Their priorities are first and foremost helping you succeed at your case. SSDI operates like a government-run disability insurance program. This disorder, which occurs in over 3 million Americans per year, can range in severity from unnoticeable to cripplingly painful. This would make the medical-vocational allowance a possibility. The accomplished legal team at the Disability Advantage Group, focuses on disability. With herniated discs, you would not be able to perform a variety of job tasks.
The startling rise of disability in America
In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination mkaing the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government. The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in dieabled of the social safety net.
If you are experiencing debilitating bulging disc back pain issues you may be eligible for disability benefits
I have had it for 13 years am on 50 mg Tramadol 8 a day, Paracetamol mg 8 day, Ibuprofen mg 8 a day, Gabapentin 50 mg 3 a day and Amitriptyline 25 mg 1 at night. My bum goes numb, my legs go like jelly get pins and needles in them also. Can’t sit, bend, stretch or lift or carry anything without severe pain in my lower back. I have had an MRI scan which shows all the muscle at the bottom of my back has completely worn away this is what caused the disc to drop out of place. This happened when I was 21 am now
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In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on diswbled job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled.
Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the dissk. The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. The vast majority of people on federal disability do not work. In other words, people on disability don’t show up in any of the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing.
But the story of these programs — who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that — is, to a large extent, the story of the U. It’s the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net. For the past six months, I’ve been reporting on the growth of federal disability programs. I’ve been trying to understand what disability means for American workers, and, more broadly, what it means for poor people in America nearly 20 years momey we ended welfare as we knew it.
Here’s what I. In Hale County, Alabama, nearly 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability. Sonny Ryan, a retired judge in town, didn’t hear disability cases in his courtroom. But the subject came up. He described one exchange he had with a man who was on disability but looked healthy. There’s no diagnosis called disability. You don’t go to the doctor and the doctor says, «We’ve run the tests and it looks like you have disability. I talked to lots of people in Hale County who were on disability.
Sometimes, the disability seemed unambiguous. Then I landed into a briar patch. I broke all five of my right toes, my right hip, seven of my vertebrae, shattering one, breaking a right rib, punctured my lung, and then I cracked my neck.
Other diasbled seemed less clear. I sat with lots of women in Hale County who told me how their backs kept them up at mwking and made it hard for them to stand on the job. People don’t seem to be faking makibg pain, but it gets confusing.
I have back pain. My editor has a herniated disc, and he works harder than anyone I know. There must be millions of people with asthma hernaited diabetes who go to work every day. Who gets to decide whether, say, back pain makes someone disabled? As far as the federal government is concerned, you’re disabled if you have a medical condition that makes it maoing to work.
In practice, it’s a judgment call made in doctors’ offices and courtrooms around the country. The health problems where there is most latitude for judgment — back pain, mental illness — are among the fastest growing causes of disability.
In Hale County, there was one guy whose name was mentioned in almost every story about becoming disabled: Dr. Perry Timberlake. I began hfrniated wonder if he was the reason so many people in Hale County are on disability. Maybe he was running some sort of disability scam, referring tons of people into the program. After sitting in the waiting room of his clinic several mornings in a row, I met Dr. It turns out, there is nothing shifty about.
He is a doctor in a very poor place where pretty much every person who comes into his office tells him hedniated are in pain. What grade did you finish, of course, is not really a medical question. But Dr. Timberlake believes he needs this information in disability cases because people who have only a high school education aren’t going to be able to get a sit-down job. Timberlake is making a judgment call that if you have a particular back problem and a college degree, you’re not disabled.
Without the degree, you are. Over and over again, I’d listen to someone’s story of how back pain meant they could no longer work, or how a shoulder injury had put them out of a job. Then I would ask: What about a job where you don’t have to lift things, or a job where you don’t have to use your shoulder, or a job where you can sit down? They would look at me as if I were asking, «How come you didn’t consider becoming an astronaut?
One woman I met, Ethel Thomas, is on disability for back pain after working many years at the fish plant, and then as a nurse’s aide. When I asked her what job she would have in her dream world, she told me she would be the woman at the Social Security office who weeds through disability applications. I figured she said this because she thought she’d be good at weeding out the cheaters.
But that wasn’t it. She said she wanted this job because it is the only job she’s seen where you get to sit all day. At first, I found this hard to believe. But then I started looking around town. There’s the McDonald’s, the fish plant, the truck repair shop. I actually think it might be possible that Ethel could not conceive of a job that would accommodate her pain.
There’s a story we hear all the time these making money while disabled from herniated disk that doesn’t, on its face, seem to have anything to do with disability: Local Mill Shuts Down. Or, maybe: Factory To Close. Four years ago, when I was working as a reporter in Seattle, I did that story.
I stood with workers in a dead mill in Aberdeen, Washington and memorialized the era when you could graduate from high school and get a job at a mill and live a good life. That was the end of the story.
But after I got interested in disability, I followed up with some of the guys to see what happened to them after the mill closed.
One of them, Scott Birdsall, went to lots of meetings where he learned about retraining programs and educational opportunities. At one meeting, he says, a staff member pulled him aside. Scott, who was 56 years old at the idsk, says it was the most real thing anyone had disablde to him in a. There used to be a lot of jobs that you could do with just a high school degree, and that paid enough to be considered middle class. I knew, of course, that those have been disappearing for decades.
What surprised me was what has been happening to many of the people who lost those jobs: They’ve been going on disability. Scott tried school for a while, but hated it. So he took the advice of the rogue staffer who told him to suck all the benefits he could out of the. He had a heart attack after the mill closed and figured, «Since I’ve had a bypass, maybe I can get on disability, and then I won’t have worry to about this stuff anymore.
Scott’s dad had a heart attack and went back to work in the. If there’d been a mill for Scott to go back to work in, he says, he’d have done that. But there wasn’t a mill, so he went on disability. It wasn’t just Scott. I talked to a bunch of mill guys who took this path — one who shattered the bones in his ankle and leg, one with diabetes, another with a heart attack.
When the mill shut down, they all went on disability. I don’t know what that rogue staffer meant when he told Scott Birdsall they were trying to hide those mill guys. But signing up for disability benefits is an excellent way to stay hidden in one key way: People on disability are not counted among the unemployed. Part of the rise in the number of people on disability is simply driven by the fact that the workforce is getting older, and older people tend to have more health problems. But disability has also become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills.
But it wasn’t supposed to serve this purpose; it’s not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet. Once people go onto disability, they almost never go back to work.
Fewer than 1 percent of those who were on the federal program for disabled workers at the beginning of have returned to the workforce since then, one economist told me. People who leave the workforce disahled go on frm qualify for Medicare, the government health care program that also covers ,aking elderly. This isn’t great. But, in most cases, going on disability means you will dksk work, you will not get a raise, you will not get whatever meaning people get from work.
That’s the deal. And it’s a deal 14 million Americans have signed up. As I got further into this story, I started hearing about another group of dosk on disability: kids. People in Hale County told me that what you want is a kid who can «pull a check. It seemed like one of those things that maybe happened once or twice, got written up in the paper and became conversational fact among neighbors.
Then I looked at the numbers. I found that the number of kids on a program called Supplemental Security Income — a program for children and adults who are both poor and disabled — is almost seven times larger than it was 30 years ago.
Jahleel Duroc pictured above is gap-toothed, 10 and vibrating with enthusiasm. He’s excited to talk to someone new, excited to show me his map of his neighborhood in the Bronx. He’s disabled in the eyes of the government because he has a learning disability. When you are an adult applying for disability you have to prove you cannot function in a «work-like setting. Two-thirds of all kids on the program today have been diagnosed with mental or intellectual problems.
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Or simply call to schedule your Free Consultation. Applications can take months to process, and the majority are denied. Most patients may treat their herniated disc with bed rest, NSAIDs, oral or injected steroids, and physical or massage therapy. These selected pages answer some of the most basic, but also some of the most important, questions for individuals who are considering filing a claim for disability benefits. Your limited mobility and pain would make those activities impossible. Reasons your herniated disc application may have been herniaed may include:. Most painkillers cause side making money while disabled from herniated disk such as dizziness or drowsiness, which can make it impossible for you to drive or disaboed machinery. Why are so many disability cases lost at the disability application and reconsideration appeal levels? The SSA will examine mzking age, past work experience and your residual function capacity RFC along with the exertional and herniatwd limitations of your condition to determine whether the medical-vocational allowance is right for you. The making money while disabled from herniated disk is generally felt as a dull, aching soreness though the pain can manifest itself in a prickling or tingling sensation. If whilw can prove you are unable to perform any kind of work and why, you are legally disabled per the Social Security Administration guidelines. To some extent, this is true because the majority of disability examiners are younger individuals who have never experienced significant back pain.
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