Social Security has released its Annual Statistical Report On The Social Security Disability Insurance Program for 2010. If you think that higher and higher percentages of Social Security disability claims are being approved, take a look at the chart above. Note in particular the increase in technical denials.
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Percentages of approvals across all levels of appeal might not be increasing, but there is a worrying increase in approvals at the hearing level. According to the charts, in 2009, 77% of cases involving Social Security disability benefits were approved (with an 85% pay rate when just DIB is involved and a 69% pay rate when both DIB and SSI are involved)
Technical denials drastically increased due to fallout from the Special Disability Workload. They'll in all likelihood remain constant at these levels in the future.
Technical denials are a complete waste of agency resources--if someone files for SSI, and they ever had any earnings at all, a T2 claim must be taken, even if it is the third-or-fourth-or fifth time they have filed and been denied for not being insured.
In our office and in other offices in the metropolitan area, the manager runs 'scrubbers', programs that screen the Master Beneficiary Recored (data base for SSDI and RSI recipients) against a certain dollar amount of benefits. This creates a list of people who are over 65, not on SSI and whose retirement benefit is under a certain dollar amount. Those lists are distributed among the SSI CR's who are instructed to 'cold call' these recipients to try to obtain SSI aged claims. Management doesn't track how many of these leads turn into approved claims, but it has been my experience that if I can talk a person over 65 to file a claim, that it invariably will lead to a denial. So we spend our time looking for claims for the sole purpose of a technical denial instead of doing the work that is waiting there for us to do, like Continuing Disability Reviews and SSI redeterminations. Technical denials are easy. I can do it in my sleep. Adjudicating a claim to payment takes work. But the work units are the same and that is what matters to the boss.
Management is playing the game that was created for them and they want to win. It's not that they don't believe in service to the public, but they also want to be successful and to get promoted as well. It's been this way for as long as I worked at SSA. New employees have a hard time with it, but learn to go with the program and 'cold call' people who have not expressed any interest in qualifying and probably don't, qualify, but gets the office an extra claim - a technical denial of course.
But now that there is a statistical analysis published, someone higher up may start asking why we have so many technical denials.
The fact that the percentage of medical denials has gone down in this chart is directly related to the increase in the volume of technical denials. It may have nothing to do with the percentage of technically eligible claims being medically denied. Can't tell from this chart. Remove the technical denials and run a new chart.
I only wish these numbers were real.
http://www.collapsenet.com/affiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=416&url=424
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