I want to circle back to something that was in the Washington Post article about Social Security’s decision to scrap their plan to reduce or eliminate the consideration of age in making disability determinations. There was this interesting sentence:
… Among the Trump administration’s concerns with using the new [occupational] data is that younger disabled people with cognitive and mental impairments would probably qualify for fewer jobs, potentially leading more of them to be awarded benefits, the former Social Security executive said. …
OK, so it sounds like they collected data showing that more people with cognitive and mental impairments should be awarded disability benefits but they’re not going to act on that data or even release it to the public. Does that sound like the right thing to do? If the data is subpoenaed for an ALJ hearing shouldn’t it be produced?
I recall a non-disability case where I asked the ALJ to obtain some information about the case from a field office. The field office sent back a memo literally asking “Don’t you understand that the attorney is only trying to get his client approved?” Would that be the agency’s response to a request for the occupational data that they spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars obtaining?
You might think that an attorney raising a fuss over this might be endangering their older clients since the plan to reduce or eliminate consideration of age might come back. That sounds too speculative to me to take into consideration but if an attorney has clients with conflicting interests, you don’t solve the conflict by deciding which clients to not represent zealously. You solve it by withdrawing from cases. That’s non-negotiable.
4 comments:
The old data in the DOT has very little information on mental job requirements compared to the modern data found in ONET and the Occupational Requirements Survey. That's even more true since SSA discourages its vocational experts from considering DOT reasoning level, math and language job ratings. Most adjudicators and vocational experts will only exclude a job at step five if there is a documented job requirement that conflicts with some aspect of the disability claimant's residual functional capacity. The higher number of documented mental job requirement categories in the modern data means it's more likely to find a conflict between job requirements and RFC. It also means more accurate disability determination, which would be a good thing.
I"m somewhat surprised you raised this issue here. There are multiple similar issues in this stuff. For example, where is the science behind how long a person with carpal tunnel can handle and finger? Where is the science in determining how long a person with certain conditions can sit/stand/walk. Most of these decisions are based on nothing but pure speculation. VEs have been testilying for years. I haven't seen much on here about it. Mostly, you seem to just want to rant about politics. WIsh you would spend more time talking about the ridiculousness of this system.
So, there really are objective data that can actually PROVE how long a person with condition X can do something? And while we're at it, let's prove how painful some condition is. Uh huh. Of course it's all guesswork!!!
For years, VEs testified there were between 5,000 to 25,000 Addressers (using typewriters to address envelopes). Then SSA finally conceded the job is obsolete (who uses a typewriter anymore), so a few years ago began testifying only 500 to 2,000 jobs. Then since late-2024 the VEs say between 25,000 to 100,000 Addresser jobs. It's a sad Kafkaesque joke and always has been.
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