From TheNews.com:
The day after her husband’s funeral, Rondell Gulick called Social Security. Now alone with their nine children, the stay-at-home mom faced what would become a months-long process of claiming the benefits she was counting on to keep her family afloat.
Gulick, like many people trying to access benefits, is at the mercy of phone calls. Across the country, Social Security Administration offices have been closed since the start of the pandemic and with nearly 900,000 additional deaths caused by coronavirus, there are thousands of people seeking Social Security survivors benefits, some who know little about the process. The majority of people seeking survivors benefits, by far, are women. ...
Applications that could be completed in one in-person visit in a normal year are taking weeks and even months to complete.
Gulick has spent hours and hours on the phone in the weeks after her husband’s death to try to get the benefits most of her children qualify for. ...
Ben Gulick’s death was sudden: He was only 45 when he died January 2 from complications related to COVID-19. Donations from family and friends have helped, but they will keep them going for only so long.
“Dealing with so many hurdles on top of dealing with loss, while also trying to help nine children grieve this process” has been stressful, Gulick said. “I do not know what our future holds. I just don’t know.” ...
Brianna Berry, 31, only started to seek out survivors benefits after other widows told her she could apply. Her husband, Lewis, was one of the earliest and youngest deaths from COVID-19 in the state of Indiana. He died in April 2020 at age 37.
Berry spent a part of those early months after Lewis died on the phone trying to reach someone at Social Security. At first she didn’t know if she could go in person, or even who to call. She couldn’t find information on how to apply on the website or what she qualified for. When she found a number to call, she bounced around between different phone numbers and representatives until she was finally able to apply. ...
Jolene Reeves hasn’t been able to get through to Social Security. After half a dozen calls spending 45 minutes to more than an hour on hold, the Georgia resident only has a phone appointment scheduled for the end of March. ...
10 comments:
Golden opportunity for enterprising reps to offer assistance to those having trouble with online applications.
"We Know Nobody Cares About Disabled Claimants, What About Widows? Do We Care About Them?" This headline is inaccurate, inflamatory and offensive. Right now, folks across the Atlanta region are reading this and trying to find an appointment to accommodate this claimant. It has been said in past posts and we can repeat it now...Until the N8NN technology issues are resolved Field Offices don't stand a fighting chance at getting ahead of the calendars or mail, or walk-in appointments once the agency reopens for unscheduled visitors.
If he died in January 2022, she's not even eligible for monthly benefits until sometime this month, depending on his date of birth.
But an appointment the end of March isn't great for her. The reason it's such a long wait is that there are two months worth of people ahead of her that are trying to file for retirement, disability, medicare and survivor benefits.
Yes, Charles needs to stop posting offensively inaccurate click bait style headlines. It serves no useful purpose other than to piss off the SSA employees that visit his blog.
@1219 can't file survivors benefits online.
The truth of the matter is that service to the public is not as good as it should be at SSA. And, no one seems to care.
Am I the only one who sees the irony in 1:13's portrayal of trying to move heaven and earth to get the Georgia woman an appointment? And the fact they are working hard to help her despite how messed up things are is the point of the headline. Actions that could take a visit with a CR or SR and be done in a 15 minute office visit (like the Indiana woman) are growing moldy in unopened envelopes or piled at the bottom of a stack. Likely hundreds of thousands of routine post entitlement actions are mounting in a "to get to" pile. Plus the non-routine stuff that people will demand be attended to. That is going to be a sh*t show real soon. Actual real people with needs being told to wait 7 weeks to file a claim simply isn't public service. “The fact that they can’t go in and meet with someone or that they can’t reliably talk to someone by telephone is an incredibly serious barrier.” Not blaming most of the folks trying, but the agency as a whole has blackened both eyes in its handling of this. The Deputy Commissioner for (Non)Operations really shouldn't feel very good about the way things have been handled.
It's hard to believe that we're almost two years in and there's been no effort to re-establish the Immediate Claims Taking Units.
Maybe in some offices she could walk in and be seen but not in mine...we don't have the staff to accommodate such a thing. We used to, pre-pandemic...now, we can't do anything more than answer about half our calls and try and process what work we can between calls. It's a really sad state of affairs for some offices like mine. I'm sure it's not nearly as bad in others, but I wouldn't know.
The answer is NO
It has always been NO
It will continue to be No
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