The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities brings some perspective to the Social Security disability story I wrote about earlier, pointing out that an "alarmist" media is overstating the problem.
Here are the facts. In December 2010, 8.2 million people received disabled-worker benefits from Social Security. (Payments also went to some of their family members: 160,000 spouses and 1.8 million children.) Demographic and economic factors have pushed more people onto the disability rolls in recent decades; the number of disabled workers has doubled since 1995, while the working-age population—conventionally described as people age 20 through 64—has increased by only about one-fifth. But that comparison is deceptive. Over that period:
- Baby boomers aged into their high-disability years. People are roughly twice as likely to be disabled at age 50 as at age 40, and twice as likely to be disabled at age 60 as at age 50. As the baby boomers (people born in 1946 through 1964) have grown inexorably older, disability cases have risen.
- More women qualified for disability benefits. In general, workers with severe impairments can get disability benefits only if they’ve worked for at least one-fourth of their adult life and for five of the last ten years. Until the great influx of women into the workforce in the 1970s and 1980s, relatively few women met those tests; as recently as 1990, male disabled workers outnumbered women by nearly a 2 to 1 ratio. Now that more women have worked long enough to qualify for disability benefits, the ratio has fallen to just 1.1 to 1.
- Social Security’s full retirement age rose from 65 to 66. When disabled workers reach the full retirement age, they begin receiving Social Security retirement benefits rather than disability benefits. The increase in the retirement age from 65 to 66 has delayed that conversion. Over 300,000 people between 65 and 66 now collect disability benefits; under the rules in place a decade ago, they’d be receiving retirement benefits instead.
The Social Security actuaries express the number of people receiving disability benefits using an age- and sex-adjusted disability prevalence rate that controls for these factors. Over the 1995-2010 period, that rate rose from 3.5 percent of the working-age population to 4.4 percent. That’s certainly an increase, but not nearly as dramatic as the alarmists paint (see graph). And it’s no surprise that the rate creeps upward during periods of economic distress.
Bottom line, the program is not doomed by the numbers, and policymakers should not allow alarmist reports about the program to create an excuse to start cutting benefits or to drastically change the system.
That putting people back to work thing, though? That remains a good idea.