The Disability Signal Across the Atlantic
On August 11 I wrote US Disabilities Hit an All-Time High of 37 Million In July: UP 23% Since Feb 2021. The BLS Current Population Survey printed 37,029,000 Americans 16 and over reporting a disability. That is seven million more people since February 2021, a 3-to-4 sigma break from the pre-2020 plateau that has not mean-reverted. The inflection is February 2021 with the Covid vaccine rollout not in 2020 when Covid was at its most virulent strain. Alternative explanations fail the timing and the magnitude test. The UK PIP system corroborates that US survey signal with something the American series cannot give you: medically assessed new claims broken down by body system and underlying cause.
If you want to know whether that US survey signal is real, stop arguing about survey design and look at an administrative system that actually diagnoses people.
Go back to the UK Disabilities (PIP) Project we published at Phinance Technologies. The page is still up…use it. It was built so researchers, doctors, and ordinary citizens could see the same thing we saw in 2023. You can look at total body system new claims or by underlying cause new claims (best viewed on desktop) within a body system. You can pick absolute new claims, excess new claims, percent excess new claims and excess new claims z score. We also break it out by monthly and yearly data. Finally you can sort it by age group as well. Play with data and be horrified like we were in 2023. Interactive charts…all done by Phinance Technologies for free.
PIP is not the protagonist from Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations. It is the UK’s main working-age disability benefit officially known as the Personal Independence Pension program by the UK Department of Work. Claims are medically assessed. Decisions, “clearances,” as noted above are coded by body system and then by underlying cause. The positive award rate has been stable at around 40 percent, so you are not looking at a sudden collapse in standards. You are looking at more people presenting with more illness…new claims, not just the stock of existing claimants, sorted monthly or yearly and by age band versus a 2016–2019 trend.
That is the advantage over the US survey. The BLS series tells you that disability exploded after early 2021 with the vaccine rollout and not in 2020 with the virus. PIP tells you where in the body it exploded, and it lets you watch the timing against the vaccine rollout curve on the same chart.
