Disability

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by dino

Just another way to get a free check on someone else's back. Whatever happenned to contributing to society.

I have a friend in Florida who is on permanent disability. Having watched her try and try and try and try and try to get a job (after the company she worked at for over a decade closed), and get fired over and over, usually on the first day, I can say she really wanted to contribute to society, but society told her to go **** herself. She considered suicide over it at one point; she was so depressed.

Absolutely, there is abuse in the system, but we also have a system that is biased against people without a college education. If those people aren't in good physical health, they often can't get a job because most jobs available to people with just a high school diploma are physically grueling. There's an interesting article that came out a while ago about it:

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

My uncle is very right-wing, but he talks about how the endless move to privatize everything really hurt the police force (he's a retired trooper). He said years back, everything was done in-house on the force, so if a trooper got injured, or got too old to handle the beat, there were always desk jobs that had to be done, and the troopers got moved to them. Now that those jobs are contracted out, there aren't jobs for the older or injured troopers to do, and they end up on disability, which, in the end, costs more money overall.

Again, not arguing about the fact that there is abuse of the disability program, but it's not like it's easy to get on - my friend had to go through over a year of applications, and was rejected the first time. And she comes up for review every four or so years, as do most people on it. And it means she's going to spend her life in poverty. She lives with her parents; she struggles to make ends meet; she doesn't have a life.

The bigger issue is long-term structural unemployment and a vanishing of jobs that don't require at least a bachelor's degree and a 25-year-old's physical resilience. Unless one feels, like Scrooge, that if the alternative for these people is death then, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."