Some of those people also may have had a disability they recovered from, but no real opportunity to return to the workforce (or no incentive to work towards their recovery). I believe the Social Security office even includes the criteria "could this person get a job?" based on age, skill, and location, and you could remain on disability even though in some theoretical sense you are physically able to work. Such as, you might consider a miner who has some physical reason he is unable to continue in mining; theoretically he might be physically capable of working in some other job, but those jobs don't exist in the community, or he doesn't have the skills and doesn't have enough time left in the workforce to justify retraining.
Which is to say, there are situations where no one is really defrauding the system, but because the rules don't offer any soft landing people have to stay inside a system and can't explore the marginal contributions they are capable of making.
(Still this wouldn't remove the purpose and need for disability insurance, just remove some of the strange structures in it that have developed.)
Which is to say, there are situations where no one is really defrauding the system, but because the rules don't offer any soft landing people have to stay inside a system and can't explore the marginal contributions they are capable of making.
(Still this wouldn't remove the purpose and need for disability insurance, just remove some of the strange structures in it that have developed.)
EconTalk had a really good podcast on disability insurance: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/04/autor_on_disabi.htm...