standard scare tactic!
Having been through the process with hubby (he was turned down), I am well aware that it is easier to get a bachelor's degree on one's own than it is to get Disability with an advocate. It always has been.How I wish it were possible to put every Republican through the process so that they could personally see just how difficult it is.It's hard enough to get SNAP or to vote in states with bigoted laws – it is a thousand times harder to qualify for disability. But they would rather spend $150 in unnecessary "fraud prevention" than pay out $1 in benefits. Then they claim Democrats are wasteful. It boggles the mind.
In 1999 I had a stroke. My short term memory vaporized after 6 (or so) seconds. I was turned down repeated by the SS people. it took me 5 years (Bush had cut the number of people that could sit on a appeal board).
After hearing my day to day challenges the board not only awarded me disability but they retroactively started it the day after the stroke. My employer had disability insurance but once SS covered it they went after me retroactively for the disability that had been denied me. Bah Humbug on Bush and all the republicans and my former employer for allowing such crap.
Thankfully they also got rid of the pilot letting non-medical folks do 100% of the decision in certain states that were finding a lower proportion eligible than in the states with medical review.
My baby brother received a denial from Social SEcurity Disability the day he died of a massive heart attack, that was nineteen years ago. It is even worse now than it was then. It boggles my mind that people who have to work hard to scrape a living will continue to vote for Republicans.
I've been asserting since the 'seventies that toxic air and toxic water (such as the aeroal pesticide spraying which called my attention to it) would affect people's brains. To my mind the fact that, as you say, people who have to work hard to scrape a living continue to vote for Republicans is positive proof I've been correct. How I managed to stay sane I cannot imagine (at least I think I have managed to stay sane, though thay may be debatable).
Although perhaps a bit different, Lyin' Ryan received SS survivor benefits while growing up etc. Maybe those should be clawed back as an example.
Granted, I live in a different country, but my mother's stepfather was a paraplegic from the age of 3. He moved to Canada and worked for some time but eventually it became difficult and he applied for a disability pension. He was accepted but it certainly, in those days, was not big enough to support them. My grandmother worked until she was about 73 just to keep up the income.
I have two extended family members on DI, and like you, TC, one couldn't afford going to the dentist, for an abscessed tooth, and still hasn't because he can't afford it. Edie, so very sad about your brother! It's absolutely horrible how this is going. Very dismal to say the least.
This is a manufactured "crisis" entirely invented out of whole cloth by Rethuglicans in their never-ending efforts to dismantle Social Security itself.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren sums up my sentiments perfectly:
Even I can see that the Republicans are using the same blueprint to wage war on all but the 1%. Just say a social scheme is riddled with fraud, managed badly, costing to much or giving handouts, and on the brink of collapse and, although none of it is true, for some strange reason you get the go ahead to punish those that had so little to live on in the first place and make their lives unlivable. This time the blueprint is used on the disabled "who are getting handouts". This tactic is utterly deplorable but what is even more digusting that it never is truly chalanged and the cuts to the already disenfranchised are just accepted.
Elizabeth Warren has a better proposal and related petition is at:
https://act.credoaction.com/sign/warren_ceo_pay
CREDO petition above signed. Thanks, jla. Hugzzz.
You are welcome Jim and thanks for putting it on the Care2 thread.