Social Security says:

Q: Is there a time limit on Social Security disability benefits?

A: Your disability benefits will continue as long as your medical condition has not improved and you cannot work. Social Security will periodically review your case to determine whether you continue to be eligible. If you are still receiving disability benefits when you reach your full retirement age, your disability benefits will automatically be converted to retirement benefits.

Some disabilities are reviewed more regularly. If there is a condition that seems irreversible – a stage four metastasized cancer – there will be fewer reviews. A younger person with a psychiatric disability, for example, might be reviewed more regularly. The goal is to review a case eery three years, but current workloads and budget constraints have made that difficult.

If you have a review, get a letter from your doctor saying your condition has not improved. That should be the end of it. href=”www.socialsecurity.gov/disability.”>www.socialsecurity.gov/disability.Learn more about disability benefits here:

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Many are unaware of this fact: after one is found eligible for Social Security disability payments, there is a wait of 25 months until Medicare coverage begins. Sometimes the wait is fatal.

Sue Sherman, the subject of a June 2010 story in The Oregonian about her quiet effort to raise awareness about the Medicare waiting period for Social Security disability recipients, died Tuesday of pancreatic cancer. She qualified quickly under compassionate allowances for Social Security Disability Income in 2009, then learned of the two-year wait to enroll in Medicare — a gap instituted in 1972 to keep costs down, avoid overlaps with private insurance and to preserve Medicare for those with severe, long-lasting disabilities.

At least 15,000 Oregonians are among the 1.8 million Americans who must wait two years after obtaining Social Security disability to become eligible for Medicare. The only exceptions to the Medicare wait are for people in end-state renal failure or with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. SHe became eligible for Medicare in October 2012.

Through 2009 and 2010, Sherman contacted politicians and policymakers to point out that many disabled people spend their savings on the medical care necessary just to reach a diagnosis and can no longer get private health insurance.

For at least the past two sessions of Congress, a proposal has come forward to phase out the waiting period over 10 years. But the Congressional Budget Office calculated the measure would cost an average of $10 billion a year, and the proposal went nowhere. See article here:

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NPR reports that more than three million extra people are now collecting Social Security payments because of disability, than were in 2007. A new report from the Obama administration and others suggests that as people lose unemployment benefits, they’re going after disability benefits. Unemployment claims have been trickling down over the past few months, which most agree is good.

But in tandem with that decrease, another public benefit has been increasing. Since 2007, some 3.4 million Americans have been added to the list of those receiving Social Security Disability Insurance. SSDI, as it’s know, pays out some $1,000 a month and also gives people access to Medicare and Medicaid.

About 10.6 million Americans now receive SSDI benefits, which has raised new fears that the Social Security Trust Fund may go broke as early as 2017. According to two new studies, many of those new claimants ran out of unemployment benefits before they applied for SSDI. Listen to report here:

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The Wall Street Journal this week is running a series on the long delays at Social Security. The backlog of applications for disability benefits is so big the Social Security Administration has a special code—DXDI—for appeals dismissed because the applicant died waiting. Since 2005, the agency has made 15,043 DXDI designations.

One person who died waiting was Dexter E. Penny of District Heights, Md., who applied for disability benefits in February 2009 after being diagnosed with colon cancer. His initial application was denied. Then his first appeal was denied on the grounds that he didn’t provide enough medical records.

Mr. Penny, a mason, approached the Maryland Legal Aid Bureau for help a year after his first application. He couldn’t understand why terminal cancer wouldn’t qualify him for benefits, says his sister, Diane Penny.

Kate Lang, his lawyer, called four hospitals seeking additional records. Mr. Penny’s condition worsened. By September 2010, he was told he had stage-four cancer. Mr. Penny, 50 years old, was nearly broke and dying in the hospital and the agency wanted more accurate documentation to determine whether he was able to work, according to his sister…

Applications for disability benefits are rising sharply because of high unemployment, an aging population and a combination of mismanagement and potential fraud within the system. About 3.3 million people sought benefits in 2011, and at the end of September a record 771,318 were waiting to have their cases heard on appeal by administrative law judges, according to the latest government data.

Both U.S. lawmakers and disability groups have complained about the long waits. The Social Security Administration has set up a program to let some applicants jump to the front of the line. It also has expanded the number of diseases and disorders that merit an immediate review, which include acute leukemia and pancreatic cancer, to 113, from 100.

These moves have reduced the number of applicants dying in line each year, by 20% from its 2009 peak. The backlog, however, has continued to rise.
Full story at this link.

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After practicing in this area for decades we can say it could be transformed and cured if there were a way to get partial disability. Many could work part time. Many more could not and survive, literally, on these benefits which are our safety net. Do families want to support these sick people? Impossible in most cases. Now, one can only work part time after being found totally disabled. Does that make sense?

Today’s Wall Street Journal prints a second article critical of a huge national law firm that has drawan fire for its practices. These huge mega firms have slowly grown and now impact not only the system but many earnest small practitioners all over the US. When a lawyer in aplace like tiny Bend Oregon is put out of business by a cowboy from Manhattan it is a sad day. The local and very personal connection of these small firm practitioners has been frayed by the reach of media. That is just known as progress, but it diminishes the personal connection with clients that is the joy of practicing law, to know we truly made a difference in a person’s life. The first thing we say to our clients is that they shouldn’t need a lawyer. But we win most of our cases because we put them together well and screened out malingerers before I started. And we know the staff in the offices we deal with all the time.

Beyond that, Binder deeply annoys judges and doctors, to a point that it may impact the way their clients are treated. Here is the story:

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Advocacy groups for people living with mental illness are uniformly opposed to a new rule proposed in August by the Social Security Administration that would affect eligibility for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). The rule would revise the definition of a key term used to determine if people with mental disorders qualify as disabled. It would also allow SSA adjudicators to consider the results of standardized testing in adults.
Mental health advocates oppose multi-step eligibility test for mental impairments
The first contentious issue in the proposal is the SSA’s revised definition of the term “marked impairment,” which is used to determine if a mental illness or disorder affects the applicant’s ability to work enough to qualify as a disability.
Within the nine mental disability categories in the SSA’s list of disabling conditions, each listing has three paragraphs — A, B and C — that determine eligibility. Currently, an applicant is generally eligible for benefits either if he meets both the A and B requirements or the C requirement.
To meet the paragraph B requirements, the applicant has to demonstrate a marked functional impairment, which is currently defined as “more than moderate but less than extreme.”
The SSA’s proposal would change that, defining a “marked impairment” as symptoms that “interfere seriously with your using that mental ability independently, appropriately, effectively, and on a sustained basis to function in a work setting.” Applicants would have to show a marked limitation in two specific abilities, or an extreme limitation of one specific ability. The specific abilities include the capacity to understand, remember, and apply information; interact with others; concentrate, persist, and maintain pace; and manage oneself.

The problem is that there are no scientifically valid standardized tests for mental illness or other mental disabilities in adults. Nevertheless, the SSA laid out a detailed set of rules on how the results of such tests would be used in determining an adult’s eligibility for Social Security disability.
“We recognize that the proposed rule did not require the use of test results alone when making determinations of disability,” explained Linda Rosenberg, president and CEO of the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare.

The proposal was so controversial that the SSA was forced to reopen the comment period in November. Source: Blog, Law Office of Jeffrey Rabin,

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The Social Security Administration has been working for years to reduce its backlog of disability claims, which now stands at 780,000 claims. It even hired and trained 8,600 new employees last fiscal year.

But any progress it made has come to an abrupt halt. Largely because of the recession, Americans filed 400,000 more disability claims than predicted last year and the agency expects 700,000 more to be filed this year than in 2008.

SSA is not alone. Agencies across government that provide federal assistance are seeing their workloads explode as Americans seek unemployment insurance payments, health care insurance, school lunches, food stamps and college loans. Benefit claims and payouts have jumped in the last year at assistance programs run by the Labor, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services departments, among others. See article here:

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More than 50 million people each received payments of $250 last May. The administration expects that approximately 57 million would get $250 in 2010. Of those, 49 million would be Social Security beneficiaries. The rest of the recipients would be veterans, railroad retirement beneficiaries, disability beneficiaries, those on Supplemental Security Income and public-employee retirees not eligible for those programs. See full story here:

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THe Associated Press reports that big job losses and a spike in early retirement claims from laid-off seniors will force Social Security to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes the next two years, the first time that’s happened since the 1980s.

The deficits — $10 billion in 2010 and $9 billion in 2011 — won’t affect payments to retirees because Social Security has accumulated surpluses from previous years totaling $2.5 trillion. But they will add to the overall federal deficit.

Applications for retirement benefits are 23 percent higher than last year, while disability claims have risen by about 20 percent. Social Security officials had expected applications to increase from the growing number of baby boomers reaching retirement, but they didn’t expect the increase to be so large.

What happened? The recession hit and many older workers suddenly found themselves laid off with no place to turn but Social Security. See article detail here:

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A nationwide surge in Social Security disability claims has hit Michigan disproportionately hard.

The flood has caused a case logjam at the state’s five Social Security hearing offices, which have some of the longest wait times in the nation: nearly two years.

The delay in benefits approval, experts say, can mean a slow slide into poverty, with laid-off workers eating up their savings or even losing their homes. Older workers with health problems are increasingly turning to disability to stay afloat after losing their jobs because they are often less likely to find new employment, experts say. See story here:

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