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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-disability-20130405,0,4082944.story For millions of American workers, things are looking up. Employers are starting to hire again, new jobless claims are down by a quarter from a year ago and the unemployment rate has dropped from a peak of 10 percent in 2009 to 7.7 percent. It's all a big change from the worst days of the Great Recession. But one indicator hasn't turned around. That's the civilian labor force participation rate – basically, the share of adult Americans who are in the U.S. workforce, holding down jobs or looking for them. When the recession began, the rate was 66 percent. When the economy tanked, it started to decline, hitting 64.6 percent by the end of 2010. But since then, it has kept sliding, and it now stands at 63.5 percent — lower than it has been in the past 30 years. Why, in a time of economic growth and an improving job market, are more people leaving the workforce than joining it? One reason is demographic: With baby boomers reaching their mid-60s, a lot of them are happy to retire. Another is that many people whose jobs disappeared lack the skills they need for the jobs that are emerging. But there's another reason: the Social Security disability program. Over the past two decades, the number of workers on the disability rolls has more than doubled, to 8.5 million. As Jordan Weissmann notes in The Atlantic, "more than 5 percent of all eligible adults are now on the rolls, up from around 3 percent 20 years ago." The cost of the program, which is administered by the Social Security Administration (SSA), has nearly doubled as well. Its trust fund is on track to run out of money by 2016. Given other developments, you might expect just the opposite. The disabled now have federal protections against employment discrimination thanks to the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. Medicine can overcome or ameliorate many once-debilitating conditions. Older people are less likely to have chronic disabilities than before. Physically demanding jobs are less common. As it happens, though, the rules were changed to make qualifying for disability easier than before. Today, disabilities are most often based on mental illnesses or "musculoskeletal" afflictions. "It is exceptionally difficult — for all practical purposes, impossible — for a medical professional to disprove a patient's claim that he or she is suffering from sad feelings or back pain," writes Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Undoubtedly some people are gaming the system. In 2010, the U.S. Government Accountability Office looked at data from a dozen states and discovered that "62,000 individuals received or had renewed commercial driver's licenses after SSA determined that the individuals met the federal requirements for full disability benefits." The tendency of some SSA administrative law judges to overrule the agency's initial denials of benefits also has drawn scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal began reporting two years ago on David B. Daugherty, a judge who then worked in Social Security's Huntington, W.Va., office. A Nov. 25, 2011, Journal article said of Daugherty: "In 2010, he awarded benefits in all but four of 1,284 decisions. In 2011, before he was put on leave, Mr. Daugherty awarded benefits in all but two of the 1,003 cases he decided. Typically, judges award benefits in about 60 percent of their cases. ... Social Security Administration Commissioner Michael Astrue has said that judges who award benefits more than 85 percent of the time cost taxpayers roughly $1 billion a year. About 130 of 1,500 Social Security judges awarded benefits at that rate in 2011, according to federal data." Disability has also gotten more attractive to older workers who exhaust their unemployment insurance and fail to find jobs. It has the additional attraction of providing Medicare coverage after two years. For many, disability insurance has been a form of early, and not entirely voluntary, retirement. What can be done? Congress could tighten the rules, and the Social Security Administration could be given the funds to assign more staff to monitor the condition of people already on the rolls, who may improve enough to work and leave the program. Obamacare may lessen the appeal of Medicare coverage, since it will make it easier for those with health problems to get private insurance. But clearly this is a program that needs a serious evaluation. The disability rolls have grown at a scary pace, and if Congress and the administration don't put a stop to that, financial reality will.