Jon Dubin and Robert Rains have written an Issue Brief for the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy titled Scapegoating Social Security Disability Claimants (and the Judges Who Evaluate Them) in response to the Richard Pierce hit piece in Regulation, a publication of the Cato Institute. Here is one paragraph from the Dubin and Rains piece (footnote omitted):
Policy is often initiated, and sometimes adopted, based on popular misconceptions, partial truths, commonly repeated falsehoods, and isolated anecdotes with unfortunate consequences. Because neither the Pierce proposal’s media-anecdote-driven factual assumptions nor core legal suppositions about the identified problem are well-founded and because the proposed solutions are both misguided and unsound, this initiative, and other similar initiatives, should be non-starters.My experience tells me that if there were simple solutions that would produce consistent decision-making on Social Security disability claims, we would long since have achieved those solutions. The people administering the Social Security disability programs, like the rest of us, occasionally do stupid things but they are far from stupid and they have had decades to study the problem. Disability determination has been studied many, many times over the years by outsiders and many of them spent far more time on it than Pierce. The only people who think there are easy solutions are people like Pierce, who have only studied the problems superficially. I think the worst label one can put on a policy recommendation is "naive" and naive is the kindest thing I can say about what Pierce has written.
10 comments:
A very nice job of pooh-poohing the silly Cato Institute blither. This was not one of the Cato Institute's better efforts. Indeed, it is the sort of thing one would expect if/when the Koch brothers take over the Institute.
Or maybe the Marx brothers?
How embarassing for Prof. Richard Pierce and the publisher, to have that many demonstrable legal and factual errors in a published work. Kudos to Profs. Dubin and Rains for cataloguing them.
Pierce's article was full of errors and it was obvious that he did not really understand the disability system that well. However, what makes you believe that Dubin and Rains are any better or more accurate? I have not read their entire article yet, but I have already seen instances where they play fast and loose with the facts -- for example commenting that there are outlier ALJs on both sides of the spectrum, but neglecting to acknowledge that there are only a small number with high denial rates (a few dozen) compared to a significant number (several hundred) with very high pay rates (85% or more).
Pierce has some interesting ideas that should be developed, but maybe NOT at the Cato ...
If the "average" ALJ has an allowance rate of 60%, an ALJ with a pay rate of 85% is only 25 percentage points from the norm, whereas an ALJ with a 25% allowance rate is 35 points from the norm and thus much more of an outlier. If more than 25 percentage points is your definition of an outlier in either direction, then all those with allowance rates under 35% must be outliers as well. There are certainly plenty of those, not just "a few dozen" as you seem to think.
The issue, which really wasn't articulated well in either article is the current position of the bell curve.
65% pay rate is simply outrageous. Yes, there are only a "few" 99% pay raters, but there are hundreds and hundreds of >90%ers. The bigger problem is the pay rate of the average ALJ.
There needs to be a directed movement to mandate a downward shifting of the curve to ~ 30% pay.
I'm sorry, but 7 out of every 10 people who walk into a hearing office are not completely incapable of working.
Anon 4:51,
Maybe 7/10 people in a ODAR waiting room are not "completely incapable of working" by your standards, but for the rest of us, we play by SSA's goofy rules. 5 out of those 7 might be 55 year old guys who worked construction for 30 years and have bad backs and knees. Are you going to hire them to answer phones at your office? I know I'm not, and I'm pretty you won't either. No employer will.
You can't just put everyone under the "sit and squirm" test and assume that because they can sit through a 45 minute disability hearing they are magically capable of performing sedentary or light work 8 hrs a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year.
@ 5:00
The rules/regs are at least 50% of the problem. Whether a person will be or is likely to be hired should play NO role in disability determinations. The grid rules are awful and need to be massively overhauled, and IMO abolished.
that 55 year old engineer who has done nothing but "skilled" engineer work for the past 35 years isn't getting hired as an edible nut sorter or security monitor (or any other job), but we make no special accomodations for him.
The "Average" pay rate is only 60% because so many ALJs pay 85, 90, 95% of their cases. If there were fewer judges who paid every 8 or 9 claimants, then the average would decrease.
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