Children’s SSI program examined

Research cites a cycle of dependency

October 28, 2011|By Patricia Wen, Globe Staff

WASHINGTON - Indigent children who grew up as part of a $10 billion federal disability program often do not fare well in early adulthood: Four out of 10 are high school dropouts, and eight out of 10 are unemployed within five years of their 18th birthday, according to congressional testimony yesterday.

More than half of the young adults who are part of the children’s Supplemental Security Income program eventually seek benefits from the adult part of the same program, creating a disturbing cycle of government dependency and poverty, said David Wittenburg, a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, a public policy research firm.

“We need to rethink the current policies,’’ Wittenburg said in his presentation to a congressional subcommittee yesterday.

He testified as the first congressional hearing convened following a three-part Boston Globe report, published last December, that found potentially perverse incentives for low-income families to introduce and extend disability designations for their children to secure up to $700 in monthly benefits. At the hearing, convened by Representative Geoff Davis, a Republican from Kentucky and chairman of a Ways and Means subcommittee, lawmakers questioned social policy specialists and a government investigator, among others, about whether this program has evolved into a de facto welfare system that undermines the chance that recipients will become productive adults.

“SSI today offers monthly checks without any requirement that benefits be spent on helping the child overcome his or her disability,’’ Davis said before a packed room of about 100 people nearly all 11 members of the bipartisan subcommittee on human resources.

During the 90-minute hearing, lawmakers heard about how this program, which had once served primarily children with lifelong physical and congenital disabilities, is now dominated by children with behavioral, learning, and mental disorders, including ADHD, speech delay, and autism.

The number of families seeking these benefits has soared, policy specialists testified, as the nation’s welfare benefits have shrunk, as more children slip into poverty and as behavioral, learning, and as emotional disorders are more routinely diagnosed. Even as the government rejects more child applicants than it accepts for behavioral, learning and mental disorders, enrollment in these categories has climbed. They now account for 55 percent of all cases.

Lawmakers were also told that government workers fail routinely to follow up to see if the child is better and perhaps no longer eligible for benefits. Some teenagers on SSI told the Globe that they have been discouraged from working for fear that it would jeopardize the child’s disability status and therefore their benefits.