This chapter examines the political development of the nation’s two largest income support programs for people with disabilities, Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Although the creation of cash benefits for disabled workers was controversial, once established, disability benefits expanded steadily. Today DI and SSI cover a wide array of disabilities and provide support to children and adults, some of who have worked little, if at all. Yet despite dramatic program growth, disabilities still create great economic hardship. Moreover, despite the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act and a variety of work incentives, employment levels among the disabled are low, and DI and SSI face major challenges transitioning beneficiaries into paid employment and preparing disabled children for financial self-sufficiency in adulthood.
The 1948 welfare state settlement perpetuated social care as stuck in the Poor Law. However, its capacity to deliver short-term political expedients has allowed it to remain in place and defy decades of efforts to reform it, creating an intellectual and moral desert. The concept of
independent living developed by the disabled people’s movement could fill the vacuum and become the driving vision for a sustainable system of social care based on rights. This would require the dismantling of the pernicious eligibility system to be replaced by one based on claimable
legal rights. The article sets out a route to achieve this, beginning by making the recording of need a reality. This in itself would have a transformative impact on how the system works, creating pressure for change by highlighting political responsibility.
The article highlights the persistent problems of rehabilitation of children with health disorders and the necessity of improving assistance to the disabled children. The improvement of the efficiency of rehabilitation measures is possible by means of the optimization of both the inner and interagency integration in the organization of assistance to children with disabilities, a clear algorithm of collaboration and document circulation between specialists of the departments of children’s polyclinic and the Bureau of Medical Social Expertise, creation of individual integrated programs and raising the awareness of patients with the quality of assistance.
Abstract
The possibility of engaging in household child care may exacerbate the incentives of parents and grandparents to falsely claim disability benefits as households also get to save on formal child care costs. This paper considers a multi-generational family model with persistence in privately observed shocks and presents an efficient implementation case for subsidizing formal child care costs of the disabled. An implementation of the optimal scheme that consists of capped formal day care subsidies, non-linear income taxation and asset-testing is proposed. Simulations based on a parametrization that targets key features of the US labor and child care markets suggest that day care subsidies may lead to sizeable cost savings.
Изучена эффективность социально-психологической реабилитации лиц пожилого возраста на отделении социально-психологической реабилитации клиники Федерального научного центра реабилитации инвалидов им. Г. А. Альбрехта как обязательной составляющей восстановительного процесса. Представлены результаты оценки влияния реабилитационных мер на активность и устойчивость жизнедеятельности реабилитируемых на основе выявления статистически значимых сдвигов составляющих психологического статуса с применением опросника САН.
The aim is to study the effectiveness of social and psychological rehabilitation of elderly people at the clinic of G. A. Albrecht Federal Scientific Centre of Rehabilitation of the Disabled - the impact of rehabilitation measures on the mental sphere of rehabilitated based on the identification of statistically significant changes in the components of psychological status using the questionnaire SAN.
A new criticism of the variety in measures serving to identify the disabled population in the American Community Survey (ACS) has been raised by Burkhauser, Houtenville, and Tennant. That criticism identifies the lack of a participation component, specifically a measure of work limitation, as creating bias resulting in an underestimate of the size of the working-age population with disabilities. The purpose of this article is to provide another perspective on the relationship of the current ACS measure and a work limitation measure demonstrating the complications introduced by combining measures that represent two different metrics and introducing an unmeasured environmental element. The relationship of the measures with receipt of Social Security Disability Insurance or Supplemental Security Insurance is also examined and discussed.
Abstract
We study the design of retirement and disability policies and illustrate the often observed exit from the labor force of healthy workers through disability insurance schemes. In our model, two types of individuals, disabled and leisure-prone ones, have the same disutility for labor and cannot be distinguished. However, they are not counted in the same way in social welfare. We determine first- and second-best optimal benefit levels and retirement ages. Then we introduce the possibility of testing that can sort out disabled workers from healthy but retirement-prone workers. We show that such testing can increase both social welfare and the rate of participation of elderly workers; in addition disabled workers are better taken care of. It is not optimal to test all applicants. Surprisingly, the (second-best) solution may imply later retirement for the disabled than for the leisure-prone. In that case, the disabled are compensated by higher benefits.
Cash Benefits under Voluntary Disability Insurance in the United States