A Major New Expenditure
YOU WOULDN'T expect disability rates to change much in a society from year to year - but they do. In the last few years the costs of the government's giant disability programs have begun rising in a way that none of the usual factors of inflation, population and the rest can fully explain. The government faces a major new expenditure, and no one knows all the reasons why.</br></br>The cost of the two large programs combined was $50 billion last fiscal year. The projection for fiscal 1998 is $80 billion - up 60 percent in just six years. The main program is the part of Social Security that supports disabled workers and their families. Its share of the Social Security tax is no longer enough to cover the rising cost. The disability trust fund could be exhausted as early as 1995 if Congress doesn't change the financing or other terms of the program, as it doubtless will.</br></br>The companion program of so-called supplemental security income for the needy elderly and disabled is expanding even faster. Disability is the reason. Costs are projected to rise from last year's $19 billion to $34 billion in fiscal 1998, a 75 percent increase. SSI would surpass food stamps as the second-largest federal welfare program after Medicaid.</br></br>A partial explanation for the SSI expansion is a 1990 Supreme Court decision easing the definition of disability as applied to children. The number of children on the rolls has increased sharply since - but so has the number of disabled adults, and children still make up fewer than a fifth of disabled SSI beneficiaries.</br></br>The baby boom is also offered in explanation, the theory being that boomers are just now reaching the age where workers' bodies begin to give out. But in fact most are still a little young; the oldest boomers are still in their mid-forties, and disability tends to appear more frequently in the mid-fifties.