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In 2014, Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, and Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, put forth a really dumb idea. It was so dumb, in fact, that the Trump Administration appears ready to pick up on it.
At the time, Lankford was in the U.S. House of Representatives and chaired the Subcommittee on Energy Policy, Health Care and Entitlements. Speier was the ranking member. After the subcommittee held a hearing called “Oversight of Rising Disability Claims and the Role of Administrative Law Judges,” Lankford and Speier sent a letter to Carolyn W. Colvin, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration. The letter strongly urged the agency to adopt eleven “common-sense reforms” to thwart all those who “attempt to game the disability determination system.”
Common-sense reform number seven said, “SSA should review each applicant’s social media accounts prior to awarding benefits.” This, the letter said, would be “extremely useful” in determining who’s faking their disability and thus ensuring that Social Security payments only go to those who have a “genuine” disability.
Okay, maybe this might expose some nefarious character who rents a wheelchair and goes to the Social Security office sitting with one leg folded under, claiming to be an amputee. If there’s a picture of him on Facebook wearing short pants and running a fifty-yard dash on the two legs that God gave him, he’s busted.
Screaming about fake cripples works the same as screaming about fake news.
But suppose your disability is depression. What if there are pictures on your social media pages of you smiling and enjoying yourself? What does that tell us about whether or not you are really depressed? Not a damn thing.
The only way that would cast any suspicion is if we begin with the assumption that being genuinely disabled equals being totally incapacitated. If you’re really disabled, all you do is stay home and suffer.
That was the prevailing image of disabled people sixty and seventy years ago, which is probably why Trump finds this idea so appealing. The New York Times reports that his administration is working with the Social Security Administration to develop a proposed rule that makes common-sense reform number seven a reality.
It’s a page right out of the Trump vilification playbook. Screaming about fake cripples works the same as screaming about fake news. If it’s done often enough and loud enough, maybe eventually it’ll blur things up so much that nobody will be sure what’s real and what’s not.
Take me, for example. I’ve been riding around in various wheelchairs for sixty years. That ought to be enough to qualify me as crippled. But I don’t stay home all day and suffer. So am I suddenly not genuinely disabled?
If this is to be the new disability determination criterion, then the list of who is genuinely disabled is whittled down to include just about no one. This paves the way for a lot of people who qualify for Social Security disability support to be denied.
So if you or someone you love may apply for Social Security Disability support, you should probably stay off social media. Either that or only post pictures of yourself looking totally miserable, just to be safe.