Proposed Changes To Immune System Listings

Social Security has issued a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) that would amend the immune system Listings. The NPRM includes a major change that will help many who suffer from rheumatic disorders. Here is the summary of the change from the NPRM:

Each of these current listings, except current listing 14.09D [for AIDS], also requires you to have all four of the constitutional symptoms or signs: Severe fatigue, fever, malaise, and involuntary weight loss. We propose to revise this requirement to ‘‘at least two’’ of the constitutional symptoms or signs instead of all four, because we believe that the requirement in the current listing is too severe.

The proposal continues the trend of making the Listing preambles longer and longer. If current trends continue, the Listings will eventually be well over a hundred pages in length. An example of the padding of the Listing preambles occurs in the discussion of the AIDS Listing, which would be amended by the NPRM to include the following language that is already more appropriately included elsewhere in the Regulations:

Your symptoms, including pain, fatigue, and malaise, may be important factors in our determination whether your immune system disorder(s) meets or medically equals a listing or in our determination whether you are otherwise able to work. In order for us to consider your symptoms, you must have medical signs or laboratory findings showing the existence of a medically determinable impairment(s) that could reasonably be expected to produce the symptoms.