UPDATE, 1250a Pacific, Tuesday: Please hop over to geordie's diary, for a summary of the draft bill in its current incarnation. The sordid change I discuss (okay, rant about) below is apparently NOT included in the bill right now. I trust the Rs and the Ds not one little bit to protect SSDI and disabled American workers. I still ask you to contact all of your elected officials tomorrow and tell them: NO cuts to SSDI are acceptable. Thank you, geordie, for doing the work! My panic consumed me.
I'm shaking so badly...can barely type. This imminent budget 'compromise' on Social Security Disability Insurance benefits is a DEATH SENTENCE for me and millions of other American workers. We paid premiums from every paycheck and turned, reluctantly, to the the Federal disability benefits we earned when we became severely ill or injured. I say 'reluctantly' because the eligibility criteria are extreme--"unable to work any job in the American economy"--and the application process is lengthy, byzantine and often cruel. People who meet the strictest criteria die waiting for hearings after perfunctory denials. Google Eric De La Cruz.
Maybe I can explain the backstory in more detail when the convulsions of fear subside. If they ever do. The GOP has been framing the 'disability debate' for years, working up to today. I have been begging the Front Page to cover the GOP's planned 2016 20% slash of SSDI. But wow those R bastards are good. I'm just blindsided by how swiftly the GOP unveiled this sick plan and the Dems caved to it: Turning SSDI from an earned insurance program for American workers' into another unsurvivably lean welfare program for undeserving lazy fraudster poors.
I beg every single one of you to phone and write your Senators and Congresspeople and the President IMMEDIATELY. Call them out on this dastardly, deceitful sham: They are trying to turn a INSURANCE program for disabled workers into a humiliating welfare program tied to the poverty index.
Washington chose to precipitate this fake 'crisis' in the Social Security Disability Insurance program because Republicans in Congress refused to do one thing for years: Make a simple, long-overdue actuarial fix to the allocation between the Retirement & Disability Trust Funds. Decades of demographic shifts in the workforce necessitate a miniscule adjustment--a fraction of a percent--in order to make both Funds fully solvent FOR THE NEXT 29 YEARS.
So the Republicans deliberately created an artificial crisis by choosing to let the Disability Fund run short by the end of 2016. And the Democrats have gone along with the charade, and agreed to this sham 'compromise' of forcing all 11 million beneficiaries onto ONE FIXED BENEFIT, permanently indexed to the Federal Poverty Line. No matter how hard you worked, how much you earned and paid as premiums into the system.
THIS TURNS SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY INSURANCE FROM AN EARNED INSURANCE PROGRAM INTO 'CHARITABLE' GOVERNMENT WELFARE PROGRAM. This is not okay.
This also doesn't save the government a dime. By cutting all disabled workers down to a single flat benefit--a meager of 125% of poverty--the Congress is making all of us eligible for other welfare programs FOR WHICH WE DO NOT WANT TO APPLY. But will have to, merely adding to the government's costs, not cutting them.
I am already not really surviving. This strips me of the very last shreds of dignity. And there are more details, I am certain, crammed into this mess.* 'Savings' that will be more than I can bear. Because I am already so far past my limits.
Call. Email. Write. Get everyone you know to do the same. Please. Because I can't right now. Curled up in a ball. Also, no Congressperson right now. Because homeless.
*There is only one story where I can even find this disastrous insurance-to-welfare 125% 'detail' mentioned. God knows what else they're hiding. So many of the other 'details' I'm reading about 'reforms' and 'tweaks' are just kneejerk responses to years of well-sown Republican lies about SSDI.
