From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Online:

Julie Dable Stuart had been waiting more than three years for a decision on whether she qualifies for Social Security disability benefits when a large envelope arrived in the mail at her Waukesha home late last year.

She was stunned.

“It was pieces of my Social Security file,” said Dable Stuart, 43. “No postmark. It had my name and postage due. I had to pay $6.65. It was all kinds of personal information about me.”

The envelope contained copies of her medical information, work history and family information submitted to the Milwaukee Office of Disability Adjudication and Review in November 2004. Those documents were submitted as part of her request for a hearing to determine her eligibility for benefits, which had been denied when she first applied in 2003.

Upset and confused, she immediately called the Social Security office.

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In many parts of the US, people wait two years for a hearing – and this is after going through two levels of appeal that can make the wait more like three years. Congress is paying attention as a new Social Security Commissioner is being grilled on the problems. From the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch:

In 2004, the Social Security Administration under then commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart added more judges and other employees and sent about 5,000 Cleveland cases to hearing offices in other parts of the country where they were heard by teleconference.

The wait time for a hearing dropped slightly, from 20.6 months in fiscal 2004 to 19.2 months in fiscal 2006, according to numbers provided by the Social Security Administration.

But the waiting list actually grew longer. In 2004, Ohio Sen. George Voinovich said it had 8,796 names on it. Data from March 2006 shows the number of people waiting grew to 10,803. In the 11 months since, it has jumped to 12,609.

Critics say to fix the system more needs to be done, including revamping the initial application process so that it’s simpler and more truly needy people get benefits right away, not get turned down because they made in error in the complicated application process.

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Privatizing Social Security is a nightmare of an idea. It is a particularly bad idea for older women, who depend on the system more than men. Social Security is women’s main retirement. Without it, an astonishing 59.2 percent would live in poverty in their old age. That’s because women earn less throughout their lives, get a big fat zero added to their Social Security tally for every year they spend out of the workforce taking care of kids or elderly parents and have lower and fewer private pensions to fall back on when retirement day comes.Full story here:

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Congressman Michael R. McNulty (D-NY), Chairman, Subcommittee on Social Security of the Committee on Ways and Means, today announced that the Subcommittee will hold a hearing on the Social Security Administration (SSA) disability claims backlogs. The hearing will take place on Wednesday, February 14, 2007.

The workload of SSA has grown significantly in recent years due to the aging of the population and new workloads such as those resulting from the Medicare Modernization Act (P.L. 108-173) and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (P.L. 108-458). However, due to funding constraints affecting SSA’s administrative budget, these increasing workloads are not being effectively addressed. The agency has done much to employ scarce resources efficiently, re-engineering work processes and increasing overall productivity by more than 13 percent from 2001 to 2006. Even with these improvements, however, there is a growing concern about the effect of staffing declines and other resource shortages on service delivery to the American public.

Nowhere is the situation more grave than in the processing of applications for disability benefits. Due to large and increasing backlogs, severely disabled individuals can wait years to get the benefits they need for basic economic survival. At the end of fiscal year 2006, about 1.3 million people were awaiting a decision on their initial claim or appeal for Social Security or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) disability benefits.

The President’s FY 2008 budget request would provide a modest funding increase. However, given rising fixed costs and other factors, this would not be sufficient to maintain current staffing levels, which had already declined by 8 percent from FY 2006 to FY 2007. Thus, the disability backlog is projected to increase under the President’s FY 2008 budget to almost 1.4 million cases.

This hearing will focus on the disability claims backlog, including how the delays impact individuals who have applied for disability benefits; the effect on other critical agency workloads, including program integrity activities; steps SSA has taken to date to resolve the backlogs; and options for addressing the problem.

In announcing the hearing, Chairman McNulty said, “The current delays in receiving disability benefits are completely unacceptable. Americans who have worked hard and paid into the system should not have to wait for years to get benefits they have earned and desperately need. SSA must have sufficient resources to give the American people the service they deserve.”

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From the Charlotte Observer:

Ronald McKoy, homeless and HIV positive, applied for Social Security disability payments in October 2004 because he said he was too sick to work.
About a year later, social workers say, the 50-year-old McKoy barely weighed 100 pounds and went to a local hospital vomiting blood.
Yet, even when he died in February as a resident of the Uptown Men’s Shelter, he was still awaiting a judge’s ruling on whether he qualified for disability benefits.
“He was clearly disabled,” said Lynn Bishop, McKoy’s attorney. “I’m confident he would have won.”
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The Los Angeles Times reports: Because of a backlog at the Social Security Administration, hundreds of thousands of people are burning through savings as they wait to see if they qualify for disability benefits. Full story here:

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