Impairment and Disability Compensation Systems in the United States

1999 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Mohammed I. Ranavaya ◽  
James B. Talmage

Abstract Although several states use the AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment (AMA Guides) when they evaluate individuals with impairments and disabilities, various disability systems exist in the United States. Disability and compensation systems have arisen to ensure that disadvantaged members of society with a medically determinable impairment, which may lead to a disability, have recourse to compensation from various sources, including state and federal workers’ compensation laws, veterans’ benefits, social welfare programs, and legal avenues. Each of these has differing definitions of disability, entitlement, benefits, procedures of claims application, adjudication, and the roles and relative weights assigned to medical vs administrative deliberations. Workers’ compensation statutes were enacted because of inadequacies of recovery from claims for injured workers under common law. Workers’ compensation is a no-fault system adopted to resolve the dilemmas of tort claims by providing automatic coverage to employees injured during the course of employment; in exchange for coverage, employees forego the right to sue the employer except for wanton neglect. Other workers’ compensation programs in the United States include the Federal Employees Compensation Act; the Federal Employers Liability Act (railroads); the Jones Act (Merchant Marine Act); the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act; the Department of Veterans Affairs; Social Security; and private, long-term disability insurance.

2021 ◽  
pp. 114-123
Author(s):  
Mark Robert Rank ◽  
Lawrence M. Eppard ◽  
Heather E. Bullock

Chapter 15 provides an analysis of the effectiveness of social welfare programs in reducing poverty. Comparing pretransfer with post-transfer rates of poverty across a range of OECD countries demonstrates that poverty can be substantially reduced. The myth that government programs do not work in addressing poverty is simply incorrect. A number of European countries are able to cut their rates of poverty by up to 80 percent as a result of robust social policies aimed at reducing poverty and inequality. In the United States, the Social Security and Medicare programs have been particularly effective in reducing the poverty rate among the elderly population.


2021 ◽  
pp. 247-268
Author(s):  
Kathleen Wellman

This chapter revisits the Cold War world, divided between capitalists and communists, a conflict that these curricula cast as a good-versus-evil morality play. American evangelicals allied with the Republican Party. They connected religion and corporate capitalism and rejected Democrats as New Deal socialists. These curricula praise Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to root out communism in the United States and condemn internationalism, especially the United Nations, as fostering a totalitarian, one-world government. They see the United States’ wars in Korea and Vietnam as insufficiently committed to the fight against communism. These textbooks weigh whether other nations developed collective political actions or social welfare programs; they deplore both as socialism or incipient communism. Decolonization made new parts of the world ripe for American capitalism or Soviet communism. They and their leaders were good or evil depending on whether they subscribed to the agenda of Christian conservatives.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 3-7, 16

Abstract This article presents a history of the origins and development of the AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment (AMA Guides), from the publication of an article titled “A Guide to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment of the Extremities and Back” (1958) until a compendium of thirteen guides was published in book form in 1971. The most recent, sixth edition, appeared in 2008. Over time, the AMA Guides has been widely used by US states for workers’ compensation and also by the Federal Employees Compensation Act, the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act, as well as by Canadian provinces and other jurisdictions around the world. In the United States, almost twenty states have developed some form of their own impairment rating system, but some have a narrow range and scope and advise evaluators to consult the AMA Guides for a final determination of permanent disability. An evaluator's impairment evaluation report should clearly document the rater's review of prior medical and treatment records, clinical evaluation, analysis of the findings, and a discussion of how the final impairment rating was calculated. The resulting report is the rating physician's expert testimony to help adjudicate the claim. A table shows the edition of the AMA Guides used in each state and the enabling statute/code, with comments.


Author(s):  
Mauricio Drelichman ◽  
Hans-Joachim Voth

Why do lenders time and again loan money to sovereign borrowers who promptly go bankrupt? When can this type of lending work? As the United States and many European nations struggle with mountains of debt, historical precedents can offer valuable insights. This book looks at one famous case—the debts and defaults of Philip II of Spain. Ruling over one of the largest and most powerful empires in history, King Philip defaulted four times. Yet he never lost access to capital markets and could borrow again within a year or two of each default. Exploring the shrewd reasoning of the lenders who continued to offer money, the book analyzes the lessons from this historical example. Using detailed new evidence collected from sixteenth-century archives, the book examines the incentives and returns of lenders. It provides powerful evidence that in the right situations, lenders not only survive despite defaults—they thrive. It also demonstrates that debt markets cope well, despite massive fluctuations in expenditure and revenue, when lending functions like insurance. The book unearths unique sixteenth-century loan contracts that offered highly effective risk sharing between the king and his lenders, with payment obligations reduced in bad times. A fascinating story of finance and empire, this book offers an intelligent model for keeping economies safe in times of sovereign debt crises and defaults.


Author(s):  
Amy C. Offner

In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. This book brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, the book also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.


Author(s):  
Kenneth Bo Nielsen ◽  
Alf Gunvald Nilsen

The chapter examines the fairness claim of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (LARR), 2013. The author uses the utilitarian fairness standard proposed by one of the most influential American constitutional scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Frank Michelman, whose study of judicial decisions from an ethical perspective by introducing the concept of “demoralization costs” has shaped the interpretational debate on takings law in the United States. Michelman’s analysis is particularly relevant for the land question in India today since there is a widespread feeling that millions of people have been unfairly deprived of their land and livelihoods. The chapter looks at the role of the Indian judiciary in interpreting the land acquisition legislation since landmark judgments affect the morale of society. It concludes that using Michelman’s standard would help in bringing about greater “fairness” than what the new legislation has achieved.


2021 ◽  
pp. 089124162110218
Author(s):  
John R. Parsons

Every year, hundreds of U.S. citizens patrol the Mexican border dressed in camouflage and armed with pistols and assault rifles. Unsanctioned by the government, these militias aim to stop the movement of narcotics into the United States. Recent interest in the anthropology of ethics has focused on how individuals cultivate themselves toward a notion of the ethical. In contrast, within the militias, ethical self-cultivation was absent. I argue the volunteers derived the power to be ethical from the control of the dominant moral assemblage and the construction of an immoral “Other” which provided them the power to define a moral landscape that limited the potential for ethical conflicts. In the article, I discuss two instances Border Watch and its volunteers dismissed disruptions to their moral certainty and confirmed to themselves that their actions were not only the “right” thing to do, but the only ethical response available.


1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Barbara Orlans

Attitudes toward the Three Rs concept of refinement, reduction and replacement in the United States in research and education are widely divergent. Positive responses have come from several sources, notably from four centres established to disseminate information about alternatives. Funding sources to support work in the Three Rs have proliferated. The activities of institutional oversight committees have resulted in the nationwide implementation of important refinements. In the field of education, student projects involving pain or death for sentient animals have declined, and the right of students to object to participation in animal experiments on ethical grounds has been widely established. However, there is still a long way to go. Resistance to alternatives is deep-seated within several of the scientific disciplines most closely associated with animal research. The response of the National Institutes of Health to potentially important Congressional directives on the Three Rs has been unsatisfactory. The prestigious National Association of Biology Teachers, which at first endorsed the use of alternatives in education, later rescinded this policy, because of opposition to it. An impediment to progress is the extreme polarisation of viewpoints between the biomedical community and the animal protectionists.


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