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POLICY INSIGHT
BEYOND THE NUMBERS

Just the Facts on Disability Insurance

We’ve updated our primer on the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program, an integral part of Social Security that provides modest but vital benefits to workers who can no longer support themselves due to a severe and long-lasting medical impairment.  For an estimated 150 million insured workers, DI stands ready to protect them from destitution if a health catastrophe strikes and they meet DI’s stringent eligibility criteria.

Some highlights from our piece:

  • Some 8.9 million people received disabled-worker benefits from Social Security in December 2013, averaging $1,146 a month.
  • The typical beneficiary is in his or her late 50s or early 60s, with limited education and poor health.  Recipients’ death rates are at least three times as high as the general population’s.
  • Most recipients depend heavily on their DI benefits as their main source of income.  Beneficiaries are much likelier to be poor or near-poor than people who don’t collect DI.

DI rolls have risen steeply over the last few decades, chiefly because of demographic factors — overall population growth, the aging of the baby boomers into their 50s and 60s (the peak ages for DI receipt), the rise in women’s labor force participation (which means more women now qualify for DI benefits), and the rise in Social Security’s full retirement age from 65 to 66 (which delays by a year the reclassification of DI beneficiaries as retired workers).  Once you adjust for those factors, DI’s rate of receipt has grown modestly (see graph).

Find our primer here and check out our other posts on this important topic.

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