For years you’ve paid insurance premiums to protect yourself against unforeseen health problems. Yet when an accident or serious illness strikes, the insurer refuses to pay up.
That’s essentially theft, the kind of thing people expect the government to step in and stop.
But in this case, it is the government itself — Social Security, to be precise — that is cheating ailing and injured people out of the money to which they are entitled.
As detailed in a story in Sunday’s Kansas City Star, Social Security is victimizing large numbers of people by delaying their disability payments or refusing to pay them at all.
It’s an outrage.
The government is not simply cheating people, it is cheating them at a point in their lives when they are perhaps more vulnerable than they have ever been: financially vulnerable, physically vulnerable and often psychologically vulnerable.
Missouri and Kansas residents appear to be at higher-than-average risks of unreasonable delays.
The critical problems:
-- The application process is far too complicated, raising the risks of lengthy delays and unreasonable denials. Some people feel they must hire someone else to handle all the complexities, and such help is often quite expensive.
-- Social Security’s processing backlogs delay payments to people who need their money immediately. Disabled Kansas Citians who apply for benefits now may not get them, on average, until late next year.
-- Some people who deserve benefits never get them.
Government officials promise to do better. But some of the steps that have been announced seem like things that should have been done long ago: adding staff, recognizing the severity of certain illnesses and so on.
Social Security isn’t optional for the people who pay into it. That places an even higher moral burden on the government to provide the promised benefits quickly.
Because Social Security’s concept of “disability” is so restrictive and because it handles claims so poorly, experts advise people to buy private disability insurance as well.
That’s a sad commentary on the current situation. It is also very good advice.
I agree with Paul Krugman, Princeton economist and columnist, that the situation in SS is not dire, but that Medicare needs attention. As Krugman pointed out, the trustees report shows that the fund increased last year more than predicted due to the increase in immigrants. As the Star editorial pointed out, the payroll taxes that support SS are projected to run short in 2017. After that, however, SS will start drawing on its trust fund which is projected to be exhausted by 2041, all things remaining equal. (By that time many of the baby boomers will have died.) After the trust fund is depleted payroll taxes will pay 78 percent of current benefits. The problem is not with Social Security, but with the large deficit the US is running which may make it unable to pay what it owes to the recipients.
For those who are interested in a cogent explanation, I would refer them to a book by KC's own Max J. Skidmore, UMKC, entitled Social Security and Its Enemies. Another excellent one is Social Security: The Phony Crisis by Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot. Both are short and free of academic jargon.
Jeanette