Donald Trump is systematically chipping away at every government social insurance program, from food stamps to Medicaid and Medicare to Social Security, to advance his cruel agenda. Among the swarm of regulation changes to all these programs is the creation of a new category of beneficiaries for Social Security Disability Insurance, one made up of people who will have to jump through multiple invasive hoops every two years in order to keep their modest benefits. This isn't the first time a Republican president has done this. When Ronald Reagan made cuts to Social Security, 21,176 people died and 200,000 people lost their benefits before the public outcry forced a reversal of the policy.
The public comment period for this latest change ends on Friday, and if the public outcry is loud enough in 2020, we might be able to turn it back. To that end, more than 140 House and Senate lawmakers signed on to open letters opposing the cuts, and have joined advocacy groups in rallying the public against them. "At a time when leadership from SSA is sorely needed to further reduce unacceptably long disability application wait times and eliminate the disability hearing backlog," the senators wrote to the Social Security commissioner, "it is alarming that the agency appears more concerned with devoting limited resources toward making it harder for people with disabilities to receive essential benefits."
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As the program stands now, there are three categories of SSDI enrollees for the purposes of eligibility reviews: Medical Improvement Expected (MIE), Medical Improvement Possible (MIP) and Medical Improvement Not Expected (MINE). The new category would be Medical Improvement Likely. Most of the people in that new category would be older people who are physically unable to continue in their work and are mostly in the MIP and MINE categories. In defending the rule, the SSA said simply, "We believe that there may be positive employment effects as a result of these proposed rules, although we cannot currently quantify them." The senators jumped on that lack of specificity, writing that "SSA fails to clearly establish a need for these changes, fails to justify the specifically procedural changes proposed, fails to fully evaluate the effects these changes will have on beneficiaries and fails to provide an adequate cost-benefit analysis.
"SSA does not even provide a cursory estimate of the number of people who will lose access to benefits," they write. "All that appears certain is that the proposed rule would significantly increase time and paperwork burdens on people with disabilities […] and significantly increase SSA's administrative costs." Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon makes an important point in a Newsweek interview. "It's important to remember that Social Security is an earned benefit, which means everyone who is eligible has already paid into the program for years with each paycheck." These changes, he said, are little more than "harassment of people with disabilities" and put Americans at "greater risk of falling through the cracks."