Latest news with #disabled
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
When do you get your SSI check for July? See full 2025 schedule
Those who get Supplemental Security Income checks will be getting them on a normal schedule in July. SSI recipients got two checks in May – their May SSI payment issued on May 1 and their June payment on May 30 – because of quirks in the Social Security Administration's calendar. Typically, the payments are issued on the first day of the month, and the May 1 payment went out as expected. But because June 1 fell on a weekend, the payment was sent on May 30, the last business day of May. Payments in July and August will arrive on a more normal schedule, with the July payment issued on Tuesday, July 1, and the August payment on Friday, Aug. 1, according to the SSA calendar. Social Security: 3 reasons I'll be taking benefits long before age 70 SSI beneficiaries will also get two checks in August, October and December. That's because the first date of the following month lands on a weekend or holiday. Here are the dates for SSI payments for the rest of 2025, according to the SSA calendar: Tuesday, July 1, 2025 (Check for July 2025) Friday, Aug. 1, 2025 (Check for August 2025) Friday, Aug. 29, 2025 (Check for September 2025) Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025 (Check for October 2025) Friday, Oct. 31, 2025 (Check for November 2025) Monday, Dec. 1, 2025 (Check for December 2025) Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2025 (Check for January 2026) There are about 7.4 million Americans who may be disabled or have limited resources getting monthly Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefit payments. SSI provides benefits for those with limited income or resources, those aged 65 or older, and those who are blind or have a qualifying disability. Children with a qualifying disability can also get SSI, according to the Social Security Administration's website. Adults who earn more than $2,019 from work monthly, typically do not qualify for SSI. About one-third of those SSI recipients also get a benefit from Social Security. Those who may be eligible for SSI can begin the application process online, in person at your local Social Security office, or by calling 1-800-772-1213 (TTY 1-800-325-0778) from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. local time during the work week. Mike Snider is a reporter on USA TODAY's Trending team. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, X and email him at mikegsnider & @ & @mikesnider & msnider@ What's everyone talking about? Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: When are July SSI checks sent out? See full 2025 payment schedule
Bloomberg
9 hours ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Why AI Will Change Everything, But Not How You Think
One of the upsides of collapsing fertility should be rising incomes for those who choose to work. Fewer workers supporting a fast-rising group of elderly people (and in the UK at least, a fast-rising group of disabled people) should make labor very valuable indeed. Good news, given how horrible real income growth has been over the last 15 years. If all goes well with this transition to peak humanity, young people might even soon be able to afford to buy houses and have children again.
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
What DOGE Can Do For Social Security
The Social Security Administration sends millions of "clawback letters" each year. If the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can stop our Social Security system from sending checks to dead people, that would be a plus. Yet a far more important task is to stop the system from overpaying people who are very much alive. Last year the Social Security Administration admitted it had identified 2 million beneficiaries who have been overpaid and sent them 'clawback' letters, demanding the government's money back. Some of these claims go back several decades, and they can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. As revealed in a recent episode of 60 Minutes, in one case the agency sent a clawback letter to a 32-year-old man, living on Social Security and disabled by cerebral palsy. The agency claimed that 21 years earlier, when he was 11 years old, his mother was overpaid $4,902 on his behalf—and the government wants its money back! In another case the agency demanded more than $300,000 from a disabled woman living on her Social Security benefits. In a third case, the agency demanded to be reimbursed for an overpayment that was 45 years old. In all these cases, the agency admits that these mistakes were made by the government, not by the beneficiaries. Further, if its demands are not met, Social Security threatens to stop sending the beneficiaries as much as half of their monthly benefit checks. Aside from the human tragedies clawback letters create for the people who receive them, there are three practical reasons why taxpayers should care. First, our government has wasted millions of dollars by sending out checks for the wrong amounts—money that in most cases will never be recovered. Second, when the government demands its money back it is often going after people who had no idea they were overpaid and who are living on a fixed income. Forcing a retiree to sell his house or cash out his IRA to pay a surprise bill from the government seems especially cruel in many cases. That's inconsistent with Social Security's role as a safety net. Third, virtually no one on Social Security knows whether their check is the 'right' amount. That means every beneficiary is at risk of receiving a clawback letter, and that creates a level of insecurity that is the opposite of the purpose of the Social Security system. Although the dimensions are much smaller, Social Security acknowledges it also has a history of sending checks to people who are dead. We don't have to rely on Donald Trump or Elon Musk for verification. The agency's Inspector General recently discovered as many as 217 dead Oregonians were receiving checks. In one case, a dead beneficiary received checks for 15 years. While the agency overpays some people, it underpays others. According to the Office of Inspector General, more than 13,000 widows and widowers collectively have lost $130 million in Social Security benefits because of mistakes in claiming spousal benefits. Married couples also lose thousands of dollars because they make mistakes in claiming spousal benefits. More often than not, these mistakes are made because of bad advice from Social Security personnel. Note: If people make a mistake in claiming benefits, they are generally not allowed to correct it—even if the mistake was not their fault. Yet, as noted, if Social Security makes the mistake, it demands its money back. Why is Social Security making so many mistakes? For two reasons. First, the system is enormously complex. It has 2728 rules and hundreds of thousands of pages explaining the rules, governing just 13 basic benefits. Second, it relies on human resources rather than computer programs to make decisions. The most important revelation from DOGE so far is not the finding of large amounts of fraud, waste and abuse. It is the finding that so many agencies (including the IRS and the FAA) are using computer programming language that the private sector abandoned decades ago. The main language used to run Social Security's core systems, for example, is a 60-year-old program called COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language). There aren't that many people alive who are still able to program in COBOL. That Social Security does not have a computer program that can tell its own employees as well as beneficiaries the right amount of their monthly benefit is truly amazing. What is even more surprising is that the private sector not only has a very accurate Social Security benefit calculator, it also tells viewers how to claim benefits in a way that maximizes their lifetime income. The private calculator, developed by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, is available to everyone for $49. Yet think of how much misery could be avoided if the government created something similar – or simply leased the private program -- and made it available to everyone for free. It was Prof. Kotliioff who first discovered the problem of clawback letters. He created an online portal where people could submit their personal horror stories, many of which appear in a book he co-authored with financial advice columnist Terry Savage. Going forward, there are three changes that merit urgent attention. First, we need to bring Social Security's computer systems into the 21st century. There is no reason why the country's most important retirement system isn't using the same software available to private financial firms. Second, there should be a reliable online calculator that allows Social Security personnel to avoid mistakes and prospective beneficiaries to make informed judgments about claiming benefits. Third, there should be a one-year statute of limitations on Social Security clawback claims while we are waiting to get an accurate computer system in place. DOGE can help with the first two of these reforms. Congress is probably needed for the third.
Wall Street Journal
4 days ago
- Health
- Wall Street Journal
About Those Medicaid ‘Cuts'
Melinda Lemos-Jackson worries about the 'strain of deep Medicaid cuts' for families like her own (Letters, June 16). Yet changes to the program for the able-bodied shouldn't be viewed as 'cuts'—they amount to a restoration of the moral principle that we should be helping those who need it and that those who don't should be contributing to that assistance. Resources for those with special needs, for instance, are suboptimal because of the bad incentives in ObamaCare's expansion: The feds provide states with more generous reimbursements for able-bodied, childless adults than for the disabled. That states took the bait is a shame, as resources are always limited. As Congress tries to right the ship, it's working for people exactly like Ms. Lemos-Jackson's family—the originally intended 'face of Medicaid.'
The Guardian
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pushers review – Rosie Jones's hilarious disability drug sitcom is pure silliness
Disabled people are routinely ignored, underestimated, overlooked and patronised. The perfect drug dealers, in other words. This is the gratifyingly sardonic concept behind comedian Rosie Jones's new sitcom – co-written with Veep's Peter Fellows – in which she stars as Emily Dawkins, a woman with cerebral palsy whose benefits are senselessly cut by the DWP. After a humiliating work capability assessment, she runs into old school mate Ewen in the loos. Once he remembers who she is (no, not the woman he shagged in the Co-op store room), Ewen is delighted to see her again – 'I thought you died!' – and is soon offering Emily 50 quid to deliver a mysterious package for him. Initially Emily declines; too dodgy. But with the prospect of an actual paycheck from her charity work dwindling, she reluctantly gets on with the job – and is pleasantly surprised to find that her disability allows her to get away with murder. Well, distributing cocaine, at any rate. Such a premise – impoverished disabled woman cornered into dealing drugs to survive contemporary Britain – could have produced an incredibly bleak show; criminal gangs do regularly exploit disabled people for financial gain. Yet Pushers comprehensively swerves sincere social commentary. Rather than being used by Ewen, Emily quickly becomes the enterprise's driving force. While her childhood pal wants to shift the £500k worth of cocaine he has somehow acquired, then bow out of the game for good, his new employee opts to diversify into the heinous synthetic street drug spice behind his back. She also insists on recruiting a team to distribute the drugs faster. Two are sourced from Wee CU, the disabled-toilet-monitoring charity Emily volunteers for: Harry (Ruben Reuter), a dance lover with Down's syndrome, and the stern, ruthless and neurodiverse-coded Hope (a brilliant performance from Libby Mai), who is keen to get stuck in (her qualifications include being 'the treasurer of the official The Bill fanclub' and spending '42% of my spare time playing drug dealer simulations'). Emily also brings in local alcoholic Sean (Jon Furlong), who passes his days scaring the public by ranting to himself in the street. After Ewen insists his tough-as-old-boots mum be involved too, their crack team is complete. The other thing that prevents Pushers from straying into seriousness is Ewen himself (Ryan McParland), whose astonishing stupidity suffuses the entire series. Physically, McParland bears more than a passing resemblance to the American comedian Tim Robinson, whose unhinged performances in his Netflix series I Think You Should Leave breathed new life into the sketch genre. The actor seems to be channelling a similar comic vibe too: Ewen is loud, weird and unpredictably intense. The individual jokes designed to demonstrate his idiocy might seem hacky on paper – 'name me one person who has ever died from drugs?!' – but McParland's exaggerated gormlessness makes such lines giddily funny. As Emily, Jones tones down her natural exuberance slightly – she is the straight woman to Ewen and his bonkers malapropisms and misapprehensions. Yet she's still an agent of farce; in all the many, many TV shows about drug dealing I have watched over the years, I can safely say I have never seen so much spilt cocaine in my life. And as hinted by the flash forward at the start of episode one – in which Emily is pursued through a hospital by a glowering gangster, before running straight into a doctor holding an open blood bag – no matter how dark things get, silliness still dominates. The first couple of episodes of Pushers are absorbing and frequently hilarious. Jones's ability to joke about disability is unparalleled ('I didn't breathe for 17 minutes' is how she explains the origin of her cerebral palsy to her benefits assessor. 'I really wouldn't recommend it'). And she is careful to ensure Emily's responses to Ewen are priceless in themselves. Yet as the series progresses, the comedy is overshadowed by a narrative that becomes increasingly hard to make sense of. Alongside the antics of Emily's unwieldy criminal crew, both she and Ewen have romantic subplots, with the former developing a confusingly chaste entanglement with Jo, her Insta-glam boss at Wee CU, who dangles payment and sex in front of Emily like two ghostly carrots. What's more, our hero's sudden switch from reluctant dealer to gang mastermind is never fully explained: did her conscience just evaporate? Meanwhile, the slapstick and cartoonish inanity do start to wear thin after a while. Although its lack of sentimentality and commitment to hard comedy is admirable, Pushers still could have done with leaning a little further into the scathing satire promised by its setup. Instead, what we ultimately get is a gag-strewn, generally lighthearted portrayal of small-town turf wars. Jones's action-sitcom certainly has its moments, but it could have had slightly more bite. Pushers is on Channel 4 now
