Driving Me Up The Wall In Two Ways

From Dave Lieber (who calls his column the Watchdog) writing in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

Ray Shuga, a retired truck driver in Fort Worth, twiddled his thumbs for about two years between the time he applied for Social Security Disability Insurance and the arrival of his first check.

"In Texas, there are so many people applying for disability, they are just way, way backed up," he says.

So he and his wife waited while the federal government tried to catch up with demand. Or at least catch up with them.

"We were counting pennies left and right," Shuga says. "We couldn’t buy anything, couldn’t do anything. My pickup had problems. My wife’s car had problems. But we got by."

In Texas, about 50,000 people are waiting to hear back about their initial application to get SSDI benefits, paid to people who are under retirement age but can no longer work because of a disability.

That number of applicants almost doubled in one year, the Social Security Administration says. ...

The Watchdog was alerted to the SSDI backlog by a representative of Allsup Inc., a third-party company that helps Americans file claims and in return takes a percentage of the initial retroactive payment if an applicant is successful.

Spokesman Dan Allsup says the Belleville, Ill., company has a 99 percent success rate when applicants stick with Allsup through the entire process ...

This drives me up the wall in two ways. First, I get many clients like this. They hear there are backlogs so they wait until they are destitute and desperate before filing a claim. These clients do not want to hear me telling them it will take another two to three years at best before they receive help. I suppose you can figure out the other part of this that drives me up the wall.