Gokhale: Reform Disability Insurance

At Investor's Business Daily, the Cato Institute's Jagadeesh Gokhale writes about the need to reform Social Security's disability program. While DI has widely been ignored as part of Social Security reform plans to date, with most solvency-oriented reformers finding it too complex to tackle, there's growing interest in looking at DI reform – both to hold down rapidly growing costs and to improve the efficiency of the program in finding disabled people and granting them benefits in a reasonable period of time.

Gokhale references a proposal from David H. Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Mark Duggan of the University of Maryland, which would require employers to provide private disability insurance as a "front end" for the Social Security DI program. The idea is that the private plans would be focused on helping individuals remain on the job; for those who couldn't, the path to receiving Social Security DI would be smoothed.

In a recent New York Times blog, I touched on some other ideas from Autor and Duggan for DI reform. Also worth noting is that Richard Burkhauser of Cornell University is currently completing a book for AEI on disability insurance reform, co-authored with Mary Daly of the San Francisco Federal Reserve. I'm hopeful that the Autor-Duggan paper and the Burkhauser-Daly book will instigate a new momentum for DI reform.