A couple of items from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's blog on the immediate effects of the health care bill that was just signed into law:
IF YOU ARE A SMALL BUSINESSES OWNER:
SMALL BUSINESS TAX CREDITS—Offers tax credits to small businesses to make employee coverage more affordable. Tax credits of up to 35 percent of premiums will be immediately available. Effective beginning for calendar year 2010. (Beginning in 2014, small business tax credits will cover 50 percent of premiums.)
...
COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS—Increases funding for Community Health Centers to allow for nearly doubling the number of patients served over the next 5 years. Effective beginning in fiscal year 2010.
The first one matters a lot to those of us who represent claimants. The second is important to everyone. Inadequate medical care is a huge problem for Social Security disability claimants. Often, Social Security disability claimants' health suffer as a result of inadequate medical care. The lack of decent medical records also makes it more difficult for claimants to win their Social Security disability cases.
This health reform bill,maybe,once implimented,be liked by alot of americans. Except those republicans,and tea party folks who hate mr obama.
ReplyDeleteThe main thing is how much all these "wonderful gifts" will cost and how is it going to be paid for.
ReplyDeleteNot a tea party member, SSA employee with a brain.
It's not particularly exciting for SSD claimants or SSD reps. Most people suffer as a result of inadequate medical care *before* they become SSD claimants.
ReplyDeleteDoubling the service capacity of community health centers could actually make it harder for SSD claimants to assert that they couldn't access or afford medical care during periods of no treatment.
Plus, the new health care bill doesn't speak to improving the quality of care/recordkeeping at CHC's. The actual records generated could just build up a string of "normal" exam findings that cut against disability.
Maybe "more records" would result in fewer DDS denials, i.e. getting it right the first time. That'd shrink the pool of claimants seeking legal assistance at the hearing level.
Bad for business, right?
I disagree with anon #4. The DDS is never going to up their allowance percentage enough to hurt the representation business. Their job is to deny a certain percentage of cases, even if they won't actually come out and say that. And let's not even pretend that they make the right decision most of the time, especially in SDM decisions, which are completely laughable.
ReplyDeleteAnon #4 would like to qualify - this *could* shrink the number of denials for insufficient evidence.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it wouldn't be significant. I was really thinking of DDS denials where MRI or other "expensive" objective evidence would support a listing-level impairment... but the claimant has been out of treatment due to financial reasons. There are some things that CE's and x-rays just can't establish.
But, I could be totally off-base. It was just a thought, and not totally fleshed out.
I do agree with Anon #5 that the SDM decisions are 100% laughable. The RFC assessments are 110% laughable. They're not-so-subtly tailored to whatever is needed to reach a "not disabled" result. Ugh.