Effective immediately, the "Quick Disability Determination" or QDD process has been made national, according to a Federal Register item. Previously, QDD was an experiment in the Boston region only.
I have stated previously that I regard QDD as little more than a new name for something that has been around for decades. This may induce those unfamiliar with the program to think that Social Security has a new process to make disability decisions faster, but the truth is that this applies only to a small number of claims from the most seriously ill claimants, most of whom have terminal cancer. Social Security has always processed such claims expeditiously. Everything I have seen tells me that QDD is meaningless hype.
I have stated previously that I regard QDD as little more than a new name for something that has been around for decades. This may induce those unfamiliar with the program to think that Social Security has a new process to make disability decisions faster, but the truth is that this applies only to a small number of claims from the most seriously ill claimants, most of whom have terminal cancer. Social Security has always processed such claims expeditiously. Everything I have seen tells me that QDD is meaningless hype.
5 comments:
QDD is something newer than the presumptive disability and other initiatives because it involves software scanning electronic medical information and flagging those cases most likely to be allowed. In the past an employee of SSA or one of the state disability services had to review the paper file and flag the case. Cases should be identified more quickly now.
Oh my. This poster has a heck of a lot more faith in SSA's software capacity than I do. To the contrary, it isn't (and never was) hard for DO folks to flag cases where the allegation was a terminal disease/diagnosis, and for the DDS to pull those out of the queue and screen them for presumptive allowances. Charles is right; this is 99.9 percent hype.
The only thing new about QDD is the development of a sophisticated statitical model that SSA has already poured several million dollars in. Apparently, SSA executives felt that the DDS' needed a model to tell them that ALS and pancreatic cancer are terminal illnessess, as if they already didn't know.
You must also realize that the presumptive disability process applied only to SSI, not SSDI. While CRs could flag the obvious cases this software has the ability to highlight cases that claims represenatives do not have the training to recognize.
And why is HIV/AIDS not a part of this "flagging procedure?" It is a "terminal illness" and "there is not currently a cure. In fact, the treatment to "stall" progression of the disease tends to make the infected person more ill than the disease (sort of like chemo to the cancer patient)! The only criterion for this flagging that I could find was for cancer patients. Not to make light of a cancer sufferor BUT they, more times than not, go into remission after treatment. For HIV/AIDS sufferors there does not exist any such hope.
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