Before I progress into this blog, I suggest you read the following documents:Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI)
I do not know of anyone born into this world who decided their life's ambition was to be disabled. I do know there are people who attempt to defraud anything and take advantage of anything that allows them not to work. Our current programs for the disabled are inadequate and under staffed. And I am just as certain that most people who are disabled live below the median income standards. Whether they receive public assistance or not, they do not on the average exist in a personal world of abundance and prosperity. My experience with other people with disabilities, they constantly battle with maintaining a positive attitude. Many succumb to depression and isolation. Many are shunned by the people of the world and rejected by even their own families. As they become older and out live their families, if they are fortunate, many live lonely lives. No disabled person seeks pity that I know about, but a helping hand given in true friendship is gladly received even if hesitation precedes the help. In this blog I will attempt to address one of problems they face, social security disability insurance payments commonly referred to as SSDI.
As the baby boomer generation reaches retirement and more require SSDI payments, I believe to have social security available for anyone in any form, we need to revamp the system. As much as the government wants us to believe that social security was never designed to be a primary source of income, it is. Let us get real, for many, especially women, who have never worked outside of the home, and those disabled since youth, it has been that way, and for many it is that way today and will remain that way in the future. Currently, there are many reasons for women with children to remain at home raising children. I personally believe without at least one parent being available at all times, many of the children henceforth will be devoid of the values that so many of us in the older generations have utilized to make life worthwhile. Too many children are lost in today's world to gangs where they find a type of family that is dangerous to the mass majority of us. Unfortunately, for the parent who raises a disabled child, many, child and parent, never get to work in the world and earn a paycheck. Their work is taking care of their child. They still need an income to provide for that disabled child. I do not believe that a mother chose to conceive a disabled child any more than I believe a child chose to be disabled. However, things are the way they are, and even caretakers in parent form need to have provisions for retirement and even their own disabilities. Many parents get disability for their children but have no provisions of their own. With all our concern for welfare, what do we propose to do for people who truly deserve long term consideration? I encourage everyone to take a long look at the way social security is operated from start to finish. Get real about the fact that it is, has been and will remain for many, their primary source of income.
Let me tell you a little about my life first so you get a picture mentally in regards to how I live relatively happy. I have struggled since I was eight years old with essential tremors that for many years doctors thought would become Parkinson's disease. Unfortunately, I was unlucky enough to sit outside a doctor's office and hear him tell my mother I would never probably survive to the age of eighteen. Pretty scary for a child to hear. I am sure they did not know I heard them and I never spoke about it.
From the picture of me above, you can tell I am alive. I have experienced far more of life than those doctors ever thought I would. However, the tremor did create many problems for me that would have been nice not to have had. Nine years of prescription tranquilizers made me an addict. Even without abuse, tranquilizers are addictive. I would have never been able to attend and complete public school successfully without tranquilizers. Unfortunately, in those days, doctors did not know that alcohol would create a lot of the same problems as tranquilizers. Alcohol became a problem for me and extremely mind altering. I am grateful for a 12 Step Program for teaching me how to be free from alcohol and drugs. To this day, I still have doctors who think I should drink and have it help my tremors. I quit explaining and just walk away from that suggestion.
Obviously, I have been disabled all my life and limited in many things I can do. As I have aged, it has become worse and other physical conditions have complicated my life. I am grateful to the medical profession for finally acquiring a procedure that has eliminated some of the tremor. I agreed to have brain surgery in a procedure called a thalamotomy in 1999. The tremor had progressed to the point I was going to have to hire someone to feed me and help with many things that required extension of my arms to accomplish. Extended arm movement makes the tremors totally unmanageable. I still cannot put a nail in the wall with a hammer or carry two cups of coffee. But I can feed myself without wearing my food most of the time. There are occasional spasms that still create problems. Over the years I have had to give up many things such as singing because of voice tremors. That was difficult because at one time I was offered a singing career but inwardly I knew my tremors could not handle the stress and turned it down. As a side effect of the surgery, I have sacrificed some short term memory and that was easy to do in order to feed myself. It takes a little time to recall things especially if it is a recent event.
Everything considered I have come to the conclusion that even if I did acquire employment in the conventional workplace it would be short lived because I cannot meet other people's job requirements on a consistent basis. I am even more aware of my physical condition than an employer would be and one of mine, an eye tremor, is only viewable on an EEG test result. It does create tired eye syndrome and eye strain on a regular basis. I have not found a neurological ophthalmologist anywhere close to where I live. As of today, I do not receive SSDI, SSI or welfare. My only income is derived from maintenance in a divorce settlement. I have receiving maintenance in the State of Colorado since May of 2002.
Thankfully, I have been able to work part of my life prior to my divorce and for that I am grateful. The sad part is since the early 90's the only jobs I had was for a mortuary selling pre-need funeral plans that cost me more to do than I made, and for a fabric company. The second job was very short lived and caused me more physical problems that I could afford to remedy. The mortuary job required long hours, commission sales with no consistent income and high stress that made the tremor worse. Definitely not good matches for my employment needs. Both of these jobs were prior to my divorce. Even sadder it meant I did not have enough quarters paid into social security to acquire benefits over the required 5 or 10 year period of time.
In 2001, the truth behind my acquiring SSDI became notable when my husband of 34 years requested a divorce. Considering my disability, SSDI had to be considered as a resource for income after the divorce was final. Careful discussions with social security administration removed the resource during mediation. Even with a good attorney at my elbow my divorce settlement still lacked a few things it should have incorporated. I was able to acquire a maintenance agreement that continues in place until I am sixty-six years old and eligibility for regular social security retirement benefits is achieved. It has given me a unique insight into the problem.
Let me summarize a few points to ponder in regard to receiving SSDI:
- Are you or have you been capable of being employed?
- If you can work at anything, however menial, will it financially support you?
- If you are getting divorced, disabled and do not qualify for SSDI, think what you should include in your decree due to your disability. Most handicapped people I know tend to over estimate what they can do and do not consider what the employers of the world will let us do.
- What will you do if something happens to the maintenance or alimony you may receive from the divorce settlement? Will you be able to survive on welfare?
- Get a realistic view of how you appear to an employer and the public. Many employers resist hiring a person with a disability, regardless of what the law says, especially if your problem is beyond their scope of understanding or they think the problem is more complex than you are saying.
- Make sure you are able to maintain health insurance. It is one thing to think it is easy to acquire, and another when the cost of the policy complicates your ability to pay for it. If you have been covered by your ex's group insurance, trust me COBRA does run out and you will need to get health insurance. Regardless of a group plan, individual policies do cost more.
- Try to find a compassionate health care provider or doctor familiar with your unique problems whether health or monetary. Get an estimate of what your yearly costs are going to be when your income is reduced. However, it may require a good attorney who deals with social security benefit problems in order to get your income or answer any questions.
- Do not waste time fighting with social security over how it should be. They are not miraculously going to change their rules to accommodate you.
- I am positive there are people out there who never have and never will qualify for SSDI. Obtaining help or an income for them is even harder. If they are getting divorced they really need to look at all possibilities before the decree is final.
- Try to stay current on what financial assistance is available to you. There are many programs available to the disabled but finding the person who knows about them can be a long process and expensive. Many of these programs do not require monetary reimbursement from the disabled in order to participate. Requirements for each program are not necessarily available to every disabled person but may be disability specific.
- Take a look at the woman who has stayed home and raised a family. She receives no monetary compensation for her time or work. She submits no funds to social security. She becomes divorced and then disabled and her income is gone with the husband. What happens then? She cannot receive disability payments from her ex-husband. The do not consider that when figuring income for the disabled. If she has been re-introduced to the workforce long enough after becoming divorced and disabled, she will be able to apply for SSDI if her disability is of a permanent nature. If it is not permanent, she needs to let go of that resource as an income and pray someone helps her until she can either establish a permanent disability, one that extends more than one year, or she is able to return to work. The same could be true for a man. These situations are not gender specific. When you negotiate prior to a divorce, especially when you have been in a long term relationship, beyond ten years, you need to look at what income you will have if you should get sick.
- Let us look at another situation, a man/woman, who is the primary income maker in a family after a divorce where alimony/maintenance is in the decree. The person paying the alimony/maintenance is able to remarry freely, however, the other marriage partner is not. If they remarry they loose any support from the first marriage. Look at the situation with a disabled person and think what the limits are for them. They cannot remarry and keep any maintenance from the first marriage even if the marriage was twenty-five or more years. Is that the way it should be? Divorce settlements are frequently not truly equitable. Many times the primary income producer remarries and takes the disabled person back to court in order to pay them less regardless of the disabled person's situation. Yes, I have seen these types of situations.
If you are able to work at all, be prepared to fight with social security for your disability payments. From what I have seen you cannot be only slightly disabled, you must be 100% disabled in social security's eyes. It does not matter if your doctor says you are or a combination of doctors who are not employed by social security. It only matters that social security and their doctors see you as disabled. Even if you cannot work and your doctor has told you so, social security seems to have a problem paying benefits without at least one denial.
I had a friend of mine who was stricken suddenly with a mental disorder to the point that she was found running naked through city streets. What I will relate is a true story. She was treated as an out patient and her condition continued to degenerate. She had been treated for severe adult ADHD prior to any of these episodes and the medicines seemed to help only slightly. She continued for a long time to work as a self-employed person. Her job did not supply her with the money she needed to survive doing the normal eight hour days. She had episodes of blackouts due to sleep deprivation and her over all health was failing. Her visits to a doctor were minimal because frankly, she did not have insurance or the money to pay for the visits. She had been a nurse and thought she knew something about what her health issues were. Nurses should never play doctor on themselves. Because of her age, she was not able to find a job other than the one she had self-employed as a medical transcriptionist. After the nude incident, the county health officials got involved. However, they can only do so much. Another incident ended with them putting her in a state mental institution. Everything they found wrong with her other than mental, like cancer, should have spoken loud and clear of permanent disability. It took more than a year to get her benefits and a county health department that refused to accept no for an answer. In between times, she lost everything she owned. According to the folks with the county, her self-employment for several years complicated her acquiring her rightful benefits. The only way she retained any personal pictures, private papers or momentos was due to me and her considerate and helpful landlord. I had the unpleasant duty of liquidating her things or having the landlord throw everything out. Landlords do have a right to the use of their property and if someone does not have family anywhere around, they can do whatever they must do to the property. This landlord waited more than three months without payment before it became apparent that the tenant was returning or able to pay the rent.
Should it have been this far advanced into her disability before receiving her benefits and being taken out of the working world? According to the doctor who diagnosed her adult ADHD it alone should have been enough. It did not seem to matter to anyone that what she was doing was taking twice as long as anyone else to accomplish. She was doing piece work and that did not matter to her employer because he really did not know how long it took her to accomplish the task. No one knew that the doctor who diagnosed her had told her he was surprised she could work at all. She was so anxious to be healthy and independent that she was willing to push herself to a breaking point and once she got there, things became even more complicated. In between times good county mental health officials and I as her friend did all we could to try to get her out of the workforce. Her life when I last saw her had no semblance to the life she lived in a self-supporting world. The truth was her life in a self-supporting world was not really anything close to normal or healthy. She finally received her benefits, Medicare and Medicaid and was living in an assisted-living facility. I understand she died and I know the last time I saw her she did not recognize me. Many times when I visited her the people aiding her treated her like she just needed to die and quit inconveniencing them. However, I feel doctors drug out her life for the benefits they received. For me, I pray I never get to that point. Many questions for me arose from this story, and many are still unanswered. Just because someone makes money does not mean they should be working and there is at this time no one that I know who can evaluate whether a person should be kept from working. How can you force someone not to work? It makes me wonder how many mentally ill are working and creating more problems than we can cure. I doubt anyone checked her work and people's medical records could have errors in them because of her. Pretty scary when you really think about it.
I will continue to relate some true stories I have seen and heard in part 2 of this blog. For today, this is enough to be thought provoking for all.
