{"id":17179,"date":"2015-11-04T14:13:16","date_gmt":"2015-11-04T22:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=17179"},"modified":"2015-11-04T14:13:16","modified_gmt":"2015-11-04T22:13:16","slug":"republicans-declare-war-on-the-disabled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2015\/11\/04\/republicans-declare-war-on-the-disabled\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans Declare War on the Disabled"},"content":{"rendered":"

It sickens me to share that, in their ongoing jihad to transfer all the nation\u2019s 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.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"1104D9sabled\"<\/p>\n

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\u2019s passage of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, they drew blood.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been hearing it for years now: Disability Insurance is overgenerous, fraud-ridden, a well-intentioned program that\u2019s 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\u2019s trust funds\u2014shifting money between the DI and the Old Age and Survivors\u2019 (OASI) fund\u2014shouldn\u2019t be used unless \u201csubstantive reforms\u201d [Murdoch delinked<\/em>] are implemented.<\/p>\n

How wonderful, then, that according to the Wall Street Journal [Murdoch delinked<\/em>], \u201cSocial Security will get its first upgrade since the 1980s to fix Disability Insurance,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

In exchange, however, it launches a veritable national jihad against those dreaded disability fraudsters.<\/p>\n

According to a summary<\/a> of the House bill, it \u201cprevents evidence submitted by unlicensed or sanctioned physicians and health care providers from being considered when determining disability.\u201d It expands a pilot project to investigate fraud, in which \u201cCooperative 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.\u201d…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <Alternet<\/a>><\/p>\n

Republicans have made it even dif ficult for disabled people to get the benefits they have earned <\/font>with their payroll deductions.  It\u2019s 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.<\/font><\/p>\n

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.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It sickens me to share that, in their ongoing jihad to transfer all the nation\u2019s 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, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}