Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is a federal cash benefit that may be available if a person is disabled. To qualify for SSDI, a person must have worked long enough and recently enough under Social Security. A person can earn a maximum of four work credits per year. The number of work credits needed to receive SSDI depends on when the disability started. (SSDI) will not begin until the sixth full month after the onset of the disability. The claims process is long because of the need to obtain medical information and to assess the disability in terms of the ability to work. After Disability Determination Services (DDS) forwards the claim, the applicant will receive the first SSDI check dating back to the sixth month from the on set of the disability.

The Social Security privatization plan has focused more on retirement benefits. It has forgotten the Social Security provides disability and survivor benefit as well. When the Bush administration and others talk about privatizing Social Security, they mean diverting some portion of Social Security payroll taxes into individual private accounts that will be used to save for retirement. This plan suggests that benefits paid to future retirees must be significantly reduced to make the plan work. Benefits could be reduced by as much as forty percent.

The Social Security Disability Insurance is an insurance program that provides monthly cash benefit for a disabled worker or family. The SSDI program runs like the retirement program, thus, a substantial decrease in retirement benefits will have the same effect to SSDI>. The fact that SSDI claims are extremely difficult to obtain can result to claimants losing their homes, cars and savings. Many claimants become homeless due to eligibility process defects and delays.

Only 26 percent of private-sector employees had long-term disability coverage under employer-sponsored insurance plans the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported in year 1996. Work-related coverage has been decreasing and also not increasing as well since then. It is not to no purpose of that after 40 years of paying into private disability insurance the insurer refuses to be familiar with impairment as devastating and denies a claim.

SSDI is part solution and also a of the part problem for employees who can no longer work. American capitalism oppresses those employees who cannot work by shifting them onto a poverty based social insurance program rather than allowing them an imposing pay. Disablement generally associates with poverty so becoming a nonworker translates into a life of financial hardship, whether one has insurance or not, and generates a very realistic fear in workers of becoming disabled.

Many social analysts describe the disability benefits system as an opportunity, because it gives authorization to be exempt from the work-based system. Conservatives describes the disability system as part of the moral economy. Neither privilege nor morality theories, however, adequately describe the function of the disability benefits system.