Declared Disabled in US – The problem might not be that the Ticket to Work program

The problem might not be that the Ticket to Work program is ineffective, but that it comes too late in each worker’s personal-injury saga. For the roughly two-year stretch between the day someone decides they want to join disability to the day they actually start collecting benefits, there’s no one encouraging them to work. In fact, they aren’t allowed to earn more than a small amount.

“There’s no requirement to try to get back to work prior to being declared disabled,” Growick said. And furthermore, “There is nothing in the ticket that gives you an incentive to use it to go back to work unless you want to.”

Once people are declared disabled, something happens, whether through medical deterioration or labor-market entropy, that seems to make it harder to start working again. People who finally get on disability might breathe a sigh of relief, look around, and survey the options around them. They might see a lot of low-wage work with scant labor protections. Nothing that comes with the kind of health insurance you get on disability. Would you trade a guaranteed check for a fast food job?

“Think about that decision,” Maestas said. “Think about guaranteed benefits for life. The finances of the program are in favor of not trying to work. It’s not surprise to me that takeup of [Ticket to Work] has never been big.”

Talking to experts, I heard a lot of ways we could fix Ticket to Work, or disability more broadly. Webb recommended that, rather than lose their benefits as soon as they cross a certain income threshold, ticket-holders’ benefits should taper out—say at a rate of $2 for every $1 they earn. “That’s a way to recognize that you might not be able to work full-time, but you don’t lose everything when you work as much as you can,” she explained.

The Social Security Administration is currently running a study in 10 areas to see what happens when SSDI recipients are offered this kind of $2-to-$1 tapering of their benefits. Analyses of the experiment have so far showed that although participants did earn more and work more, they also received more in benefits, since those who would have fallen off their benefits under the old model stayed on them instead.

Growick thinks the Social Security Administration should do a better job filtering out beneficiaries who seem likeliest to work again, and focus their re-employment efforts on that group alone. “People who are severely developmentally disabled should not be lumped in with people who have a car accident,” he said.

But experts say the easiest thing might be to introduce Ticket to Work, or some other rehab program, earlier in the disability application process—possibly even before people apply.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at  Why Is it So Hard to Find Jobs for Disabled Workers? — The Atlantic.