William H. Macy portrays a character falsely claiming disability on “Shameless.”
Nearly 1 million people filed for disability benefits they ordinarily wouldn’t have due to the recession, a new study finds.
Another 400,000 filed earlier for disability than trends would have suggested, the study finds.
The study puts into numbers what economists had long suspected, that during the Great Recession the ranks of those who claimed disability were artificially high.
Of those that filed that otherwise would not have, some 41.8% were awarded benefits, or more than 400,000 new beneficiaries to the Social Security Disability Insurance program.