Social Security has issued Emergency Message EM-19025 on the
Eric Conn cases. It says that:
... On November 28, 2018, the Unites States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit concluded in Hicks v. Commissioner of Social Security that our current redetermination process violated constitutional and statutory protections for individuals who challenged the agency’s redetermination process. Pursuant to the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Hicks, the courts are remanding affected cases to the agency to provide new hearings and decisions. The courts have also ordered us to reinstate benefits pending the outcome of the new redetermination proceedings. We refer to this sub-set of individuals as Hicks cases. ...
Individuals who had their cases remanded from Federal court for new proceedings will receive a letter from the Appeals Council. The letter will address their new hearing to consider their medical condition. …
Affected individuals will also receive separate notices, which will be available in the Online Retrieval System (ORS), explaining how we will comply with the district court’s order to reinstate benefits until we make a new decision and how we will schedule a phone appointment. …
The EM doesn’t say what will be in these new letters and notices
nor does it say what these phone calls will concern. These may be addressed in another EM that they're not posting. Many EMs are kept secret. There are also a number of non-functioning links in the EM. Some of them might address the issues this EM raises.
EM-15020 SEN REV 8 (linked in the EM you posted, although yes, that link only works internally) was last updated in March 2018, so no, it does not give the content of the forthcoming notices. Stay tuned for those, I guess. But pretty clearly the folks whose cases are being remanded are going to (a) have new hearings scheduled; and (b) have their benefits reinstated pending the outcomes of those hearings. I'm betting the phone appointment might be for something like a prehearing development conference.
ReplyDeletePrehearing conferences would make sense, because these claimants are in a variety of different places, procedurally. Some have had new claims granted and overpayments waived and are in no different position than they were when "the Mess" started, except for their mental distress and their attorney's time. Those cases may not really need new hearings, depending on how SSA is going to treat those overpayment waivers in the future. Others have new claims that were denied, and on appeal, and those claims may be consolidated. And so on. So it makes sense to look at each case individually and figure out what actually needs to be done, if anything.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the "phone" appointments may simply refer to the calls a lot of claimants got last week to confirm their bank account info, etc., to re-effectuate their payments.