1/10 - 1/11 - SSDI & SSI Work Incentives: How to Keep Benefits While You Work

SSDI & SSI Work Incentives:

How to Keep Benefits While You Work

January 2023

 January 10 

9:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.

January 11

9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. 

Registration Fees:  

Member: $50   Non-Member: $100

Location:  Virtual 

Most people with disabilities want to work, but worry they’ll lose cash and medical benefits they depend on for survival. Fear of losing benefits is the greatest obstacle to employment for people with disabilities. Believe it or not, people really CAN work and keep essential benefits, using special rules known as “work incentives”. 

Learn how work incentives can:

• Enable people to work, within certain limits, and keep both cash and medical benefits.
• Provide benefits at higher levels and/or longer periods in some cases
• Protect medical benefits if earnings are high enough to stop cash benefits.
• Restore cash benefits quickly and easily if earnings drop or stop.
• Make people eligible for some extra benefits if they work that they don’t qualify for if they don’t work.

This workshop also explains how people (including transitioning youth) can get or keep Medicaid Waiver services while working. Finally, you’ll discover how to get benefits counseling – a service to help people use work incentives to protect their benefits. Practical exercises will illustrate how work incentives can benefit real people. Learn how the system works so you can too!

Who Should Attend:

• Supported employment providers
• Residential service providers
• Resource coordinators
• School transition coordinators
• Case managers
• Entitlement specialists
• People with developmental disabilities
• Family members of people with developmental disabilities

Facilitator: Michael Dalto is a big, old benefits geek. He has delivered presentations on benefits and work incentives to thousands of people with disabilities, family members, and professionals since 1989. He created state certification for Maryland benefits counselors and provided training and technical assistance for the certification. He oversaw benefits counseling for the PROMISE project, a research grant that served youths who receive SSI and their families. He also consulted with the Institute for Community Inclusion of the University of Massachusetts Boston on the SGA Project, a research effort that tested interventions to support vocational rehabilitation consumers in Kentucky and Minnesota to work their way off Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits. He has written training materials about benefits and provided technical assistance to Virginia Commonwealth University's National Training and Data Center. He now consults with Cornell University and the National Association of Blind Merchants.