SSDI Benefit Impacts Of Occupational Injuries/Illnesses

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This project will explore the use of several large databases for developing national estimates of the impact of occupational injuries and illnesses on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefit payments. The cost of the SSDI program has increased rapidly in the past decade and it is likely that a large portion of these benefits are attributable to occupational injuries and illnesses. The need to fund these SSDI benefits out of payroll taxes is a major concern in the national efforts to stabilize Social Security. Estimates of SSDI benefit savings that result from controlling occupational injuries and illnesses will be important for Federal health policy and priority setting. Measurement of SSDI benefit impacts requires data on individual workers covering a long enough time period to capture their progression from the onset of an occupational injury or illness to their receipt of SSDI benefits. Two data sources that capture data for large numbers of workers over a sufficiently long time period are 1) private long-term disability (LTD) claims data and 2) large-scale panel surveys such as the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). In this project, we will develop and test methods for generating national SSDI benefit impacts of occupational injuries and illnesses from both types of data. LTD claims data represent the claims experience for one large insurer of policies covering approximately 500,000 workers of more than 1,400 employers during the period 1992-1997. SIPP data will be analyzed from the 1996 SIPP (a four-year panel survey) and data from the 1992 and 1993 SIPP surveys (including an extended follow-up for respondents to the Survey of Program Dynamics). LTD claims data will be used to develop national estimates of SSDI benefit impacts of occupational injuries and illnesses for all U.S. workers covered by private LTD insurance. We will also examine variations in these estimates by diagnostic category of injury or illness, by region, and by industry. SSDI benefit impact estimates based on the SIPP will cover occupational injuries and illnesses to all workers for which Workers' Compensation benefits were received. We will also examine variations in these estimates by region, industry, worker demographics, and health problem category. We will examine strategies for benchmarking estimates from both SIPP and LTD data against other national data sets. Exploratory statistical models will also be developed to explore the interaction of Workers' Compensation program characteristics and SSDI benefit impacts.