Dorcas R. Hardy, former Commissioner of Social Security, has been named Chair of the National Advisory Board for Early Bird Alert Inc. (EBA), the company dedicated to improving health and connectivity for seniors and the chronically ill, it was announced today.
Ms. Hardy, who served under President Ronald Reagan and is president of DRHardy & Associates, a public policy firm in Washington, D.C., will lead experts in the fields of aging and disability services to advise EBA in the development and implementation of EasyConnect™, its new in-home communications device and service designed to help seniors and patients with chronic medical conditions take better care of their health.
Jun 27, 2011
Former Social Security Commissioner Hardy Still Active
From a press release:
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8 comments:
Sounds like her name is for sale cheap with now "EasyConnect".
It sounds like a TV informercial "only available on TV" level product.
How the mighty has fallen. ...
Dorcas stories are many, true and all unpleasant.
Dorcas Who? Oh, her! When she first became COSS, the push began for greater productivity, esp. in claims. So, everyone was appraised based on processing times and WUPMY in the field. DIB claims had a higher work unit value than regular RSHI claims because they took more time to process. Someone realized that DO's were taking SSA-16's to record code disallowances on uninsured DIB applicants. No, they said. That's cheating! You have to stop that. You're trying to get credit for work you didn't do. In time, a new abbreviated app was developed with less work value, but not right away. So, for years people thought that taking apps on uninsured people was wrong and constituted a vile attempt by management to game the system.
Problem was that all those unprocessed uninsured disallowances created open T2 applications with zillions of years of retroactivity when someone realized that they had to pay all these T16 DIB recipients all that back pay. In short, Dorcas Hardy's policy created the Special Disability Workload with all it's delights. We told CO at the time about the open applications and closing them out. They didn't care. So, for those of you who never had the pleasure of working for Dorcas, good for you. She's still on the Social Security Advisory Board, you know. And, honestly, I cannot think of a single good thing she did.
Dorcas entering a room barking Coffee! I was in the room in Baltimore when her enormous/unfounded ego clamored that she had a lock on staying COSS. Quickly dispatched when GB took over.
My favorite Dorcas Hardy story (probably untrue) is the one about her infamous reversable coat...mink on one side for use when she visited with her rich, Republican sponsors, and cloth on the other side when she visited the peons in SSA field offices.
No, the coat story was a myth. And yes, the NY Times got her dispatched, as one poster put it. Took some really dishonest "reporting" to do it, but that's nothing new.
Dorcas was never much for the warm and fuzzies (and that's an understatement) so no defense of her tenure will be credible with some folks. She did a reasonably competent job in difficult circumstances; OMB imposed a 20,000 FTE cut on SSA and she was stuck with implementing it. She wanted to target the cuts to Woodlawn and the PSCs but the bureaucratic politics of that were just too difficult.
She was a legend. Hitting the leather bars South of Market St in San Francisco. Visiting field offices and disappearing for hours during the middle of the day. OK, so what? She was a competent administrator and has some challenging though unpopular ideas. Some of those SSA employees are just soft. And in the end, was she any worse that her successors?
She created the SSA Teleservice Centers structure. Although some dinosaurs still think this bad, it was a first step towards a more modern and customer oriented SSA.
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