ArticleThe Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science2019
Identifying Work Capacity and Promoting Work: A Strategy for Modernizing the SSDI Program.
Article in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Applying Aspects of Disability Determination Methods from the Netherlands in the United States.Social security bulletin · 2026Article
- Reforming Food, Drug, and Nutraceutical Regulations to Improve Public Health and Reduce Healthcare Costs.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Aging and Work Capacity.Journal of the economics of ageing · 2025Article
- Independent and joint contributions of physical disability and chronic pain to incident opioid use disorder and opioid overdose among Medicaid patients.Psychological medicine · 2024Article
- Pain, Physical Demands at Work, and Future Work Expectations Among Older Adults in the United States.Innovation in aging · 2023Article
- Has the opening of Amazon fulfillment centers affected demand for disability insurance?PloS one · 2023Article
- Scaling up and scaling out: Consilience and the evolution of more nurturing societies.Clinical psychology review · 2020Review
- COVID-19 and the US Safety Net.Fiscal studies · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program, which provides income support to individuals who become unable to work because of a disability, has not been substantially reformed since the 1980s, despite sweeping changes in health, medical technology, and the functional requirements of jobs. I review how the SSDI program works, its history in terms of caseloads and reforms, and findings from the research evidence that offer lessons for the future. I then propose two interlocking reforms that would modernize the core functions of the program. The first is to improve SSDI's process for determining whether an applicant has remaining capacity to work by replacing the outdated medical-vocational "grid" with a new system of individual work capacity measurement. Second, I propose the introduction of partial disability benefits, which would make use of the new system for measuring work capacity, and allow beneficiaries to combine benefit receipt with work. Partial benefits could be paired with a generalized benefit offset to further encourage work by beneficiaries, and the Social Security Administration's complex array of work-related rules could be eliminated.
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Registered trials
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