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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Today’s Washington Post reports:

Diane Braunstein’s large smile and warm laugh can be infectious. She speaks calmly as she sits in a high-backed, dark wooden chair in her spacious Baltimore office, a master bureaucrat.

If that seems a cold or callous characterization, her actions have been anything but. One look at her résumé shows she’s spent a lifetime mastering the minutia of process and regulation on behalf of the elderly, the ill and the disabled at the Social Security Administration and other organizations. Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue appointed Braunstein director of a program called Compassionate Allow­ances in 2007 after she helped him about 20 years earlier when his terminally ill father could not quickly obtain benefits.

The two were working together at the Department of Health and Human Services. Astrue’s father developed glioblastoma, an often-fatal brain cancer that resulted in a coma. Astrue found himself trying to file for benefits on behalf of someone who wasn’t able to speak.

“It was a huge surprise and a time of high anxiety,” he said. “Having someone as competent as Diane was a great blessing.” See story here:

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Today’s CBS Money-Watch article has a good discussion of the implications of the debt deal for Social Security. These ideas apply equally to disability payments:

“The devil’s in the details of the debt deal. Say that three times fast and your tongue will get just as twisted as our politicians’ did in recent weeks.

“The recent debt compromise calls for a bi-partisan committee to make recommendations to Congress by Thanksgiving for reducing entitlements, including Social Security and Medicare. These programs are protected, however, from the automatic reductions in entitlements that will go into effect if the bi-partisan committee doesn’t come to any agreement, or if Congress doesn’t adopt their recommendations.
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The Baltimore CIty Paper reports that the number of applicants for disability has exploded during the past two decades, and waiting times increased to an average of more than 500 days. Baltimore is the site for the largest processing components of the Social Security Administration. The long wait times have left some desperately poor applicants with virtually no income for years. The system is complicated enough that many applicants hire lawyers to steer their cases through it, at a cost of thousands of dollars (“Hardly Working,” Feature, June 1). In 2007, Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue vowed to cut the backlog, and appeared to be making progress—despite yet another spike in applications owing to the economic downturn.

In the administration’s performance and accountability report for fiscal year 2010, Astrue said he had “made elimination of our hearings backlog our number one priority” and had “steadily reduced the hearings backlog despite receiving nearly 100,000 more hearing requests than we did in [fiscal year] 2009.” He said the Social Security Administration had by September 2010 reduced average hearing processing time to “below 400 days for the first time in six years.”

But Astrue also moved the goalposts, according to TRAC, which is headquartered at Syracuse University and, since 1989, has used private grants to pursue Freedom of Information Act requests of federal agencies. “In 2007 [SSA] set a goal of permanent elimination of the ‘backlog’ by 2012, modified during 2008 to eliminating it by 2013,” TRAC’s report, which is available online at tinyurl.com/ See article here:

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Compromised timing for a new data center transition and a slowdown in application modernization are among the top IT management challenges facing the Social Security Administration (SSA), according to a recent report by the agency’s inspector general (IG).
A report by SSA IG Patrick P. O’Carroll Jr., examining the top management challenges the agency will face in 2011, shows it grappling with a host of IT infrastructure projects the agency’s IG, Congress, and the SSA’s advisory board worry it can’t handle. See details here:

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Today’s Huffington Post reports that “Social Security advocates have been quick to come out against the proposal released Wednesday by the co-chairs of President Barack Obama’s debt commission. At the National Press Club Friday, John Rother, executive vice president for policy at AARP, said the plan was “really regressive and not the way to keep health care affordable for people going forward.”

“Eric Kingson of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, has called the draft report “an equal opportunity disaster,” which — beyond cutting benefits for today’s seniors and persons with disabilities — “cuts Social Security benefits for virtually every American alive today and yet to be born.” See full report here:

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The Oregonian reports:

“Sue Sherman of Southwest Portland lived a peaceful, healthy life until she was dealt an ugly card last year: a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.

“From the whirl of appointments, tests and drugs arose an enduring irony of any serious illness: too many moments surrendered just to the act of waiting, for doctors, for results, for help.

“Sherman, 57, believed she had bought some time when she qualified for Social Security disability income. But that only brought on the worst wait of all.

“How do people survive this?” she said. “The ripple effect of this is tsunami-huge.”

“She joined nearly 2 million disabled Americans — at least 15,000 in Oregon — who fall into a twilight with the first monthly Social Security disability payment, for they then must wait two years to become eligible for Medicare.”
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Social Security (SSA) has released statistics which track, by state, the numbers of recipients of Disability payments as well as showing other SSA beneficiaries of our important social insurance program. These federal funds support widows, children whose parents have died, retirees and the disabled. For many, this is the only possible access to health insurance thru Medicare.

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Today’s Washington Post reports that most Social Security and other federal benefits payments will be made by direct deposit by 2013. We applaud this savings in postage and paper, and also the increased security that it represents – thefts from mailboxes will be a thing of the past.

The decision will eliminate about 136 million paper checks sent by the Social Security Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, Railroad Retirement Board and Office of Personnel Management.

The switch is part of a broader plan to shift away from paper-based payments and transactions. The plans should save taxpayers about $400 million in processing
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Social Security (SSA) is in the long process of collecting comments on proposed changes to the Listing of Impairments for Endocrine Disorders. These changes would abolish diabetes as a separate “listing,” which would mean that proving cases of disability based on disabetes would be more difficult.

There is a comment period on the proposed rules that is open until February 12. The changes are based on the presumption that advances in medical care have made diabetes a manageable condition, not one that is disabling. The current regulations allow a finding of disability in advanced cases of diabetes, where conditions such as peripheral neuropathy or loss of a limb can be attributed to the unconrtolled disease, and prevent work.

The Listings were last revised in 1985 and also cover other endocrine disorders such as pituatary disorders and disorders of the adrenal cortex. The link to the proposed regulatory changes and comment section can be found here:

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