SSA Disability Fraud Arrests Should Extend Beyond Puerto Rico - Yahoo! Voices - voices.yahoo.com
Government programs always begin with the best of intentions. Some Americans of an earlier age had little or no income when retired at age 62 and so were offered retirement benefits. Since wives of the 50s and 60s often stayed home to attend domestic affairs, an array of spousal benefits were added. Then children's benefits. And survivor's benefits. And when earnest, hard-working construction people fell from buildings, or factory workers suffered heart attacks, strokes, or developed terminal cancers and were too weak to work, Social Security Disability paid them benefits.
That was all well and good until disability became institutionalized and, to a degree-automatic. According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly 11 million people were receiving disability benefits at an annual cost of $136 billion in 2012. With that many people receiving disability benefits, the definition of "disabled" would have to include maladies of a less severe nature than those for which the program was intended.
Seventy-five people were arrested yesterday in Puerto Rico and accused of defrauding the Social Security Disability program.
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