Feb 4, 2020

Trump Administration Completes Action On Inability To Communicate In English Rule

     The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has completed its review of Social Security's proposed final rule which will remove inability to communicate in English as a criteria in disability determination. The rule was approved and should be published in the Federal Register in the near future.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

No doubt this will please some of the more bigoted ALJs, who can be seen here referring to efforts to be inclusive of trans and nonbinary claimants as an "abomination":

http://aljdiscussion.proboards.com/thread/5214/dwpi?page=4

Anonymous said...

Wow, now that was a leap.

Anonymous said...

@8:46AM

Oh? I don't think so. Those sorts of biases often go hand-in-hand.

Anonymous said...

Must be a Deep State plot.

Anonymous said...

More like the Dumb State plot. Looks to me that the countries without inflowing immigrants go into geriatric death spirals. The reason this country has been economically dynamic for centuries is because we are the beacon to the world. We've gone in a short time from Neil Diamond's they're coming to America today to a bunch of stupid, backward ass, old white bigots. I'm sure the attacks on safety nets for the "good" Americans from places like West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Kansas and Oklahoma will be coming soon. This is culling out and attacking the sickest animal first. I only know that history will eventually judge your damage and stupidity from your thinly veiled, bigotry, hate, and nationalist ignorance and malice.

Anonymous said...

The rule is long overdue. You don't have to know English to be a housekeeper, packager, or perform any number of other simple unskilled jobs.

"Inability to Communicate in English" is easy to manipulate if a 46 year old claimant limited to sedentary work alleges they can't speak/read the language, and we have no real way of verifying whether they're telling us the truth about their abilities.


Anonymous said...

Up next....the proposed new CDR rules. Anyone think Trump will back down on them? There were over 100k responses when they were posted for comments. 99% of them were against the rules changes. Will that even matter?

Anonymous said...

@5:07

Housekeepers need to be able to read safety warnings on chemicals. Packagers obviously need to read English to understand instructions and packaging labels. The old assembly line work where you literally just seal and tape packages is automated, and the only jobs left in these positions deal more with routing of packages or more intricate adjustments to particular packages.

I can actually think of a few jobs where language understanding is minimal (silver wrapper, farmworker, leaf tier, etc.). Your examples are just bad, and bad in a material sense the jobs you rely on exist in significant numbers in the national economy, whereas the actual examples don't. The US may not have an "official language," but employers largely do.

As to an inability to communicate in English being "easy to manipulate," if a claimant can keep up the act for the entire course of a claim, that would be surprising. Also, plenty of issues have "no real way" of verification. Literally any symptom is not objectively provable (only the source is, in most cases). If you want to make the program into a purely objective system, that's a choice for Congress to make. It isn't currently.

Finally, your example of a 46 year old limited to sedentary work alleging an inability to speak/read the language is incomplete. They would also need to have an unskilled (or no) work history.

@7:27

No, probably not. Rarely do public comments material impact the changes proposed.

Anonymous said...

Wouldn’t that 46 year old also have to be 55?

Anonymous said...

Oh never mind
Hasn’t come up much