Cleveland Gets Help

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

If you're one of the 14,000 people in Northeast Ohio who have been waiting months -- or years -- for a judge to decide if you qualify for government disability checks, 2008 could bring good news.

A number of improvements have been launched to try to reduce lengthy waits for disability hearings in Cleveland and across the country.

One of those changes was the opening Dec. 17 of a National Hearing Center in Virginia. Five hundred Cleveland cases were transferred to the center, where they will be handled in video hearings, according to Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the national Social Security Administration office in Maryland. And, Hinkle said in an e-mail, an additional 120 Cleveland cases will be sent there each month. ...

Since he was sworn in about a year ago, Astrue has been working on solutions.

Among them, Hinkle said, is adding six judges to the nine who now hear cases in the Cleveland hearing office. ...

Those judges will be among 150 added across the country, Hinkle wrote in an e-mail response to questions from The Plain Dealer. "Training for the first new hires is scheduled to begin in mid-April 2008," he wrote. So it will be months before they begin hearing cases.

As deserving of extra help as Cleveland is, Atlanta is even worse. Is Atlanta getting extra help with its backlog which is even worse? Of course, the Atlanta newspaper has not been running articles on the backlog. Is help being allocated based upon who needs it most or on who yells the loudest?

Even though Social Security is getting $150 million more than the President asked for and Commissioner Astrue asked for and planned for, according to this article the number of Administrative Law Judges to be hired is staying at 150, which is little more than needed just to cover attrition over the two year time period from the time President Bush introduced his budget plan until there is a new budget.