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Apr 18, 2008

Buffalo News Editorial

From the Buffalo News:

If you paid insurance premiums that ran a little more than 6 percent of your income every week throughout your working life, but had to wait nearly two years to collect when you had a legitimate claim, you might complain to the government.

But when it is the government that is making people wait to collect the disability benefits to which they are entitled — because they paid for them — even members of Congress are left to rage into the storm.

Rep. Brian Higgins, a Buffalo Democrat, is among the congressmen heard to demand that the Social Security Administration finally make some serious efforts to chip away at the disgraceful backlog of cases of people who can no longer hold down a job and need the benefits to survive. ...

The need ... was disgracefully not addressed when the government hired 135 administrative law judges to hear those appeals but assigned only 10 to the state of New York — and none to Buffalo. ...

Attorneys who handle such cases have long lists of people who went bankrupt, were evicted, even died, while waiting for their appeals to be reviewed.

At least one claimant never got the message that he’d finally won his appeal because he was, at that moment, out in the woods killing himself.

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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:38 PM, April 18, 2008

    the last paragraph - that's it. the government has handled our money so badly they bungle, pray and delay, in the hopes our diseases kill us - or as in this case, we don't wait for that.

    i think all, yes ALL government employees need to be put on minimum wage - that's all any government job should pay. Then we'll know for sure if they are in office to serve us - or just themselves.

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  2. Anonymous5:03 PM, April 18, 2008

    OK that's fine, we'll all quit (to get better and more rewarding jobs)or maybe be replaced by a less fair & privitized corporation (UNUM??) in it for the bottom line. Perhaps it may be more productive to keep the onus where it belongs: the US Congress and its budgetary responsibility. If it were to choose to do so (in true democratic fashion--small d), Congress COULD change the defintion of disabity in the law and make it FAR easier to allow claims at the intial level in the DDS (check out why Congress mandated PER reviews by SSA on DDS proposed allowances). Next, no doubt, if this happened, the national media will treat us to what a "giveaway" program it is and how the gov't is once again wasting taxpayer $. There is no quick and simple answer to this problem unless brave politicans undertake sweeping reform.

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  3. Anonymous5:43 PM, April 18, 2008

    I worked for SSA for over 31 years. I worked hard and took my responsibilities seriously as did most of my co-workers. Congress has ignored the crying need for more staff for many years. The last office I worked in had 35 employees when I started there in 1995 and got down to 19 before this year when Congress finally bumped the budget up a little. All but six of the 35 that were there in '95 have retired, so not only are there many fewer employees, there are very few experienced employees. The programs are very complicated and it takes three years to train a claims representative. It will take at least a decade of full funding for the agency to make up the ground it lost during the Bush administration.

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