Finding A Way To Record The Deaths Of Claimants Who Are Awaiting A Social Security Disability Hearing

It has been suggested to me that it would be a good idea if there were some way to publicly record the deaths of claimants who are awaiting a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) on a Social Security disability claim. There are far more of these deaths now than there used to be because of the enormous hearing backlogs. The deaths are a depressing fact of life for attorneys who represent Social Security claimants. Not a few of these deaths are suicides. Other deaths could have been prevented if the claimant could have had the Medicare or Medicaid that goes with Social Security disability benefits.

There are some technical issues of how best to publicly record these deaths. At best, we will never be able to record anything like all of them. There are also confidentiality issues for attorneys if they list their late clients' names. Still, there ought to be some way of doing this so that the public could get some rough idea of the terrible effects of these backlogs. It would be nice if we could also have these show up on a map.

If anyone has any thoughts about how we could do this, please share it with me either as a comment in response to this item in the blog or by e-mailing me.