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Copying over a post from the ssc subreddit because I found it interesting. (Hope this is allowed.)
In the mid 2010s there was a crisis around social security disability. Things were so dire that estimates placed the DI reserves to run out by 2016.
And yet as we know, this didn't happen. Part of it was thanks to the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, which temporarily reallocated payroll tax revenues from the OAS fund to the DI trust fund but that was temporary and ran out in 2022. And as far as I can tell (and as far as my double checks with the chatbots can find), it wasn't extended.
And now with the upcoming social security crisis the DI reserves are the only part to not be facing any expected issues.
Another piece of the disability crisis, 14 million people were on disability in 2013 and the number was expected to keep rising and rising. And yet it didn't happen, the trend reversed and as of 2024, only around 7 million are on disability It was halved! Substantial drop! We're back to levels from two decades ago.
Why? How did things change so radically so fast?
Covid. I don't know how much of an impact Covid had, but it was disproportionately impacting the disabled both directly and indirectly (by using up hospital resources) and that likely lead to some deaths but it doesn't seem to be that much, we were already trending downwards before the pandemic. [Edit: See edit below, it's quite possible that Covid had a greater impact than I thought]
The social security admin changed up their policies a bit and got more pressure on appeal judges to make denials. This had an impact, but the changes to denial rates don't seem to be that drastic to explain a 50% drop. And since then that small trend downwards has actually reversed too, the overall final award rate of 2024 applications seems to be higher than the mid 2010s average.
I don't think those are the main reasons why it changed.
What do I propose was the main reason? The economy got stronger and the disabled got older.
You can see for yourself how disability applications correspond pretty heavily with the unemployment rate.
Unemployment has a selection bias, it mostly impacts the older, sicker and less educated. Those are people who in a good economy with low unemployment might be able to get jobs, but in a weaker economy they are too old and disabled to find something compared to their healthier younger peers.
You can see a huge surge in disability applications around the time of the great recession. These people were largely in their late 50s and early 60s, too young for early retirement but too old in the recession environment to compete well.
An NPR article from the time reveals this in an example of [in 2009] 56 year old Scott Birdsall and what an employee at a retraining center told him after a local mill closed down and the aging workers were left finding other jobs
A 56 year old in 2009 is what age in 2024? 71. They are past retirement age, and would have transitioned off of disability and onto normal retirement pay.
This is what I think solved a significant portion of the disability crisis. Overall disability in the late aughts and early 2010s was being used as a makeshift early retirement program for uneducated middle aged and senior workers who didn't yet quality for their benefits, but were functionally unemployable already in the post recession economy.
And while I came up with this idea for myself, during research I stumbled onto an analysis that suggests the same thing. Their analysis ended at 2019, where there was still roughly 9.8 million on the rolls, and found that about half the explanation is the business cycle/aging and half is ALJ retraining. The trend from 2019-2024 is likely explained in a similar way, and given the increased final award rates we've tended back towards, this is likely explained even more heavily by the aging explanation.
There are some factors that help support this explanation more. SSDI in general tends to go to older, poorer, more rural and sicker (at least given death rates are 2-6x higher than peers) individuals.
While this does not explain why the 2010s surge itself happened since those factors are relatively stable, it does explain why the surge was so temporary.
This also leads to an interesting question, what happens in the next period of high unemployment? How do we plan to address mass AI based layoffs if they occur?
Many people may be able to find a new job, but many won't and we will likely be facing a new disability crisis if it is forced to served as a early retirement program again.
Edit:
Thinking about it, one weirdness here is Covid unemployment which didn't seem to increase disability rates and in fact the trend downwards continued despite that. But we did see a huge surge in early retirement with about 2.6 million excess retirees. So maybe something changed in how early retirement works since? Or maybe Covid era unemployment mostly impacted younger healthier people or the jobs market for furloughed workers wasn't as bad. Or heck, maybe it's just coincidence that the downward trend was already happening and Covid really did have a major impact on the total number of beneficiaries.
My guess would be in the recovery, Covid unemployment surged higher but recovered really fast so we probably just didn't see as many Scott Birdsall situations.
Back to my thoughts, I'm extremely skeptical that the disability numbers could halve over such a relatively short period without some sort of accounting trickery. I could definitely see Covid having an impact, especially since the vast majority are older people. But the drop in numbers is just too great for me to take them at face value.
We've seen it before with disability, social security, etc, but often times the medicalized benefits system will just shuffle large amounts of people from one category to another once political pressure comes to bear on a label like "disability."
This also reminds me of the old post by Alone on how SSI is basically medicalizing political problems - can't seem to find it but if anyone knows what I'm talking about and has the link that would be great.
I worked for the state disability bureau in 2011, and I can confirm that your theory is basically correct. There was a huge application backlog stemming from the recession, and a huge chunk of it was people in their 50s who were laid off from blue-collar jobs and claimed bad backs, shoulders, etc. from slinging sheetrock for 40 years or whatever. The reason the bulk of the beneficiaries are in their 50s is because the law makes it very difficult to qualify if you are under 50; you have to either have a condition that meets a defined listing (and the listings are for the kinds of things that if you have no one's going to question your ability to work), or to be completely incapable of doing sedentary work. If you're over 50, it's assumed you can't adjust to other work, so you can only be sent back to a job you've done in the past 20 years. In some cases, it may be determined that you can do lighter work similar to what you did before (e.g., an auto mechanic (medium duty grade) can work as a tech at a quick lube place (light duty grade)) but that's pretty rare. If you're over 50 and already have an office job you're also out of luck, since you're effectively given the same standard as an under 50.
So a lot of people who were laid off, especially from the construction industry, especially those who were close to retirement anyway, just filed for whatever injuries they had accumulated over the years and said that was the reason they stopped working. To be fair, though, a lot of these people ended up going back to work while their claims were pending, so I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. The difference between then and now is that people above 50 but below 62 were part of the largest generational cohort in US history, so there were simply more of them. In 2008 only the oldest boomers had reached 62m and the youngest were still in their 40s. By 2020, everyone born before 1958 was 62 or older, and the youngest were already in their mid 50s. This gives 6 years worth of people to make claims, with the number going down every year.
A lot of the Boomers who retired during COVID did so because they already had enough savings to retire. The ones who didn't weren't likely to be laid off either, since COVID unemployment hit the service industry mostly and didn't really affect much else. Car mechanics and pipefitters weren't getting laid off, and if they were they were the ones at the bottom of the totem pole, not the ones who had been in the union for decades. The 2020 recession was also sharp and brief, unlike the 2008 recession where the recovery seemed to drag on for years until the job market felt normal again. It wasn't until 2013 that extended unemployment relief was ended.
So yeah, now that most of these people are on regular Social Security, and there hasn't been a comparable recession to cause a flood of new applicants, and the generational cohort of people in their 50s is smaller than it was before, there's no reason to have expected claims to keep rising. The 2010s projections were hitting right as the flood of applications was already peaking and about to decline.
Ahh ok interesting, did not know this! Also, can't take credit for this theory I stole it from the SSC subreddit.
Yeah, makes sense. I'm a bit bitter that I probably wont get SS benefits, but oh well. I suppose it is what it is at this point.
I'm very curious to hear more stories about your time at the disability bureau though. Any fascinating cases or surprises you had there?
This is a common worry but going off current projections, you will get social security. Just not all of social security, about 80-70% scaling down over the years. https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/2024/trTOC.html
Basically the issue right now is that payroll taxes doesn't cover outgoing benefits enough for the OASI funds, so we're currently eating into the saved up money put into the Treasury. Eventually we'll run out of those savings (estimated around 2033) and then only be able to pay out benefits equal to the amount of payroll tax collected. But that's still roughly 80% of total benefits.
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