Yesterday, Jordan Weissman’s excellent article, “Disability Insurance: America’s $124 Billion Secret Welfare Program,” published March 25, 2013 in The Atlantic,  explains how the number of former workers enrolled in Social Security Disability has doubled in 20 years.  He states:

“Since the early 1990s, the number of former workers receiving payments under it has more than doubled to about 8.5 million, as shown in Planet Money’s graph below. More than five percent of all eligible adults are now on the rolls, up from around 3 percent twenty years ago. Add in children and spouses who also get checks, and the grand tally comes to 11.5 million.”

That rapid, under-the-political-radar expansion has turned the program into a massive budget item. As of 2010, its monthly cash payments accounted for nearly one out of every five Social Security dollars spent, or about $124 billion. In 1988, by comparison, it accounted for just one out of eight Social Security dollars. Because disabled workers qualify for Medicare, they also added $59 billion to the government’s healthcare tab.

Are disabilities just becoming more common? According to economists such as MIT’s David Autor, the evidence says no. The workforce is indeed getting older, and thus more ailment prone. But Americans over 50, who make up most disability cases, report much better health today than in the 1980s. And demographers have found that the percentage of Americans older than 65 suffering from a chronic disability has fallen drastically since then. In the end, economists Mark Duggan and Scott Imberman estimate that, at most, the graying of America’s workers explained just 4 percent of the increase in the rate of disability program participation for women, and 15 percent for men, through 2004.

Instead, it seems two things have happened: Qualifying for disability got easier, and finding work got harder. As the Planet Money piece puts it, “there’s no diagnosis called disability.” According to the letter of the law, disability recipients must prove they are too physically or mentally impaired to hold a job. And early in the program’s life, the most commonly reported ailments were easy-to-diagnose problems such as heart-disease, strokes, or neurological disorders. But after the Reagan administration began trying to thin out the program’s rolls in the early 80s, an angry Congress reacted by loosening its criteria. Suddenly, subjective measures like self-reported pain or mental health problems earned more weight under Social Security’s formula. Today, the most common diagnoses are musculo-skeletal issues, such as severe back pain, and mental illnesses, such as mood disorders — health problems where the line between a disability and a mild impairment is far blurrier.”