If one would take a consensus among Social Security Advocates and advocates for people with disabilities, the message would be clear; Some sort of benefit cuts are inevitable. I recently sat down with the lead disability rights attorney at the Disability Law Center in Boston, Massachusetts’ most renown organization in advocating for the legal rights of people with disabilities and her message could not have been clearer. Some fundamental changes are in the works, some could be considered positive, but others some not so much. The agreement among advocates is that the changes will come in SSA attempting to stem the sharp increase in folks applying and maintaining disability benefits.
Unfortunately when it comes to Social Security, there is a huge disconnect between the political ramifications of any benefit changes and the policy/operational changes that are continuously happening without the need of congressional approval. Nothing irks me more than alarmist dairies that sound the alarm regarding proposed SSA benefit cuts, when these diarists don’t understand that fundamental changes are already happening within SSA on the policy/operations level. Where is the outrage there? I would like to focus on three of these areas in this diary; Changes in Continual Disability Reviews, Changes in which SSA uses the Ticket to Work Program to encourage beneficiaries to seek out employment supports, and new demonstration projects that adjust current work incentives to meet the financial needs to beneficiaries.
Continual Disability Reviews (CDR)
Once individuals are entitled to benefits, they must periodically prove that their disabilities continue to be severe in order to retain eligibility. Upon being awarded disability benefits the individual was given what’s called a “diary” date, which determined how often a beneficiary was supposed to go through a Continual Disability Review. These diary dates, which can range from every two, five or seven years depending if the original claims reviewer determined if there was any possibility of medical improvement. This process, where the person would again have to submit updated medical information to SSA can cause some anxiety among beneficiaries. These reviews should not be confused with what has recently been called “work reviews” those are an entirely different process.
The problem over the last 20 years is that these reviews have been notoriously behind, beneficiaries who have had a scheduled CDR, generally will not see action taken on their record for 8-10 years after it was supposed to happen. When it does, the examiners are so backed up that the rate of re-approval (to avoid a lengthy appeals process) is about 99%. This could be considered a positive, but recent changes will cause this to no longer be the case.
Ticket to Work Program
The Ticket to Work was a program which began in 2001 after Legislation (crafted by Ted Kennedy) was signed into law in 1999. The program was meant to give beneficiaries a choice as to where receive vocational rehabilitation services. Essentially Ted Kennedy traded improved work incentives (work rules) for an attempt to privatize federally funded and state administered public vocational rehabilitation services. Under the Ticket to Work, the beneficiary would be eligible to receive a ticket, where they could bring it to what is called an “Employment Network” and receive employment supports. I won’t go into why the ticket program itself was such a failure the first 10 years of its existence, but it did include one important benefit for the beneficiary. If someone “assigned” their ticket to an employment network and began to receive services, then that person would be “exempt” from going through a Continual Disability Review (CDR). Of course up to this point, protections from CDR weren’t all that big of a deal since the SSA really didn’t place much emphasis on getting those done.
This has now changed; SSA changed its policy on the importance of following up with CDRs and completing them in a timely manner. Obviously they were so far behind that deciding where to begin was a challenge, so they revamped the Ticket to Work Program by starting a whole new marketing campaign about the program. Generally everyone on SSDI or SSI is ticket eligible, meaning they will receive a notice and an invitation at one point to attend a presentation on available work supports. In addition they will be told about the CDR protections. Don’t get me wrong, I believe all SSDI/SSI beneficiaries should take advantage of its protections since I firmly believe that the work incentives are a really good tool to become competitively employed. However, once in the ticket to work program a beneficiary must meet certain benchmarks in order to maintain the protections. If they fail to meet these benchmarks, an automatic CDR will ensue. The new emphasis on these CDRs means that the medical review will be much more rigorous. That in its self should not be a tremendous concern, because if the individual is participating in a vocational program, they can maintain their cash/health benefits until they are competitively employed.
Work Incentives and Demonstration Projects
I believe that that work rules for these programs are pretty good. Unfortunately there are some pretty horrible misconceptions out there, which are unfortunately perpetuated by the SSA local offices themselves. A word of advice, never go to the SSA office to find out how earnings will affect benefits. The Service Reps are not trained in work incentives and will routinely give out wrong information. Never, ever call the 800 number……!!!!! The SSA website however, is great. The abundance of information there is accessible and easy to understand.
Going through the actual work rules would require another diary, but safe to say that you are absolutely able to work while on SSDI or SSI and keep most, if not all your cash and/or health benefits. What people need to understand about the work incentives is that they are very personalized… How earnings affect one person’s benefits isn’t exactly how it’s going to affect the next person’s benefits. A lot has to do with the type of work the person is doing, they severity of the disability and long term work goals.
Of course improvements can always be made, which why some demonstration projects are now up and running and have advocates excited. For example, there is a SSDI project called BOND, which allows a SSDI beneficiary to earn above SGA and then automatically have a 2/1 disregard (sort of the SSI work rules but for SSDI after SGA). Of course this will only affect a small portion of beneficiaries. To put this in perspective, when the Ticket to Work program was started SSA only wanted to see a decrease of people on the disability roles by becoming competitively and substantially employed…. Of… ready for this…; the goal was to see a reduction of half on one percent!!! However that one percent would equal to about 7 billion dollars in life time benefits saved!
If I could just add, please avoid using "SS" when referring to Social Security for obvious reasons. Please use SSA, or Title II.. or another abbreviation.
Thanks!