Some writers might be unable to legally earn above a certain threshold of taxable monthly income without losing their Disability benefits (for the health care attached to those benefits).

I wonder if that's part of the reason why Medium has created the "Leave Partner Program" option?

A better option would be to have a clickable mechanism that allows authors to forfeit payments from specific individual articles, prior to the monthly payouts being dispersed. This could also benefit authors in terms of potential future copyright infringement allegations from third parties.