You Can Have Your Check and Eat It Too:
How to Keep Disability Benefits While You Work
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.
Participants should bring a laptop with Microsoft Excel on it.
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/service coordinators
- School transition coordinators
- Case managers
- Entitlement specialists
- People with developmental disabilities
- Family members of people with developmental disabilities
About Our Trainer:
Michael Dalto, the Work Incentives Project Director for the Maryland Department of Disabilities, trains and certifies benefits counselors – the specialists who help people with disabilities use work incentives - in Maryland. Michael has delivered presentations on work incentives to thousands of professionals, people with disabilities and family members since 1989.