There's a Congressional hearing tomorrow on the enormous backlog of Social Security disability claims awaiting adjudication. This afternoon, Social Security adds three extremely rare conditions to its "compassionate allowance" list. The "compassionate allowance" list is and always has been meaningless. It's just a list of rare conditions for which a disability claim would be approved anyway. The list has always been a way of pretending to do something about the backlogs while actually doing nothing of consequence. The compassionate allowance list is just a fig leaf for Social Security and Congress to hide behind. If you work at Social Security and you think otherwise, you either don't understand the situation or you're fooling yourself.
Former Commissioner Astrue created the idea of compassionate allowances and forever touted them. Most likely his infatuation with the initiative flowed from his experience in the orphan drug industry where he made a fortune. But as the post says, these are extremely rare and by definition do not affect significant numbers of applicants. For the Agency, they are a useful way to respond to the various interest groups seeking special treatment for individuals with the conditions that the groups advocate for. Most importantly, the initiative provides a check against individuals with conditions that are clearly disabling falling through the cracks or wait too long for a determination that should be a "slam dunk." When people focus on the program, they lose sight of the fact that like the listings, they are not all inclusive; there are many applicants with impairments that do not show up on these lists that are just as severely impaired as those on the lists.
ReplyDeleteI see CALs somewhat frequently--well maybe 2%. I only handle the FO part but most of the time I see them come back as allowances within a couple of weeks. So quicker than your normal claim that can be housed for a few months before being worked.
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ReplyDeleteWell, 500,000 cases have been approved through this process - certainly not just a few. The computer modeling identifies the cases and hopefully reduces adjudicative time which can be used for other cases.
Astrue's interest in this group goes back to the denial of his mother's disability claim - who had a severe but uncommon condition which was denied.
Numbers, numbers,numbers. 500,000 out of a pool of how many, over what period of time? The beauty of Social Security for people trying to make a point is that given its enormity you can always come up with a big number. Small percentages yield big numbers over time so it CA is worthwhile. However, it is not a prime driver of the workload issue.
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