Showing papers on "Disability insurance published in 1976"

Fiduciary Provisions of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.

Abstract: skeletal principles that necessitate future regulations and court interpretations to specific rules of prohibited and mandatory conduct. Most fiduciary provisions are not clearly illuminated or organized in the legislation but must be extracted by cutting and pasting; their full import and impact will only be realized with the passage of time. LEGISLATIVE HISTORY OF THE FIDUCIARY PROVISIONS The private pension system is of relatively recent origin in the United States. It is in large part attributable to the change in our society from a rural agrarian to a highly industrialized urban one. In an industrial society, the laborer sells his services in return for wages, and when he is no longer able to sell those services he is forced to live off the wages previously earned and saved. It was thus only natural for laborers to be concerned with deferring some of their current * Member, New Orleans Bar. 1. P.L. 93-406 (September 2, 1974) [hereinafter cited as ERISA]. For a complete legislative history, see CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE, LiBRARY OF CONGRESS, HD 7100, 74-183 Ed. (1974). LOUISIANA LAW REVIEW wages to their retirement years. The inability of a substantial portion of the American workers to provide for their own retirement through savings and the inadequacy of the amounts saved and the consequences flowing from this result was one of the prime reasons for the federal government's injecting itself into the retirement picture. In 1935, Congress enacted the Federal Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance Program, which has been expanded both in coverage and in benefits in subsequent years. 2 Though the federal government had entered into the retirement picture through the enactment of a federal retirement system, 3 it had, before the enactment of ERISA, exercised relatively little control over private pension systems. The growth in private pension plans in the United States has been tremendous. In 1950, it was estimated that 9.8 million workers were covered by some form of private pension plan.4 In 1960, the figure had increased to over 21 million, and by 1969, over 29 million workers were covered.5 It was estimated that in 1974 over 30 million workers, almost one-half of the private non-farm working force, were covered by some form of private pension plan.6 The phenomenal rate of expansion in coverage was also matched by the accumulation of pension assets. In 1974, it was estimated that assets in excess of 372 billion dollars were held as reserve in various pension plans.7 These assets constituted the largest unregulated source of capital in the United States. In view of these factors, it was only a matter of time before encompassing federal regulatory legislation was enacted in the private pension area. On March 28, 1962, President John F. Kennedy established a blue-ribbon federal cabinet-level committee to review 2. 49 Stat. 620; 42 U.S.C. § 301 (1970).

Demographic characteristics of disability applicants: relationship to allowances.

Abstract: This article highlights some of the causes underlying differences in disability allowances by sex and race. Among the causes are differences in labor-force patterns, the educational background, and the age distributions of the insured and applicant populations. More than half of the differences between the black and white applicants in the proportion of claims allowed is explained by differences in their age distributions. The lower proportion of claims allowed for black applicants may reflect the greater tendency fo the black insured population to apply for disability insurance benefits.