Social Security Disability Benefits: Making an Informed Decision About Work – Live Captioning Transcript – 12.9.15
> Good afternoon, everyone in thank you for joining us for today's webinar Social Security disability benefits informed decision-making. Today's webinar is sponsored by Acorda Therapeutics. Am going to invite my collect, Nakia Matthews, to take a moment to give you a few housekeeping tips.
> Good afternoon, everyone, thank you, Elizabeth. The audio for today's webinar is being broadcast to your computer. Please make sure that your speakers are turned on or that your headphones are plugged in. You can control the audio broadcast the at the audio broadcast panel. If you accidentally close the panel you can reopen it from the top menu, communicate and click audio broadcasts broadcast. You don't have some capability on your computer or if you prefer to listen by phone, you can dial the number you see here and enter that meeting could. Please note you do not need to enter an attendee ID. Real-time captioning is provided during this webinar. The captions can be found in the media viewer panel, which appears in the lower right corner of the webinar platform. If you would like to make the media viewer panel larger, you can do so by minimizing some of the other panels like chat or Q&A. We will have time for questions at the end of the webinar. Please use the chat box or Q&A box to send any questions you may have during the course of the webinar to me, and we will direct those accordingly during the Q&A portion. If you are listening by phone and not logged into the web portion you may also ask questions by e-mailing them to me directly at . Please note this webinar is been recorded in the materials will be placed on the NDI website at cialwellness. If you experience technical difficulties during the webinar please use the chat box or e-mail me at . With that I will turn it back over to Elizabeth.
> Thank you so much, Nakia, and thank you to everyone on the line for joining us today. Amobi are moderated today my name is Elizabeth Jennings and the deputy director at National Disability Institute. Today, we will go over financial wellness, what it means, how you qualify for Social Security disability insurance, the impact of work on those benefits, where to turn for assistance. We will try to leave time for questions and answers, that we have a lot to share with you. We are going to give you some suggested next steps and rapid. You have the chat box, as Nakia mentioned, please send us your questions as you think of them. That save some for the end Emma we can answer them then. You don't get a question answered today, please send us your e-mail address in the chat box privately, we will be happy to respond to you. Or, we will give you are contact information at the very end. You're welcome to contact us at any point in time. I want to say thank you again to our sponsor, Acorda Therapeutics, who makes these financial wellness webinars possible. For those of you who are new to our webinars, National Disability Institute is a national research and development organization, with the mission to promote income preservation and asset development for persons with disabilities. And to build a better economic future for Americans with disabilities. Here is why. The national poverty estimates don't look so great for individuals with disabilities. For those 18-64, 12.5% of people without disabilities live below the poverty level. For individuals with disabilities, more than two times that number, 28.2% live below the poverty level. When I updated these numbers for today's webinar, actually the poverty level have gotten worse for people with disabilities. Review the Americans With Disabilities Act as our mandate, support the economic self-sufficiency of individuals with disabilities. The act says the nations proper goals regarding individuals with disabilities are to assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living and economic self-sufficiency.
> It is that piece of the act that we focus on, and so many other disability organizations do in a credible job of focusing on the other pieces. So what is financial wellness? We define it as the state of the persons finances with the intent of working towards financial behaviors that limit stress and the impact of stress on one's daily life. And anybody living with a disability knows that stress can just exacerbate medical conditions that are already challenging. There is a lot of pieces to financial wellness. There is being financially literate, understanding your money and how to manage it, accessing affordable, financial services. Are you with the right bank or credit union? Utilizing favorable tax provisions, which we are going to talk to you about on our next webinar in 2016. Budgeting, understanding public benefit rules, which we will start to tackle today, building and maintaining assets, accessing available health care subsidies and understanding work and long-term disability options.
> While in the current webinar series we are not able to tackle all of these issues, if you take the time to go to our archives, Nakia if you could put that in the chat box please, you can find previous webinars on each of these areas. Why is it important? It impacts our mental and physical health for everybody with or without a disability. It impacts our self-concept. It can actually change our status with other community stakeholders and give us a chance to have a voice in the community by having the funds to leave our home and participate in community activities and directly impact our quality of life. When you look at the financial wellness of people with disabilities and chronic health conditions, you find an incredible setback. The most basic level of financial wellness is being banked or having access to affordable, financial services. We did a study last year that mines data from the federal FDIC that showed individuals with disabilities are un- banked and under banked at a rate much higher than those without disabilities. You can see that without a disability, it is the green area that are fully banked and with a disability it is the red and yellow area and banked and under banked. That means almost half actually just over half 51% of people with disabilities either are not using a bank or are using a bank but are still using other predatory services like payday loans and cash checking. We also, prior to launching this webinar several years ago, conducted a survey with our partners at MSAA. We learned that for individuals with MS 51 .1% of households earned less than $35,000 annually. When asked about the ability to pay all their bills in a typical month, 32% had a very difficult time paying their bills and almost half reported somewhat difficult. 43% of these respondents with MS reported that their financial status has affected their ability to access medical care at some point in time. Almost 72 percent reported that they do not have enough in savings to cover three months expenses. 67.1 percent reported their finances were worse since their MS diagnosis and a large majority, 73.7 percent, reported they were not aware of for had not used financial stability programs available for available in the local area. Again you can check out our financial wellness webinar series archives to learn more about these opportunities. The strategies exist. There are a lot of strategies to support financial wellness. We are going to talk about some today, especially around Social Security disability insurance. I wanted to give you this little view of how many there are.
> Again, in our archives we address several weeks. If you see one on the screen or when you pull down the PowerPoint slides after today's presentation, please do reach out to us. We would be happy to talk to you about any of these strategies and what services are available within your local area to help you. The challenge becomes that for millions of working age adults with disabilities, a dependence on public benefits for income, health, -- healthcare, food and housing becomes a trap that require staying poor to stay eligible. It really benefits you to have all of the rules. Today, we will tackle just one of those public benefits, Social Security disability insurance, and my colleague, Kevin Nickerson, the codirector of the American Dream Empolyment Network here at National Disability Institute, is going to provide for you a clear understanding of how the SSDI rules works you can make your own informed choice about returning to work and have a better understanding of your ability to earn money and save money while holding onto critically needed healthcare for your SSDI benefits. Forgive me for going fast, but Kevin has so much great information to share with you, that I want to hand it off to him as quickly as possible. Thank you so much, Kevin, for joining us today.
> Thank you for the introduction, Elizabeth. And thank you for joining us today, folks. Those were difficult stats to see. I will say this audience, which I assume is comprised mostly of folks that get some kind of a benefit to the disability or SSI is my favorite audience to talk to the configure these two was that usually don't end up in the same sentence together and that is Social Security disability benefits and excited. I hope what we share today will be exciting to folks trying to look for a path back to financial security. There is a lot to cover. We are going to try to dig right in and see if we have time for questions at the end.
> Social Security administers several programs, but there really two primary programs we think of when we think of supporting people that have a disability, unable to work at least at substantial levels. And we will talk about that as well. That is Social Security disability insurance, SSDI or supplemental security income. We know many folks want to work and they want to get to work and get to sell supporting levels again but they have been misinformed in many ways by many folks, including sometimes information received from Social Security which can be very confusing. We understand a lot of people want to work that it is a very confusing process. We are going to try to make sense of this today, the best we can. There are many work incentives, that is the good news today. Despite all the negative statistics we just saw, there is some good news. Work incentives we are going to lay out today are often misunderstood. Often people don't understand them. We are going to try to make a few of these clear today so you can make real informed choices.
> I did say these are the main programs. Understand there are other programs we won't focus on as much today. One for example children's disability benefits or disabled widow or widower is benefits. Again, today, given the complexity of all of these programs, we have to focus on one. We decided to focus on SSDI benefits. So in terms of eligibility, Elizabeth highlighted that it is unfortunate, but often folks have to stay in poverty to stay eligible for the benefits that other eligibility so required specific to disability here are some things we wanted you to know. You have to prove you have a documented medical disability that is -- has lasted 12 months or expected to last 12 months and or result in death. It is a significant disability. The get this as long-term disability versus short-term disability. This is not short-term like many states have and offer. This is long-term disability for a significant condition that gets people eligible for this. So here is the other definition you have to meet Social Security has put forward in their manual. The inability to engage in substantial, gainful activity, we will cover that, by reason of any documented medical impairment that will last 12 months or longer and/or results in death. Is not just that you have a condition folks, is that the condition prevents you from being gainfully employed. We will go over what that gainful employment rule is all about in detail.
> The difference here is individuals who are blind don't have to prove they are unable to work really have to meet the level of blindness and have insured status which means they paid enough into the system to be eligible like anybody would for disability. We talked about this SGA, what is this about. A role that comes into play for eligibility but it comes into play later beyond eligibility. I will show you both pieces. In terms of eligibility remember the slide previous that talked about an able to perform gainful activity or gainful work. What is that? It is a fictitious number. a number that has come up with based on percentage of poverty. If you look at the bottom since 2013 SGA non- blind level of folks that apply to have a disability other than blindness the SGA level would be $1090 per month for this year. I put next year's rates on here too because they were just published. For next year the level would be $1130 per month. If looks are blind it is 1820. This year and that does not change for next year. In terms of eligibility if you are working and earning at the time you are applying they may not look at that application conceivably have a condition, a disability, it is not significant enough apparently to prevent you from being gainfully employed, so it is a combination of factors there.
> This is what SGA employment is all about. This is a test used during eligibility. The other thing you should know is it is determined based on your gross earnings before taxes. There are some exceptions to that rule when it comes to self-employment in which case they look at something called net earnings from self-employment. That generally speaking when we talk about SGA, that is how it works. Gross wages. Let's move forward here. Additional pieces on eligibility. I briefly mentioned you have to have insured status. What does that mean? While it means you have worked enough and developed credits by paying FICA taxes. I'm always am always curious if anybody knows what that is because you are paying for it out of your paycheck. I always ask this and believe it or not after all these years over 20 years no one has being able to tell me what that is. If you want to type that into the chat and break the cycle for me I would love that if you know what that is all about because you only have a few seconds to do that and I will tell you what it is. There is some exceptions to that role. When I talk about other kinds of disability benefits I discussed children's disability benefits, which is formally known as DAC or Social Security disability for an adult child. That is an exception to that rule. Folks can actually be attached to this benefit based on a parent's work history as long as a disability occurred prior to age 22. The person is not married to another beneficiary, a nontitle to beneficiary and again if they had insufficient FICA, again one of the ways they can still connect through a parent's actual work history but there is a catch. The parent has to be either retired, disabled or deceased. For that to happen.
> I did not see any takers on FICA, let me tell you with that is all about what that is all about. FICA contributions or what we call credits of coverage, again required for you to have that insured status. To be eligible for this. This is an insurance program. Social security disability insurance. Numbers vary based on your age, but generally I want you to know someone looking to have about 20 quarters of coverage in the last ten years prior to becoming disabled. With that mean Social Security is looking at recent work. You might wonder what are these quarters of coverage all about. You earn Acorda, for this year, when you earn $1220 or more. So it's an issue or not much you have developed one of those credits of coverage. Of course you can earn up to four a year. So that is how you earned this insured status through your payroll contributions. Someone asks what is FICA, that's a great question the Federal insurance contribution act. That was established I do believe in 1935. As a tax provision of the Social Security act.
> That is what FICA is all about. You are paying for it when you work. At least it does something for you folks. That is what I want you to understand when we pay these taxes this helps get us that insured status in the case we don't need to but if we ever needed to it allows us to have access to disability benefits. Something else that comes with this benefit, that is medical insurance. In this case we are talking about disability, not SSI, we don't have time to cover both the one we talk about disability and medical insurance we are talking about Medicare. What people are eligible for. But there's a 24 month waiting period once you are eligible for cash benefits. Here at different parts of this. Medicare invokes unaligned to get this benefit certainly know what I'm talking about. As part a, hospital insurance, Part B like routine care and part D which is now available which covers prescription drugs.