This time, for disability coverage:
Issa’s implication is that almost all the applicants approved by these judges are unworthy. He’s hoping to shock taxpayers by stating that between 2005 and 2013, the judges “placed over 3.2 million people on federal disability programs at a total cost of nearly one trillion dollars.”
There’s a good lesson there in how to turn a modest number into a scary one. Issa arrives at $1 trillion by multiplying 3.2 million by $300,000, which is the estimate of some MIT researchers of the present value cost of disability and Medicare for the typical disability recipient. The real value? The MIT researchers use $1,120 a month in disability payments. But that figure wouldn’t serve Issa’s purpose of making the cost of disability seem horrific.
Issa doesn’t leave any doubt about where he’s going with this. Social Security Disability is likely to run out of money in 2016; at that point the most obvious fix would be to shift some money from Social Security’s retirement fund to disability, as Congress has done in the past.
In his letter to Colvin, Issa signaled his hostility to this option. He tried to place all the blame for the program’s ills on the Social Security Administration. “A bailout of the disability fund after at least a decade of serious agency mismanagement and at the expense of the SSA retirement program, without meaningful reforms to a broken appeals process…is not a responsible solution.”
Can you see what’s coming? He’s talking about cutting disability grants or denying appeals. Disability advocates better bulk up now for the coming battle to preserve America’s promise to take care of its disabled population; it’s going to be a hard and ugly fight.
You gotta love the Republicans (and any Democrat who doesn’t rip into the Republicans about this) and their mentors in the oligarchy (1%). These dogs want it all. What the 99% will get are the scraps thrown from the rich man’s table. It doesn’t need to be that way.