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Disability, Policy, and Financial Hardship

Friday, November 14, 8:30 to 10:00am, Property: Hyatt Regency Seattle, Floor: 6th Floor, Room: 601 - Hoh

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

People with disabilities face greater financial hardship than people without disabilities. One in four disabled adults in the United States has an income below the poverty line. Additionally, a small but growing body of research demonstrates that living with a disability itself is costly, with disabled people paying more out-of-pocket than non-disabled people for medical, personal care, and accommodation expenses. While several federal programs are designed to improve financial wellbeing for people with disabilities, the policy design of these programs may contribute to financial hardship among participants as well. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from social work, public policy, and public health, the papers in this panel use novel data and methods to advance our understanding of financial hardship among people with disabilities and the role that public policies plays in mitigating or exacerbating hardship. 



In the first paper, Zach Morris (Stony Brook University) provides national estimates of total annual out-of-pocket disability-related expenditures, their burden, and the prevalence of unmet needs -- a phenomenon he terms “the disability squeeze.” In the second paper, Stipica Mudrazija (University of Washington) highlights the heterogeneity of financial hardship among disabled older adults by asking, “Does adequacy of disability benefits vary by type of disability?” In the third paper, Kelly Nye-Lengerman (Mathematica) takes a mixed methods approach to identify the barriers and facilitators of ABLE account use--which may protect disabled people from financial hardship--among SSI recipients. In the fourth paper, Jamie Koenig and Callie Freitag (University of Wisconsin-Madison) use nationally representative interview data from the American Voices Project to ask, “How do SSI recipients deal with debt?” Together, these four papers offer new insight into various dimensions of financial hardship among disabled people in the United States, and assess the extent to which disability-specific policies address such hardship.

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