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Are They Going To Cut Social Security Disability

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After the audit, if Social Security believes a beneficiarys medical condition has improved such that they no longer meet Social Securitys stringent criteria for disability, their benefits are terminated. It is now much easier for Social Security to say that a disabled person has medically improved thanks to a 2017 rule change that allows the agency to disregard medical evidence from a beneficiarys own doctors. Benefits are also terminated if the disabled person does not respond to the CDR.

The Social Security Administration is proposing a dramatic ramp up in the number of CDRs it conducts, adding an additional 2.6 million of them over the next decade. And thats not the only change Social Security wants to make to the CDR process.

When an applicant is approved for disability benefits, Social Security assigns them to a category that determines how often they must go through a CDR. If Social Security thinks a disabled persons medical condition is expected to improve, they set a CDR for every 6 to 18 months. If its possible the medical condition will improve, they set a CDR for every three years. And if the persons medical condition is not expected to improve, they set a CDR for every 5 to 7 years.

Social Security officials want to create a new category, medical improvement likely, that will get a CDR every two years. And they propose to move hundreds of thousands of people from less frequent CDR categories into the new category.

Kathleen Romig

 

Social Security Is Facing A Nearly $17 Trillion Funding Shortfall

Since 1985, the annually released Social Security Board of Trustees report, which examines the short-term and long-term outlook for the program, has cautioned that long-term revenue collection would be insufficient to cover outlays. In other words, Social Security wouldn’t bring in enough money to cover the estimated payments to all beneficiaries over the coming 75 years. Based on the 2020 report, the program’s unfunded obligations have now swelled to $16.8 trillion .

How does this happen? Let me assure you that baby boomers simply being born isn’t the sole factor. There a more than a half-dozen factors that have played into Social Security’s widening funding shortfall, including increased longevity, lower birth rates, lower levels of net legal immigration, and even income inequality.

If lawmakers fail to deal with this funding shortfall soon, the Trustees have estimated that the program will completely deplete its $2.9 trillion in asset reserves by 2035. What happens then is often a point of great contention.

‘more Lies’ Says Sanders As Trump Vows To ‘save’ Social Security Just One Day After Threatening Cuts

Jake Johnson

Just over 24 hours after to cut Social Security at the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering of global elites in Davos, President Donald Trump on Thursday vowed to “save” the New Deal-era program from supposed Democratic efforts to “destroy” itprompting Sen. Bernie Sanders to accuse the president of peddling “more lies.”

“Democrats are going to destroy your Social Security,” Trump on Twitter. “I have totally left it alone, as promised, and will save it!”

Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate and long-time advocate of Social Security expansion, responded by pointing in a to Trump’s 2020 budget proposal, which called for $25 billion in cuts to Social Security and trillions more in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

In a separate tweet late Thursday, Sanders posted a video contrasting the president’s comments at Davos with then-candidate Trump’s pledge in 2015 to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid from cuts backed by Republicans in Congress.

“As a candidate, Trump said he’d protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” Sanders wrote. “Now he has an obligation to tell the American people: ‘I was lying. It was all just a campaign ruse.'”

As a candidate, Trump said he’d protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Now he has an obligation to tell the American people: “I was lying. It was all just a campaign ruse.”

Bernie Sanders January 24, 2020

Receiving Ssdi And Reaching Retirement Age

If you are receiving benefits from SSDI, you generally cannot get both retirement and Social Security disability income. When you hit your full retirement age , the Social Security Administration will change your monthly benefits from the disability program to the retirement program. You will not notice a difference in your income when this happens.

While you typically can’t get both retirement and SSDI benefits, there’s one exception: if you filed for early retirement benefits after becoming disabled, then were determined to be disabled.

You can file for retirement benefits as early as age 62. However, benefits are reduced for early filing, which is defined as filing any time before FRA. The reduction in benefits is permanent and varies based how early you claim. Starting benefits at 62 when your FRA is 67 could result in as much as a 30% reduction .

If you claim Social Security retirement benefits before FRA because your disability stops you from working, and you are subsequently approved for SSDI, your early retirement benefits will have already begun. However, when you’re approved for disability benefits, the Social Security Administration brings up your monthly checks to the amount you’d have received at FRA; this could result in a significant increase in income. This only happens if the SSA determines you were disabled prior to early retirement, though.

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    What Are The Options To Strengthen Social Security

    At this point, all ideas are on the table to resolve Social Security’s funding shortfall. But the brass tacks is that a Social Security fix involves either raising additional revenue, reducing expenditures, or instituting some combination of the two.

    Most Democrats in Congress favor raising additional revenue to tackle Social Security’s cash problem. This would be accomplished by increasing or eliminating the payroll tax cap associated with the 12.4% payroll tax on earned income. In 2020, all wages and salary up to $137,700 are subjected to the payroll tax, while earnings above this level are exempt. Raising or eliminating the cap would require higher-income workers to pay more into the program. For added context, the amount of earnings exempted from the payroll tax has soared from north of $300 billion in 1983 to $1.2 trillion by 2016.

    As for Republican lawmakers, most prefer the idea of reducing long-term outlays to strengthen Social Security. This would be done by gradually increasing the full retirement age from its expected peak of 67 years in 2022 to as high as age 70. In doing so, future generations of retirees would have to decide between waiting longer to get their full monthly payout and accepting a steeper monthly reduction for claiming early. No matter their choice, lifetime benefits paid would decline for future generations of retired workers.

    What Is Social Security Disability

    The Social Security Administration is best known for retirement benefits, but it also oversees two programs for people living with disabilities:

    Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, is for low-income individuals without a work history. The maximum payment for an individual is $783 a month beginning in January.

    Social Security Disability Insurance is for workers who become disabled. Payment amounts depend on past earning. In 2019, the average payment was $1,234 per month.

    To qualify for either, individuals must show they have a long-term medical, psychological or intellectual impairment that prevent them for working. 

    Children who are blind or have severe functional limitations expected to last at least a year or result in death also qualify. 

    Trump Proposed Cuts But Congress Didnt Bite

    As a candidate, Donald Trump promised to make no cuts to Social Security. As president, he has periodically proposed policies that would cut aspects of the program, but so far, none of them have been enacted.

    Trump released a proposed budget for 2021, as he had in previous years, that advocated cutting two disability programs administered by the Social Security Administration: Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income. Collectively, the two programs serve millions of Americans. 

    SSDI and SSI are separate from and smaller than the agency’s main retirement income program. SSDI benefits people with physical and mental conditions that are severe enough to permanently keep them from working. It is funded by Social Security payroll taxes. Meanwhile, SSI payments are limited to low-income Americans senior citizens, or adults or children who are disabled or blind. The payments are funded through general revenue from the Treasury.

    Trump’s actions very well should have earned him a Promise Broken. He tried multiple times to break his own promise. But our promise meters are about outcomes. We’ve gotten complaints over the years about promises that couldn’t happen because they were blocked by Congress, but we repeatedly rated them on the outcome.

    In this case, a Promise Broken rating would suggest that seniors had their Social Security benefits cut. But that isn’t the case.

    Bernie Sanders Exposes Republican Plot To Cut Social Security For 11 Million Disabled People

    Sen. Bernie Sanders is warning that Republicans are plotting to cut Social Security benefits for 11 million disabled Americans through a rule change that would make it more difficult to fund the disability account.

    In a statement, Sen. Sanders explained what the House rules change will mean for disabled Americans who depend on Social Security:âAround 11 million Americans, including nearly 2 million children with a disabled parent, rely on Social Security to help keep them out of poverty,â said Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee.

    A new House rule creates a legal obstacle course that would make it harder to shift funds from the Social Security retirement account, which has a big surplus, to the smaller disability account. Such transfers have been done routinely in the past under both Republican and Democratic presidencies, including four times under President Ronald Reagan.

    Without a transfer to shore up the disability fund, Social Security Administration experts say the disability program will run short of money next year, and there will be only enough to cover 80 percent of scheduled benefits.

    âInstead of working to strengthen Social Security for all, the House Republicansâ new rule puts Americaâs most vulnerable at risk,â Sanders said.

    Jason Easley

    Awards and  Professional Memberships

    Social Security Disability Insurance Is Coverage That Workers Earn

    Social Security Disability Insurance is a social insurance program under which workers earn coverage for benefits, by working and paying Social Security taxes on their earnings. The program provides benefits to disabled workers and to their dependents. For those who can no longer work due to a disability, our disability program is there to replace some of their lost income.

    The Power Of Privilege

    With all of these horror stories, many wonder whether the process to secure Social Security Disability Insurance can ever be easy? The answer is a tentative yes if you have the right amount of privilege or connections.

    Becky Meyers worked as a lawyer before she had a series of strokes and open-heart surgery. Her employer had a generous disability plan in place following another employees stroke a few years earlier. The policy allowed the insurer to subcontract to a company whose sole occupation was filling out and filing SSDI applications.

    There is no human way, left to my own devices, I would have been able to pull the documents together, Meyers says. My story is a story of how privilege makes everything different in this world.

    Because Meyers condition was thought to be stress-induced, had she been forced to undergo the standard Social Security process without any help, she feels the effort and strain would have been life-threatening.

    I know it sounds incredibly histrionic, but I honestly think the stress of having to do that myself probably would have killed me, Meyers confides. And I doubt Im the only person who is in that situation .

    But Meyers still feels the repercussions of SSDI even if her initial application process was relatively painless. After all, the SSA still checks in to make sure she has not recovered.

    Al Jazeera contacted the Social Security Administration for a response to this article but received no reply.

    Major League Baseball Wants To Crush 42 Minor League Teams And Their Hometowns

    Marc Normandin

    Major League Baseball is threatening to destroy 42 minor league teams, and none of its reasons for doing so are any good.

    Minor League Baseball, known as MiLB, is the level where nearly every future big-league player is developed, making it a vital piece of the baseball hierarchy in America. Minor league teams not only feed the MLB teams with which theyre affiliated, they also create thousands of jobs for smaller baseball-friendly communities across the nation, such as Lowell, Massachusetts, or more remote, otherwise baseball-less locales such as Burlington, Vermont, or Keizer, Oregon.

    Minor league teams are what truly allows the sport to be considered the national pastime, as it manages to make the game national.

    So far, weve for shrinking the minors, weve heard some Minor League teams respond, and weve even witnessed members of Congress get in on the discussion with a disapproving letter and a task force. But we havent heard from the players themselves. What do the players, who lack a seat at the table in all of these discussions, think of the potential loss of more than 1,000 jobs, of severing the connection between MLB and 42 communities, and of their desire for a fair wage being repaid with the loss of a quarter of their jobs?

    Eliminating Waste In The Ssdi Program

    Government shutdown: Cuts to social services would affect ...

    To begin with, each of President Trump’s federal budget proposals while in office have of the Social Security Disability Insurance program, which was providing benefits to nearly 9.8 million people, as of August 2020. This overhaul focused on eliminating wasteful spending within SSDI, as well as reducing retroactive benefits paid to eventually approved beneficiaries from a period of 12 months to six months.

    Since presidential budget proposals estimate the economic impact of fiscal policy actions for a period of 10 years, Trump’s federal budgets were expected to reduce SSDI outlays by the following amounts over the subsequent decade :

    There are two things worth noting here. First, these figures are a drop in the bucket relative to what Social Security is expected to outlay over the next decade. According to estimates, Social Security is estimated to expend more than $15 trillion, in aggregate, over the next 10 years. This means a $24 billion to $72 billion outlay reduction to resolve perceived inefficiencies in the SSDI program represents a mere fraction of total outlays.

    Second, presidential budget proposals have historically represented nothing more than a starting point for more thorough budget discussions in Congress. This is to say that none of Trump’s four proposals were ever given much credence as concrete spending plans.

    America Already Has Among The Strictest Eligibility Standards In The World: Opposing View

    Hardly a day goes by without the Trump administration finding a new way to slash the safety net.

    But its latest proposal which would cut Social Security disability benefits by $2.6 billion over 10 years is one of the cruelest. It would require millions of beneficiaries to re-prove their disability and navigate a complex web of red tape and paperwork every two years. Hundreds of thousands of people could lose benefits even though their condition has not changed.

    Weve seen this movie before, when the Reagan administration implemented a similar policy. People with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, serious mental illness and even terminal cancer were notified they were no longer disabled and their benefits terminated. All told, half a million people lost benefits. Thousands died, many by suicide. President Ronald Reagans disability purge caused such suffering, it sparked a bipartisan revolt by 18 states that refused to implement it. Ultimately, a rare unanimous vote by Congress ended the nightmarish policy in 1984.

    Proving eligibility for benefits is an arduous process that can take months if not years, and hundreds, if not thousands of pages of medical evidence. America has among the strictest eligibility standards in the world. Over 60% of applications are denied, and tens of thousands of people die each year waiting for benefits.

    How Disabled Americans Are Harmed By A System Meant To Help Them

    People with disabilities struggle with the US Social Security Administration, which many say keeps them impoverished.

    Boston, United States In 2015, I fell 25 feet from a Redwood tree and was in a coma for 10 days.

    I spent the rest of that year using an arm crutch and went through four months of outpatient rehabilitation. Nine months later, I had eye muscle surgery to correct double vision that resulted from damage to my occipital lobe.

    Five years later, I still suffer from fine motor deficits, balance issues, and have trouble with my memory and speech.

    My first application for Social Security Disability Insurance a government grant which provides health insurance and a monthly allotment of money for people with disabilities to live on was filled out on my behalf by my parents.

    I have no recollection of it and my short-term memory is still impaired.

    I do recall the Social Security Administration scheduling an initial assessment with a neuropsychologist a full-time real estate agent who saw patients on the side in 2015. He met with me in his tiny real estate office located in a business park with no medical facilities nearby. This was my first warning sign that the SSAs disability operation was not what it should be.

    This could leave an already poor and under-served population even more destitute than they already are.

    Conservative Arguments For The Latest Food Stamp Cut Are Bogus Heres Why

    s.e. smith

    On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that it had finalized a pending rule on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that will affect nearly 700,000 able-bodied adults without dependents . Areas with insufficient jobs will no longer be able to receive waivers for SNAPs three-month time limit; ABAWDs will need to work, volunteer, or participate in job training for at least 80 hours a month to maintain eligibility, though the USDA is not providing supportive resources to help people get and keep jobs. In essence, this is a plan cruelly designed to terminate nutrition benefits.

    This was the first of three SNAP-related rules introduced by the administration this year. If all three are finalized, they will have a cumulative effect of taking critical nutrition assistance from more than 3 million people.

    The Trump administrations attack on SNAP is nothing new; for decades, presidential administrations as well as members of Congress have been attempting to push people off SNAP, as seen under the Reagan administration, in 1990s welfare reform, and 2018s farm bill. Selecting ABAWDs as a target was no coincidence; the policy is complicated and confusing, and though it has extremely high stakes for those affected, their voices are rarely heard.

    A Pesticide The Epa Wont Ban Is Sickening Low

    Amy Roost

    As a child growing up in Arvin, California, Gabriel Duarte played with his brothers in an orchard 15 feet from his familys front door. Today he plays in a prison yard. Duarte believes these two points on his 20-year timeline are related.

    Earlier this year, Duarte contacted me after reading an op-ed Id written about the widely used pesticide chlorpyrifos. Id discovered that the likely reason for each of my three childrens brain malformations was due to my acute exposure, in 1989, to a flea bomb containing chlorpyrifos. Duarte believes his ADHD and impulsivity issues are the result of his chronic exposure to chlorpyrifos in his home, school and work environments.

    Human and animal studies link chlorpyrifos exposure to structural damage to the brain, neurobehavioral deficits, , diminished IQ, and a wide range of developmental disabilities in children. It has also been linked to heart disease, lung cancer, Parkinsons disease, and the lowering of sperm counts in adults. Based on my investigative research, and interviews with Duarte along with dozens of other residents in the San Joaquin Valley, Im left to draw the all-too-obvious conclusion that communities with a higher percentage of residents who are low income are at greater risk of being exposed to harmful pesticides and other environmental toxins. And the issue of race is an inextricable co-factor.

    Replies To Bernie Sanders Exposes Republican Plot To Cut Social Security For 11 Million Disabled People

  • ‘Niquessays:

    RAISE THE CAP! RAISE THE CAP! For Godâs sake, RAISE THE CAP!!

  • Judy Taylorsays:

    Welcome to the New Third World Country, the leaders of the free world!

  • porkchop ailessays:Mon, Jan 12th, 2015 at 4:55 pm

    how dare those old folks need ss. used to be the third rail of politics. now its a cash cow dream for wall street. bernie sanders talks about how those greedy mfâs want that ss. cash to blow on their craps tableâ¦

    but plenty of cashola for the MIC.

  • bebesays:

    If theyâre going to vote âyesâ to cut ss, then their own parents, relatives be the first to be cut. Only fair.

  • djchefronsays:

    This is just the first attack on SS. They figure who cares about cripples and the mentally ill and they are right/

    As Rev Wright would say GOD DAMN AMERICA

  • Raymond Smithsays:Mon, Jan 12th, 2015 at 5:21 pm

    The attack is on Social Security Disability which would affect Americans of ALL ages and Veterans as well. If a veteran that no longer is in the military gets in a car wreck and is injured where he can not work. He or she and their family members receive a modest amount of income from Social Security Disability. Any cuts to it would cause some to be homeless. Others would have to face eating less or not paying some bills. It is a way for the TP/GOP to punish American citizens.Remember they have already done major cuts to food stamps.

  • djchefronsays:

    They will just blame the blah

  • lm945says:

    Not âraise it.â REMOVE it.

  • Shivasays:

    No to the moocher. You worked for it.

  • Dsays:
  • Administration Revives Previous Proposal To Cut Social Security Disability Programs

    In his 2019 budget proposal, President Donald Trump revived a proposal from his previous budget that would cut disability programs administered by the Social Security Administration.

    Under the heading “reform disability programs,” the budget blueprint counts $72 billion in spending reductions over 10 years. These would be from two similarly named but distinct programs run by the Social Security Administration — Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income .

    SSDI benefits people with physical and mental conditions that are severe enough to permanently keep them from working. It is funded by Social Security payroll taxes. Meanwhile, SSI payments are limited to low-income Americans — senior citizens, or adults or children who are disabled or blind. The payments are funded through general revenue from the treasury.

    “The largest cut would come from an unspecified proposal to test new approaches to increase labor force participation of people with disabilities,” said Benjamin W. Veghte, the vice president for policy at the National Academy of Social Insurance.

    As we noted last year when we looked at this promise, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney has argued that putting forth this proposal doesn’t mean that Trump would be breaking his promise, because the budget proposal doesn’t cut from the Social Security retirement program.

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