The most no-working people in America are plotting to force aged disability recipients to work 'sedentary' jobs [View all]

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...and other elitist fuckery from people who only know how to take things away from Americans;

Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1
The Trump admin is rewriting disability eligibility rules.

Changes would fall disproportionately on some of Trump's most loyal supporters in red states. Most affected would be 50- to 60-year-olds without a high school or college education who have, for decades, toiled in physically grueling jobs, including coal mining, logging, and factory and construction work.

___The five states where the highest proportions of people rely on these benefits are West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi and Alabama. Unlike New York, California and a few others, these states do not have their own disability insurance programs for workers to turn to amid federal cuts.

“The Trump administration does not think that simply being 50 years old is a disability,” said a senior administration official who would speak only on condition of anonymity. In the 1970s, when the current rules were written, the official said, many more jobs involved manual labor, but in the internet age that isn’t true anymore. Workers in their 50s with physical injuries are thus receiving disability benefits “when they don’t need to be,” given that they could get a more sedentary job in the modern economy.

Under the current system, eligibility for benefits ticks up at ages 50, 55 and 60, as workers become more medically vulnerable and less adaptable. Disability adjudicators use a series of grids that consider an applicant’s age, work experience and education level to determine whether they may have the skills to do another, less strenuous job. (The adjudicators make a yes-or-no decision on eligibility; each person who qualifies then receives a set amount based on their lifetime earnings. Once the person starts receiving Social Security retirement benefits, they no longer receive disability payments.)

But the disability program is paid for, via payroll taxes, by its own trust fund, separate from the one for the retirement program. So reductions in disability payments would not help the retirement system stay afloat. Indeed, cutting eligibility for disability could result in more disabled workers claiming retirement benefits early, actuarial experts note, which would only increase pressure on the retirement system. Meanwhile, the money in the disability fund, which is projected to remain solvent through at least the end of this century, would just sit there, unused.

...in its current form, the regulation would slash at least 830,000 people’s eligibility for disability benefits, according to an initial estimate from the Urban Institute, an economic policy think tank. As many as 1.5 million could lose eligibility over the next decade, including the widows and children of workers. Disability attorneys and experts familiar with who most relies on the program contend that the numbers could be considerably higher.

Separately, the Trump administration is preparing a proposed regulation that would eliminate or sharply cut the Supplemental Security Income benefits of roughly 400,000 extremely poor and disabled people. This second regulation would reduce support for adults and children with severe disabilities who are living in low-income households, as well as elderly people living with their adult children on tight budgets.

Losing eligibility for disability would also block these workers’ access to Medicare, which they’re currently eligible for at their age precisely because they’re disabled.

more: https://www.propublica.org/article/social-security-disability-eligibility-trump-red-states