“… The most acute bottlenecks are at the appeals level, where the average processing time is now 515 days — compared with 274 days in 2000. Such delays are especially pernicious because slightly more than one-quarter of all approved claims are awarded after an appeal hearing, and nearly two-thirds of the people who appeal ultimately prevail. Without the benefits they are entitled to, far too many applicants get sicker and experience severe economic hardship, including foreclosures and even homelessness. Some applicants die before their appeals are heard.

The fault lies primarily with Congress. For many years, lawmakers have consistently cut into the budget for the Social Security Administration, which administers the disability program. Since 2000, the cumulative shortfall — the difference between what the agency has asked for and what Congress has appropriated — is $4.4 billion, with more than $2 billion of that in the last few years.

In the same period, demands on the agency have grown, resulting in a chronic shortage of people to do the work. Disability claims have risen, to 2.5 million in 2006 from 1.3 million in 2000, driven in part by the aging of the population…

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From the Clarksville TN Leaf-Chronicle:

Question: My neighbor recently retired, only to learn that some of her earnings hadn’t been recorded properly. She eventually got everything straightened out, but what can I do now to make sure this doesn’t happen to me when I’m ready to retire in 10 years?
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The Army Times reports: Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England yesterday called for a new policy that moves wounded troops from Iraq and Afghanistan to the front of the line in the disability rating process while system-wide fixes to the disability and health care systems are put in place.
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Today’s Washington Post reports on the mounting number of unsettled claims in the VA Disability system:

…Nearly 400,000 disability claims were pending as of February, including 135,741 that exceeded VA’s 160-day goal for processing them. The department takes six months, on average, to process a claim, and the waiting time for appeals averages nearly two years.

This already strained system may grow more overburdened in years ahead as many of the troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan return from those wars, experts say. VA gives veterans from the current conflicts top priority in claims processing.

“The projected number of claims from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will rapidly turn the disability claims problem into a crisis,” said Linda J. Bilmes, a Harvard University professor of public policy…

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From Today’s New York Times:

WHEN a biting winter storm descended on the Coney Island Boardwalk one afternoon last month, whipping sand and trash into the air, a flock of seagulls lost no time in taking wing. But Patrick Garbiras, a gaunt, shambling, 51-year-old homeless man, could only do what he has been doing ever since filing his claim for Social Security disability benefits 440 days earlier: seek shelter in slow motion.

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In my years at Social Security, I have worked with many homeless people and I am often surprised when they tell me about their lives before they were homeless. One of these homeless men had been a world champion boxer. There was a former police officer. Another was a TV weather personality. I remember a man who had been a chemist for a major corporation— he had a big salary just a couple years before I met him when he was homeless. … These individuals all had good jobs at one time—now they were homeless…Living on the streets is a perilous life style but homeless people usually have no choice.

Some homeless people might qualify for Social Security or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) but they need to apply. You can help a homeless person apply for benefits through organizations you belong to—your church, community association or fraternal group.

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