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Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) provides modest income to more than 10.4 million people, including more than 5.1 million women and girls, that is vital to helping these disabled people and their families make ends meet. Nearly 52 percent of non-elderly adults receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) in 2017 were women. SSI kept more than 708,300 women age 18 through 64, 59 percent of whom were women of color, above the Federal Poverty Line in 2017.
Because of the importance of SSDI and SSI to women who cannot work because of their disability, NWLC submitted a comment to the Social Security Administration (SSA) opposing a proposed rule that would increase the frequency of Continuing Disability Reviews (CDRs) for most disability beneficiaries. The comment describes how SSA underestimated the burden of CDRs on people with disabilities, including the paperwork burden, financial cost, and threat to their health, the lack of evidence that terminating disability benefits faster encourages individuals to return to work (the evidence shows the opposite), and the higher costs this rule would impose on SSA, which already experiences problems performing CDRs.