Disabled left out of overhaul debate

PHILADELPHIA – Anthony Williams is a Social Security recipient.

He isn’t elderly; he’s 44. He isn’t retired; he’s a quadriplegic, crippled when an armed robber shot him 17 years ago.

And he’s worried. He wonders how any overhaul of Social Security would affect his monthly check – and those going to the millions of other disabled Americans who rely on the system.

“I’ve been upset ever since President Bush started talking about this,” said Williams, who lives in an apartment in Philadelphia. “If it’s going to affect us, then we’re in big trouble.”

Though few Americans are aware of it, Social Security is and has been a multifaceted, social safety net providing workers and their families with insurance against disability and death as well as retirement.

What happens to these programs should the system be overhauled with personal accounts? It won’t be possible to venture a guess until the Bush administration puts forward a specific proposal.

But in the debate thus far, quite strikingly, there has been almost no conversation about the system’s nonretirement aspects, even though those aspects make up a significant chunk of the total program.

How significant? Consider these statistics:

Of the nation’s nearly 48 million Social Security beneficiaries, more than 30 percent are “not retired workers or members of their families.”

Almost 4 million children receive checks from the system; they qualify because their parents are retired, deceased or disabled. Remarkably, more children get money from Social Security than from the nation’s main cash welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

But the largest group of nonretiree beneficiaries, numbering roughly 8 million, is the disabled, including the spouses and children who would otherwise be their dependents.

Disability checks, which average $894 a month, are not given out lightly by Social Security. Benefits are available only to those whose impairment, physical or mental, is expected to last at least 12 months or result in death.

And there is money specifically designated for this purpose. Of the 12.4 percent of wages paid into Social Security, half by employee and half by employer, 1.8 percentage points go for disability insurance.

“The issue isn’t just whether Social Security will be there for people when they get old,” said Eileen Sweeney, of the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. “It’s whether it will continue to be there for you if you’re 35 and get seriously injured in a car accident. It’s there for you now.”

The system pays retirees and it pays the disabled, including those who are disabled from birth; most Americans have no other disability insurance. It pays spouses of the disabled and, in some cases, former spouses. It pays survivors of deceased workers, including school-age children, widows, widowers and elderly parents. It keeps a lot of people out of poverty.

According to the Social Security Administration, someone who is 20 years old today has about a 30 percent chance of becoming disabled and a 16 percent chance of dying before reaching retirement age.

Most of the personal-account proposals that have been introduced in Congress would seek to maintain the disability program as is and make modest changes elsewhere.

David C. John, the Social Security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, says that leaving disability alone is simple, reasonable and politically essential for those who favor personal accounts. Supporters of accounts worry that the disability issue could become an effective weapon to resist change.