WASHINGTON — The 80 retired New York police and firefighters accused last week of faking Ground Zero illnesses to collect disability benefits had targeted a federal program that’s ripe for abuse, according to a new study.
Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) — which the 9/11 fakers allegedly scammed for $400 million — is a tempting target for fraud because Congress has dramatically expanded the definition of who is “disabled,” the National Bureau of Economic Research reports.
That’s why the rate of SSDI payouts to non-elderly adults has nearly doubled since the 1980s, even as Americans generally got healthier, according to NBER.
In the fraud case involving NYPD and FDNY retirees, which prosecutors announced last week, the scammers were coached about how to qualify, including claims that they couldn’t sleep, do simple arithmetic or even go outdoors.
Investigators found them piloting helicopters, riding jet skis, teaching karate, deep-sea fishing and even running half-marathons.
But able-bodied Americans routinely qualify for federal disability benefits because of the lax medical criteria, according to the study by researches Mark Duggan and Scott Imberman.
More than 9 million Americans ages 18 to 64 collect Social Security disability benefits, which also makes them eligible for Medicare.
Some 557,438 non-elderly adults collect SSDI benefits in New York. California had the most, with 748,043, followed by Texas’ 595,925, according to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The study disputes Social Security Administration claims that the increasing rate of disability is driven by aging Baby Boomers. The largest factor in the increase, Duggan and Imberman determined, was “congressional reforms to disability screening in 1984 that enabled workers with low mortality disorders such as back pain, arthritis and mental illness to more readily qualify for benefits.”
It accounted for 45 percent of increase in men on disability and 36 percent for women pocketing SSDI checks, according to the research.
They found that just 13 percent of the growth among men on disability was due to the aging of the population. It was 4 percent for women.