Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has released its report on "outlier" Administrative Law Judges (ALJs), that is ALJs who have either high or low rates of approving disability claims or high or low productivity. If you were expecting dramatic revelations, you will be disappointed. The chart below is an example. It displays the expected bell shaped curve of ALJ rates of approving disability claims. This is pretty much inevitable when you are talking about human behavior. Notice that the tail on the left side seems to be a lot longer than the tail on the right side. I'm prejudiced but I think the problem is much more with the ALJs with a low allowance rate.
9 comments:
Utterly consistent with what I saw over 25 years looking at the system from within. Unremarkable.
one ALJ had an OTR rate of over 96%...WOW!
Wait for it...
An average pay rate of 70% is sickening. That graph needs to be moved WAY to the left IE cap pay rates at 30% per judge.
Pretty sure it's more indicative of far too many cases being denied by state DDS that shouldn't be.
I fail to see how an arbitrary decision quota is going to make for a better system. Now, if you want to look at the numbers and use them to make adjustments to your policy, that's fine. But we all know bureaucracies just love metric targets. No matter what you do, if you ask them to try to improve numbers, they will find the laziest, most superficial way to adjust the numbers. I.e., what you just suggested.
IDK I think the current bureaucratic boondoggle is worse wherein with the #1 goal being lowering processing time, it is more "efficient" to just pay every case, than spend twice as long writing unfavorables, just to meet productivity targets.
7 of out every 10 people who walk into a hearing room are incapable of working??? sorry. not true.
Nobbins comments brings up a good point - is the problem too many cases that should be allowances being denied at the state DDS level or is this really bad ALJs over-turning good DDS decisions and allowing claims that really shouldn't be allowed?
The Boston region has a very high pay rate at DDS and then a very high pay rate by the ALJs, so in that region, it is clearly not a bad DDS being corrected by the ALJs.
Leaving aside the idiocy of the age-based presumptions for people 50 and older, which results in thousands of people being found disabled who are capable of working, the biggest problem is that Astrue and his management staff encourage a "pay down the backlog" philosphy and that too many ALJs take the easy way out of cases by accepting at face value whatever worthless medical source statement the representative submits (with these statements generally depicting the individual as barely more than a corpse).
"...by accepting at face value whatever worthless medical source statement the representative submits"
Not at our ODAR, where treating physican opinions are routienly disregarded and sometimes simply ignored (not even addressed).
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