Budget hawks have discovered that the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program is quite expensive; that the trust fund supporting SSDI is about to run dry, unless it siphons cash from the slightly less doomed Social Security retirement benefits trust fund; and that SSDI return-to-work rates are dismal.
And, of course, the SSDI program is just a somewhat distorted mirror image of what goes on in the private individual and group disability insurance programs.
The private programs may be run according to sane and transparent principles, but, of course, the aging of the workforce, low returns on the government-issued bonds that are officially classified as safe, and the weak job market are plaguing the private disability insurance programs, too.
I thought back to the disability insurance claimants I’ve met — people who did not seem especially disabled, and, in one case, was running a substantial community organizing program — and came up with one possible approach for improving the return-to-work figures: Run the same kind of amnesty program for “disabled” workers who are supposedly not working that libraries run for overdue library books.