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.