What Disqualifies A Person From Disability? 

What about the New York State Retirement System (NYSRS)?

The answer may surprise you.

The NYSRS is the state retirement system for New York's public employees. While many of us think of the NYSRS as a place where we can retire comfortably after a lifetime of public service, the NYSRS has a very different definition of what constitutes "disabled" than the federal Social Security Administration (SSA) does.

This can have important implications when it comes to receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits. In fact, according to a recent report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), more than two million working Americans with disabilities are losing their SSDI benefits.

So what makes someone "disabled"? The SSA looks at a person's physical and mental health, age, and earnings when making determinations about whether someone is disabled. The NYSRS looks at the same factors, plus how much the person earned while working. If an individual made $10,000 per year, for example, the NYSRS would look at how much that individual earned before becoming disabled. For those individuals who have been retired for several years, the NYSRS would consider the amount of money they made before becoming disabled, and compare it to what they would have earned had they remained employed. The difference between the two figures would determine whether they receive any Social Security benefits.

NYSRS

What is most surprising about this system is that it has nothing to do with the individual's medical condition. The NYSRS considers earnings a person made while he or she worked, and this includes those who had a medical condition that limited their ability to work.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. First, the NYSRS considers a person to be disabled if the individual is still unable to earn as much as the person did before becoming disabled, even if the individual's earnings are low. Second, the NYSRS does not consider a person to be disabled if the person earns more than the person would have made had the person remained in his or her previous position.

But these exceptions apply only to those individuals who have worked for the NYSRS. For individuals who worked for the state of New York, the NYSRS considers someone to be disabled if the individual's disability began after the person became a member of the NYSRS. For individuals who are self-employed, the NYSRS considers a person to be disabled if the individual's disability began after the person became a member of the NYSRS.

In short, the NYSRS does not consider a person to be disabled if the person's disability occurred before joining the NYSRS. This is an important distinction, because it means that an individual who works for the NYSRS for a number of years, and then becomes disabled, is unlikely to be considered disabled by the NYSRS. The reason for this is that the NYSRS has a policy that it will not pay benefits to people who have not worked for the NYSRS.

For example, in 2017, the New York State Comptroller's office released a report that examined the impact of the NYSRS's disability rules. The report found that of the 3.3 million people who worked for the NYSRS in 2014, almost 700,000 had become disabled. Of those, more than half had become disabled while working for the NYSRS. Of the remainder, about 25,000 people had become disabled while working for the NYSRS, but then retired and started collecting benefits. The rest of the people became disabled while working for the NYSRS, but were not yet members of the NYSRS.

This means that the NYSRS paid out more than $1.3 billion in benefits to people who were not disabled, and more than $2.5 billion in benefits to people who were disabled, but were not yet members of the NYSRS.

In fact, the NYSRS paid out more than $13.7 billion in total disability benefits in 2015, the latest year for which data are available. This was a 20 percent increase over 2014, and a whopping 481 percent increase since 2002.

These numbers suggest that the NYSRS is paying out more than it should in benefits, and that it is doing so in a way that is inconsistent with the federal Social Security Administration's definition of disability.