Disability Insurance

SHARON YOUNGER has a question about the frozen turkey. It sits, white and pink, on its back in a roasting pan on the kitchen counter of the Younger house in a middle-class development in Stevensville, Queen Anne's County, on the Eastern Shore. Before its present state, the turkey had been wrapped and stored in a freezer for several months. It came from an emergency food pantry. Younger wants to know if I think the turkey is still good. I suggest she give it the smell test."I did that already," she says.

When an employee suffered a major illness or injury five or 10 years ago, the employer's attitude was usually simple: Let him go. Workers' compensation or disability insurance would provide income, and the employer wouldn't have to worry about modifying his job or otherwise fitting him back into the workplace.Times have changed. The costs of workers' compensation and other types of disability insurance are soaring. American employers forked over about $60 billion in workers' comp expenses last year, double the amount spent in 1985.

Days away from graduating and University of Maryland senior Matthew Leedham is embarking on a financial education. As he waits for a job offer, he's mulling over his $4,000 credit-card debt, a car lease that expires in January and rent in the Washington suburbs that will be at least double the $300 he pays now. On top of that, his parents told him his health insurance expires soon. His problems will be solved if he gets a sales job with Philip Morris Cos. that will pay him nearly 40 grand and provide a company car, said the 21-year-old sociology major.

If you're under 65, your chances of becoming disabled are much greater than of dying, experts say. In fact, if you're over 21, you have a nearly 1-in-3 chance of being disabled for some period before you retire, according to the Health Insurance Association of America.What's more, being disabled can wreak more financial havoc than death. There's no life insurance to bolster the family assets, and the wage-earner still has living expenses even though he can no longer bring home a paycheck.

WASHINGTON -- Heightening the prospects that the government's burgeoning disability programs will be scaled back, President Clinton has proposed changes that would slow their growth and reduce the rolls by hundreds of thousands of people.The federal government could save up to $15 billion over five years under proposals Mr. Clinton has made and under Republican proposals that he is considered likely to accept.If adopted, the proposals would bring about the sharpest cuts in the history of the two disability programs run by the Woodlawn-based Social Security Administration.

WASHINGTON -- With Republicans promising legislative ZTC action, the Social Security Administration underwent another round of sharp criticism on Capitol Hill yesterday for delays in handling disability claims and for failing to weed out recipients who are no longer disabled.Saying the program "is in real trouble," Rep. Jim Bunning, a Kentucky Republican who heads the Ways and Means Social Security subcommittee, vowed, "We're going to do something about it."The SSA probably won't like what we do, but we're going to do it anyway.

WASHINGTON - The Clinton administration plans to ask Congress this week for special funding to sharply increase the review of disability check recipients to determine whether they can return to work, officials said yesterday.In a move that could save the government hundreds of millions of dollars, 1.4 million cases over the next two years would be reviewed 600,000 more cases than had been planned.Beyond that, the Clinton administration proposes to increase the reviews to more than 1 million annually by 2002, said Phil Gambino, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration, which conducts the reviews.

WASHINGTON -- The Social Security Administration spends $20 million a year to make sure lawyers get the fees that clients owe them for helping win Social Security disability benefits.But now the Clinton administration and Congress are moving to end the practice even though its defenders say lawyers will be less likely to take disability cases -- thus denying claimants needed legal services -- if they have to collect fees on their own."That's really going to make it difficult to get lawyers to take cases," said Joseph Manes, a lobbyist with the Bazelon Mental Health Law Center in Washington.

When people think of Social Security, they immediately think of retirement benefits.What they don't think about is a complicated bureaucracy within the Social Security Administration that pays people of all ages and income levels who cannot work because of serious illness or disabilities.Established in 1956, the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program initially provided modest benefits to workers over 50 who could not perform significant work because of a physical or mental impairment that was "long, continued and indefinite."

The government in Britain recently did something interesting. It asked everyone receiving an "incapacity benefit" -- a disability program slowly being phased out under new reforms -- to submit to a medical test to confirm they were too disabled to work. A third of recipients (878,000 people) didn't even bother and dropped out of the program rather than be examined. Of those tested, more than half (55 percent) were found fit for work, and a quarter were found fit for some work. But that's Britain, where there's a long tradition of gaming the dole.