Courtesy of Mish.
New Meaning of Disability
Here is a curious story on the meaning of “disability“.
Please consider Lack of English Meant Puerto Ricans Got Disability Benefits.
A federal audit has found that some Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. territory have received disability benefits in part because they could not speak English.
The Office of the Inspector General for the Social Security Administration said in a report issued this month that there were 218 cases from 2011 to 2013 in which benefits were granted under those circumstances.
The report said Social Security determined it was difficult for those people to find a job because they did not speak English, but the inspector general said they could have found work given their Spanish-speaking skills in a largely Spanish-speaking island.
More Details
The above version is from ABC News. In another curiosity, Sputnik News, appears to have far more details.
The US Social Security Administration has been offering disability benefits to Spanish speakers living in Puerto Rico based on their inability to speak English, despite Spanish being the territory’s primary language.
The US Social Security Administration [SSA] has been handing out disability benefits to Puerto Ricans due to the fact that they only speak Spanish. This is despite the fact that Spanish, one of the US territory’s two official languages, is the dominant tongue and is spoken by over 95 percent of the population.
According to findings released last week by the Office of the General Inspector of the SSA, the organization “has applied the medical-vocational guidelines nationally and does not make exceptions for claimants who reside in Puerto Rico, where both Spanish and English are the official languages,” leading to payouts for people living in Puerto Rico who don’t speak English.
Workers at the SSA use grids of medical-vocational guidelines to assess whether or not an individual is entitled to disability benefits, which can be claimed if a person is unable to communicate in English, and therefore limited in his or her ability to find a job.
“We identified 218 cases in Puerto Rico from Fiscal Years 2011 to 2013 where disability determination services used the aforementioned grid rules to grant benefits,” said the report.
…
