Social Security's Office of Retirement and Disability Policy has published a briefing paper dealing with the question of why the number of disability claims approved has gone down so much. It doesn't come to any definite conclusions.
The main problem I have with this otherwise thorough report is that it mostly limits the data presented to 2017 and earlier. Since then the number of disability claims filed has continued to go down dramatically while the unemployment rate has held pretty much steady. That's hard to explain if your theory is that number of disability claims has declined due to reduced unemployment. I think this is the main issue that needs to be examined and this report seems to skirt around it.
I believe that more research is needed on the connection between the quality or lack of quality of service at Social Security and the number of disability claims filed. As this report indicates, many who might file claims are ambivalent about doing so. This ambivalence makes them easily deterred by difficulty in filing a claim. We have some research on this subject but not much.
By the way, if you think that the Office of Retirement and Disability Policy must issue many briefing papers like this, you're wrong. It's August and this one is labeled "Briefing Paper No. 2019-01." What exactly do they do in that Office?
I believe that more research is needed on the connection between the quality or lack of quality of service at Social Security and the number of disability claims filed. As this report indicates, many who might file claims are ambivalent about doing so. This ambivalence makes them easily deterred by difficulty in filing a claim. We have some research on this subject but not much.
By the way, if you think that the Office of Retirement and Disability Policy must issue many briefing papers like this, you're wrong. It's August and this one is labeled "Briefing Paper No. 2019-01." What exactly do they do in that Office?
4 comments:
I also wonder -- with no empirical proof -- if the war on non-citizens has anything to do with it. Urban areas have many, many non-citizen claimants with self-reported poor English skills.
Are those people now in hiding?
They consider and evaluate policy changes to regulations and sub-regulatory policies like SSR, POMS, etc., which is a considerable amount of work. When you see new rules on retirement or disability, they have worked on it.
I read through the report and I can see some tip-toeing around some elephants in the room. For example, the report addresses outlier adjudicators, but if I recall correctly, virtually all the analysis and pressure was put on outlier claim granters and not outlier deniers. So you get adverse scrutiny and perhaps even a congressional committee shaming session if you grant much more that the average percentage of claims, but no adverse consequences if you are an outlier denier? Is anyone surprised that the average disability claim approval rate substantially declined after that?
An interesting experiment would be to reverse the trend and focus intense scrutiny and review on outlier deniers. I would suspect that such scrutiny would reveal that a significant number of outlier denial adjudicators are chronically failing to follow agency rules and policies in ways that are detrimental to disability claimants. Another interesting study, if such failure were found, would be the impact on claimants whose legitimate claims should have been granted, but were denied.
It's spelled out online - https://www.ssa.gov/org/orgDCRDP.htm
Actually, they publish a lot of information, not just disability-related [after all, the primary function of the agency is retirement security] just not in the informal "briefing paper" format.
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/
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