The Factual Background of the Social Security ActSocial Security in America: The Factual Background of the Social Security Act as Summarized from Staff Reports to the Committee on Economic Security.

1937 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 758-758 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Security Act

Constructive Welfare: The Social Security Act, the Blind, and the Origins of Political Identity among People with Disabilities, 1935–1950

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-138
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Erkulwater
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Social Security Administration ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Security Act ◽  
The 1960S

In contemporary America, identifying as a person with a disability is one of the many ways in which people acknowledge, even celebrate, who they are. Yet several decades ago, few persons with disabilities saw their condition as an identity to be embraced, let alone to serve as the basis for affinity and collective mobilization. The transformation of disability from unmitigated tragedy to a collective and politicized identity emerged in national politics, not in the 1960s or 1970s, as is commonly thought, but in the 1940s. During those years, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) set out to galvanize the nation's blind men and women, most of them poor and unemployed, to demand the economic security and opportunity enjoyed by sighted Americans. This aspiration for equal citizenship led the NFB into protracted contests with the Social Security Administration (SSA) over aid to the poor and sharpened the organization's resolve to represent the nation's civilian blind. Long before disability rights activists declared “nothing about us, without us,” the NFB insisted that only the blind, not sighted social workers or experts in blindness, were entitled to speak on behalf of the blind. Pioneering an organizing strategy and a critique of American liberalism later embraced by activists of the Left, the NFB rose to become one of the most effective civil rights and antipoverty organizations of its time. Today, however, its story has been largely forgotten.

scholarly journals A Brief Introduction to Medicare and the Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Woody R. Clermont
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Permanent Disability ◽  
Federal Program ◽  
Single Payer ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Security Act ◽  
Underlying Illness ◽  
Stage Renal Disease ◽  
End Stage

Medicare is a single-payer federal program providing health insurance for individuals ages 65 and older, those meeting the definition for permanent disability within the Social Security Act, 1 and those with end-stage renal disease.2 Medicare also covers care that is both reasonable and necessary in connection with the diagnosis and treatment of the underlying illness or injury.3 Medicare evolved from the Social Security Act over the course of three decades. The original Social Security Act4 was drafted between 1934 and 1935 by the Committee on Economic Security;5 the Committee during the first term of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, had been under the oversight of United States Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins.

American Social Security System

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric R. Kingson ◽  
Dana Bell ◽  
Sarah Shive
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Social Security System ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Security System ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Incremental Development ◽  
System P ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Security Act

This entry examines why our nation’s Social Security system was built, what it does, and what must be done to maintain and improve this foundational system for current and future generations. After a discussion of the social insurance approach to economic security and its underlying principles and values, the evolution of America’s Social Security system is reviewed—beginning with the enactment of the Social Security Act of 1935, through its incremental development, to the changed politics of Social Security since the mid-1990s. Next, program benefits and financing are described and contemporary challenges and related policy options are identified, in terms of both the program’s projected shortfall and the public’s need for expanded retirement, disability, and survivorship protections. The entry concludes by noting that social workers have an important role to play in shaping Social Security’s future.

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