NPR: The Rise of Disability

The lawyers love it, though.
Anything to grab a share for themselves ...

 

Why can't Wal-Mart hire someone 40 hours a week and pay health insurance? They don't have the money?

 

Honestly, that's one of the reasons I don't like NPR. So many of the voices are just grating to me. I suppose it's personal preference.

OT: I love audio books, but my enjoyment of the book has much more to do with the quality of the narration than the literature. If I find a narrator I like, I'll listen to just about any audiobook by that person, regardless of subject.

 

The following script is from "Disability, USA" which aired on Oct. 6, 2013. The correspondent is Steve Kroft. James Jacoby and Michael Karzis, producers.

 

That was a great segment of 60 Minutes. Classic Old School Mike Wallace
put people on the spot TV journalism.

 

I suppose it is, yes. The final quote, from Coburn, is the salient one. When the jobs all leave town and head overseas, fraud operators move in selling hope and cash. The regular person wants the cut of a good con just as much as somebody who cuts every corner to evade the IRS.

I'm not any more thrilled with this kind of fraud than anyone else. But it's what you get. Doctors with a sweet tooth for easy profit. Lawyers who can manipulate the system. I imagine Coburn's solution to this problem will be tighter regulations. Ironic, that. The things we'll cop to when it matters to us.

 

Rare are the times that I find myself agreeing with Tom Coburn, one of my Senators here in Oklahoma, but it's happened twice in the last few months. There are major problems with this system. Wish this came out at a time when the focus isn't on the shutdown. This report would get a lot more traction if the reporters in DC weren't already focused on that.

 

Combating fraud is defined as "regulation"?

Why not just call it enforcement?

 

I'm sure that there will be no fraud in some recent big government programs recently introduced.

 

It's going to take regulation to narrow and toughen the interpretation of the law. Either that, or millions of dollars shelled out in investigations.

In a sense, this kind of anarchic plotting by the lawyer and judge is simply the system playing itself out. Here you have a region hit hard with unemployment, and a lawyer wants to get them money? A judge complies? Everybody makes out? Only the nebulous, faceless taxpayers lose?

I'm against it because I think I have some sense of right and wrong, and I haven't prioritized income in my life as a primary measure of worth. But since many political leaders seem to be taking their cues from moralistic/quasi-spiritual "gut feelings" these days -- since right and wrong appears to lack definition beyond self-interest in Washington - this lawyer could have packaged himself as some of kind renegade Robin Hood and probably found his share of acolytes.

 

And I'm sure there's no fraud in the private sector.

 

"60 Minutes" had a story on this this past weekend. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) is investigating several attorneys in the W. Va-Ky. area where near-entire towns are collecting. Interesting discussion and good questions since they didn't leave out the reality of the desperation of some people in these communities which have been pillaged of jobs that are now overseas among other places. There are two sides to this story. True, abuse exists, and there's not a serious conversation about the hopelessness in some of these communities of getting decent jobs. Pretty good report, I'd say.