Over the past year, the newspaper The Oregonian, Portland and Oregon’s local paper, has been running a series carefully documenting the devastating delays at the Social Security hearing offices, putting a human face on this non-comedy of errors and underfunding. Brent Walth and Bryan Denson of The Oregonian have just won the prestigious Bruce Baer Award for Investigative Reporting, for uncovering the enormous backlog of disability claims in the Social Security system. The articles showed that while claims management is a nationwide problem, Social Security Administration’s Portland office has one of the slowest case-completion rates in the country. The reporters found several cases in which claimants died while waiting for a benefits determination from the office: On average, it takes nearly two years for the Portland office to handle the appeal of a case.

Today’s Portland Oregonian reports that despite an infusion of $148 million and attention at the highest levels, the Social Security Administration has made little progress reducing an enormous backlog of disability claims for the nation’s sickest and most vulnerable people, a House subcommittee heard Tuesday.

The hearing into the agency’s record came amid rising criticism for the bulky and overloaded system that often forces aged, blind and disabled Americans to wait three years or more to learn if they qualify for disability payments that average $492 a month. See Oregonian story here: