Disability = Winning Lottery

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Robert Doar argues  a major factor increasing non-participation in the workforce has been making various benefit programs - unemployment, food stamps, etc. - easier to get and keep for longer periods.

Writing to comment on Doar's article, medical practitioner Jeanne Ashworth focuses on the huge increase in people claiming disability payments from Social Security. She reports:

The vast majority of those who go on disability (even with potentially reversible health conditions) wll remain there permanently. In the low income area where I practice medicine, a disability-qualifying illness is considered by some like a winning lottery ticket. 

As regular COTTonLINE readers know well, for several years we've cited SSDI as a much abused benefit, an enabler of early "retirement" for those who'd rather not work.