The Human Face of Disability
By: Liz Borkowskiscienceblogs.com/thepumphandle
September 20, 2011
If you hold a job right now, here's something to think about: If you became disabled and were no longer able to work, how would you pay your bills? If your disability were due to an on-the-job injury or an occupational illness, you might be able to get workers' compensation benefits. But what if you were paralyzed after falling down a flight of stairs at home or suffering a stroke? If you're lucky, you'll have disability insurance, which some employers offer as a benefit. But for most people whose ability to work becomes compromised before they're able to retire, disability payments from Social Security become a crucial source of income.
Heather Kovich, a physician who performed Social Security disability assessments, has written an excellent article for the magazine Guernica that shows how hard it is for disabled US workers to get what they need from our national safety net. Her account also demonstrates the difficulty of designing and implementing a system that provides decent benefits to those who truly need them at a reasonable cost to taxpayers.
Kovich tells us the story of Doug (not his real name), a former patient:
In the 1980s, before Doug's life unraveled, he was making a good salary at an engineering firm in Seattle. His work was complex: he helped build a crane for NASA that assembled orbiters at Kennedy Space Center and an underwater crane for nuclear submarines. He and Laurel married in 1983 and she brought three children into the marriage. Doug quickly came to consider them his own. They owned a house in the working-class suburbs south of Seattle. But in the winter of 1996, when the tingling started, Doug's life started to fall apart.
He felt it first in his right arm: little electrical pinpricks in the tips of his fingers that shot up to his elbow, causing an aching heaviness at his shoulder. After months of physical therapy the pain had only worsened and spread. An MRI showed the cause of the problem: his spine was collapsing around his spinal cord, crushing many of the nerves, and strangling the cord itself: cervical spinal stenosis. It was bad luck--there was no injury that caused it, no family history that would have predicted it. A neurosurgeon operated to stabilize the vertebrae and take pressure off the spinal cord, but the cord had suffered permanent damage and the pain never lessened. He started drinking to dull it, the drinking affected his work. Eventually he lost his job.
Doug eventually discovered medications that could control his pain, but that didn't happen until after he'd developed a drinking problem, lost his job, and separated from his wife. While he had no income, he was able to get the drugs free through manufacturers; once he eventually got Social Security Disability Income (SSDI) payments and became eligible for Medicare, the drugs were no longer free and he was unable to afford all the required cost-sharing.
Read more: http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/2011/09/the_human_face_of_disability_-.php
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