Arthur Hess Dies

Arthur Hess, former Deputy Commissioner of Social Security, died on November 15, 2005 at his home in Charlottesville, VA. His passing has attracted almost no attention, which is a shame. Hess was 89. He came to work for SSA in 1939 and stayed with the agency until his retirement in 1974. He was a major part of the founding generation of Social Security employees who created most of what remains good about SSA. See this article prepared by the National Academy of Social Insurance on Hess's life. Hess was the first Medicare director, when Medicare was still part of SSA. The Health Care Financing Administration, which took over Medicare, and which is now the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had an Oral History program which interviewed Hess in 1996. The transcript of that interview is good reading for anyone interested in the history of the Social Security Administration, and particularly for anyone interested in the history of disability benefits at SSA, since Hess may have been more responsible than anyone for setting up the disability program at SSA.

Curiously enough, even in 1996 Hess was critical of Social Security staffing, saying "the organization has now been ratcheted down to the point where it hasn't got even enough people to do the job it has to do. There are no people that you can pull from any place in Social Security to take on a new function without hurting existing functions." This may be a lesson that SSA is learning all over again with the introduction of Medicare Part D.