It certainly did not take long for the new Republican majority in Congress to take aim at its favorite target, the Social Security disability program. The Republicans seem dead set on a fight over the program that helps keep millions of low-income disabled workers out of poverty, but it is nothing new for the Republicans to pick on the little guy.
There will be countless stories published and more talking points than you can shake a stick at before this year is out about Social Security’s disability program. Our only hope is that eventually cooler heads prevail and there is something done to avoid the fact that come 2016, Social Security’s disability recipients will see a 20 percent reduction in benefits.
The Republicans have already announced that they intend to fight any bill that would allow Congress to transfer funds from Social Security’s retirement funds to its disability coffers despite the fact that money has been transferred for decades between these two programs to make both solvent. If the Republicans have their way and don’t budge, and nothing else is done to increase the disability trust fund, disability recipients will see a reduction in benefits as early as 2016.
The Republicans have contended that they are taking this stand because they want to protect the retirement trust fund and because there is rampant fraud occurring within the disability programs of Social Security. Unfortunately for the Republicans, others are speaking up with different points of view, which actually have facts to back-up what they are saying.
Nancy LeTourneau wrote a recent fact-checking article, “Fact-Checking Republicans on Social Security Disability,” in the Washington Monthly.
Republicans have indicated that they are opposed to reallocating funds from the retirement trust fund to the disability trust fund, something before now that was considered routine, because of all the wasted money paid to people on Social Security disability who are not disabled. The Republicans says they want to clean-up the program before considering whether or not this routine allocation should continue.
The only problem is, like many times when a Republican opens his or her mouth, there are no facts to back-up such a claim.
Lucky for Americans who actually pay attention to the facts, others have looked at the Republican claims and come to the conclusion that fraud within the Social Security disability program is minute.
After an audit of the disability insurance program in 2013, the Government Accountability Office estimated that during the 2011 fiscal year that a whopping 1.3 percent of all disability payments were fraudulent. The largest percentage of these payments went to recipients who should not have been receiving payments (72 percent). These are people who had returned to work and should not have continued to receive payments.
I think we all can agree that we would like fraud and improper payments to be wiped away from all private and public entities, but we also have to be realistic. If one were to look at the Department of Defense budget and see what percentage of fraud was going on there, would we really see the Republicans take a stand and insist that the Defense Department eradicate all fraud below 1.3 percent before Congress funds the military?
How many departments within the government would we find more fraud? My guess is probably much more and Social Security would not even be within the top 10. To read the fact-checking story printed by the Washington Monthly magazine click here.
