There is a major article on Social Security's disability program in today's Wall Street Journal.
8 comments:
Anonymous
said...
I'll never forget the case of my client with AIDS whose case was denied at the Mass. DDS by a doctor who was a retired facial plastic surgeon who had retired from the practice of medicine in 1983 -- just about when they were figuring out what AIDS was all about. This was in 2005. The doc was close to 90 years old. He's gone now, but some of his compadres are just as bad.
Just another example of the bean-counters running the show.
And -- the ALJs are told to do 583 cases per year, because SSA takes the total number of cases needing decisions and divides by the total number of ALJs available. Talk about the tail wagging the dog!
No concept that it takes time to request and review medical evidence, prepare for hearings, hold hearings, analyze and decide cases, write decision instructions, then edit draft decisions. Not to mention all those staff meetings, training sessions, wasted time with video problems, etc. Heaven forbid that an ALJ should get sick and take sick leave, or take a vacation.
The Chief ALJ has recently stated that it should take an ALJ an average of 2 1/2 hours per case (1 hour for review, 1 hour for hearing,30 minutes all else). Interesting, she was a line ALJ for all of 4 1/2 months before being promoted to a HOCALJ and, then, Chief ALJ.
2 1/2 hours on average is not enough time to review the VA records, or the sometimes hundreds or thousands of pages of medical, or to analyze and digest. From personal experience, even considering dismissals, an average of 4 hours a case is needed.
With no time spent on staff meetings, training, sick or vacation time, 4 hours a case equates to a maximum of 520 cases per year (SSA counts 2080 hours in a workyear.) Subtract these ever-present distractions of work/life, and the number of decisions which can be done to comport with due process is more like a maximum of 480 per year. And, many times, fewer cases can be done per year.
ODAR management gets large bonuses when these arbitrary quotas are reached-- and they hound the ALJs for the numbers in order to ensure those bonuses are paid. Totally unprofessional. Many ALJs donate a lot of time,in order to not be harassed, even though it's illegal.
Seems like a good attorney could make a winning argument on appeal of a denial, that these arbitrary numerical quotas deny due process to individual claimants -- and that the Chief ALJ telling ALJs to spend an average of only 2 1/2 hours per case is another denial of due process to individual claimants.
Not to mention that the local field offices are being asked to essentially write case briefs for all non-medical hearing requests. A process that can take an estimated six hours to do the research, construct the file, cite the relevant policy, and turn over to ODAR for a decision. As if the field offices were not already overwhelmed.
"Anyone who can read English can make a disbility determination. It doesn't take any special doctor.
Get that through your foggy lenses.
Doctors are good to consult with, but they are not an absolute necessity. This is an administrative program, not a medical one."
Troll alert. Nobody could actually believe what was written above. The "administrative program" requires a medical decision. Medical records require at least some degree of medical expertise to interpret. There is a reason that even the incompetently crude DDS process employs physicians to review the medical records, and there is a reason why a pediatrician is not qualified to interpret a cardiology report.
...and then there is a reason why certain attorneys decide to make a profit off our disabled Americans. Not too hard to figure out why...maybe because it's not very complicated, and easy-money, and those ambulance-chasing attorneys can't make it elswhere??
You may feel that practicing SS law is not very complicated, and I would agree with you up to a point. Actually, lots of types of practice are not complicated. Criminal defense, for the most part, is comprised of a majority of drug cases, pretty much the same thing over and over. Personal injury cases are not that complicated, either, for the run of the mill auto accident. Complexity is not the issue.
I challenge any other practitioner to approach litigation like we approach a disability case. No discovery, in particular, and an appeal system that is basically useless due to the amount of time it takes for resolution.
No discovery of expert witnesses' positions is especially difficult. You can have a hearing one day with a VE and hear testimony that is contradicted by the same VE the next day. They aren't required to back up their statements. They are now using commercial software to support their "findings", with no requirement that they have any basic understanding of how the conclusions are drawn. It's a bogus system that other litigators would find intolerable.
I believe that the disability claim system as it works today is illegitimate. The justification for requiring an exhaustion of administrative remedies is the quick resolution of claims. When you do not have that, the rationale falls.
And claimants want lawyers. In most jurisdictions there are not enough lawyers to provide representation, so don't claim that they are ambulance chasing. How many ALJ hearings, statistically, are heard with attorneys present? I'll bet it's less than half.
8 comments:
I'll never forget the case of my client with AIDS whose case was denied at the Mass. DDS by a doctor who was a retired facial plastic surgeon who had retired from the practice of medicine in 1983 -- just about when they were figuring out what AIDS was all about. This was in 2005. The doc was close to 90 years old. He's gone now, but some of his compadres are just as bad.
Just another example of the bean-counters running the show.
And -- the ALJs are told to do 583 cases per year, because SSA takes the total number of cases needing decisions and divides by the total number of ALJs available. Talk about the tail wagging the dog!
No concept that it takes time to request and review medical evidence, prepare for hearings, hold hearings, analyze and decide cases, write decision instructions, then edit draft decisions. Not to mention all those staff meetings, training sessions, wasted time with video problems, etc. Heaven forbid that an ALJ should get sick and take sick leave, or take a vacation.
The Chief ALJ has recently stated that it should take an ALJ an average of 2 1/2 hours per case (1 hour for review, 1 hour for hearing,30 minutes all else). Interesting, she was a line ALJ for all of 4 1/2 months before being promoted to a HOCALJ and, then, Chief ALJ.
2 1/2 hours on average is not enough time to review the VA records, or the sometimes hundreds or thousands of pages of medical, or to analyze and digest. From personal experience, even considering dismissals, an average of 4 hours a case is needed.
With no time spent on staff meetings, training, sick or vacation time, 4 hours a case equates to a maximum of 520 cases per year (SSA counts 2080 hours in a workyear.) Subtract these ever-present distractions of work/life, and the number of decisions which can be done to comport with due process is more like a maximum of 480 per year. And, many times, fewer cases can be done per year.
ODAR management gets large bonuses when these arbitrary quotas are reached-- and they hound the ALJs for the numbers in order to ensure those bonuses are paid. Totally unprofessional. Many ALJs donate a lot of time,in order to not be harassed, even though it's illegal.
Seems like a good attorney could make a winning argument on appeal of a denial, that these arbitrary numerical quotas deny due process to individual claimants -- and that the Chief ALJ telling ALJs to spend an average of only 2 1/2 hours per case is another denial of due process to individual claimants.
Not to mention that the local field offices are being asked to essentially write case briefs for all non-medical hearing requests. A process that can take an estimated six hours to do the research, construct the file, cite the relevant policy, and turn over to ODAR for a decision. As if the field offices were not already overwhelmed.
Anyone who can read English can make a disbility determination. It doesn't take any special doctor.
Get that through your foggy lenses.
Doctors are good to consult with, but they are not an absolute necessity. This is an administrative program, not a medical one.
I'm certainly not going to listen to a liberal media "reporter" to give me some great "insight" into the problems at SSA.
Get a life, y'all.
Really? Rupert Murdoch's WSJ is the "liberal media"? Lay off the FAUX News and Rush Limbaugh, for your own health.
"Anyone who can read English can make a disbility determination. It doesn't take any special doctor.
Get that through your foggy lenses.
Doctors are good to consult with, but they are not an absolute necessity. This is an administrative program, not a medical one."
Troll alert. Nobody could actually believe what was written above. The "administrative program" requires a medical decision. Medical records require at least some degree of medical expertise to interpret. There is a reason that even the incompetently crude DDS process employs physicians to review the medical records, and there is a reason why a pediatrician is not qualified to interpret a cardiology report.
...and then there is a reason why certain attorneys decide to make a profit off our disabled Americans. Not too hard to figure out why...maybe because it's not very complicated, and easy-money, and those ambulance-chasing attorneys can't make it elswhere??
Anon at 10:08:
You may feel that practicing SS law is not very complicated, and I would agree with you up to a point. Actually, lots of types of practice are not complicated. Criminal defense, for the most part, is comprised of a majority of drug cases, pretty much the same thing over and over. Personal injury cases are not that complicated, either, for the run of the mill auto accident. Complexity is not the issue.
I challenge any other practitioner to approach litigation like we approach a disability case. No discovery, in particular, and an appeal system that is basically useless due to the amount of time it takes for resolution.
No discovery of expert witnesses' positions is especially difficult. You can have a hearing one day with a VE and hear testimony that is contradicted by the same VE the next day. They aren't required to back up their statements. They are now using commercial software to support their "findings", with no requirement that they have any basic understanding of how the conclusions are drawn. It's a bogus system that other litigators would find intolerable.
I believe that the disability claim system as it works today is illegitimate. The justification for requiring an exhaustion of administrative remedies is the quick resolution of claims. When you do not have that, the rationale falls.
And claimants want lawyers. In most jurisdictions there are not enough lawyers to provide representation, so don't claim that they are ambulance chasing. How many ALJ hearings, statistically, are heard with attorneys present? I'll bet it's less than half.
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