Deaths And Bankruptcies While Awaiting Action On Disability Claims

      From a press release:

... Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee Chairman John B Larson (D-CT) responded to new findings from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study they commissioned which found that thousands of American die or go bankrupt waiting to receive their disability benefits each year. ...

The study, “Social Security Disability: Information on Wait Times, Bankruptcies, and Deaths among Applicants Who Appealed Benefit Denials,” looked at people who appealed an initial denial of their application for Social Security or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. It found:

• More than 100,000 people died without receiving a final decision on their appeal for Social Security or SSI disability benefits, out of approximately 9 million who filed an appeal from Fiscal Year (FY) 2008 to FY 2019.
• Approximately 50,000 people filed for bankruptcy while appealing for Social Security or SSI disability benefits, out of approximately 3.6 million who filed an appeal from FY 2014 to FY 2019.
• From FY 2008 to FY 2019, most disability applicants who appealed an initial denial waited more than a year for a final decision. Median wait times reached a peak of 839 days – more than 2 years – for claims filed in FY 2015.  ...

 

The Hearing Backlog Remains Huge

     From USA Today:

It isn’t easy to be patient when you can’t work and you’re in pain, as Christine Morgan knows all too well.

Her chronic pain comes from fibromyalgia. Morgan, 60, also has spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spaces within the spine that pinches the nerves, most often in the lower back and neck. To top it off, she is diabetic, has kidney disease, high blood pressure and depression.

Yet Morgan has been turned down for Social Security Disability Insurance –  twice. “They sent me a letter that said I wasn’t disabled,” she said.

Morgan appealed her most recent denial in August 2017. Her appeal wasn’t heard until more than a year later, on Nov. 7, and she still hasn’t received a ruling. She is among more than 800,000 Americans waiting for their appeals to be decided. Each year thousands die waiting for an answer.

In fiscal year 2016, 8,699 Americans died on the disability insurance waiting list. That number rose to 10,002 in 2017. ...

Study On Deaths While Awaiting ALJ Hearings

     From a study by Social Security's Office of the Chief Actuary on Probability of Death While Pending an Administrative Law Judge Determination:

There are two key findings. First, the death rate for individuals who are awaiting an ALJ determination has declined somewhat over the period from 2006 to 2017. Second, the death rate for this group, while it is two to three times as high as that for the general population, is only about one-fourth of the death rate for workers who have been awarded disabled worker benefits and are in their first two years of benefit entitlement. ...

Click on each table to view full size

     The summary given above is accurate but I don't see why anyone would find this report reassuring. There are far too many people waiting for hearings and thousands of them die each year. 

     To give a full report on this issue shouldn't the Office of Chief Actuary have looked at what happened to those disability claims after the claimants died? The vast majority of those cases didn't die with the claimant. Someone was entitled to whatever benefits accrued before the claimant's death. Sure, some of those claims were denied but I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of those claims were approved after the claimant died. Isn't that an important?

Thousands Die Each Year Waiting For Action On Their Social Security Disability Claims

     For decades there have been newspaper articles on Social Security disability claimants dying while their cases were being adjudicated. We'll soon have a study of these deaths. It's to be released on November 1. However, the abstract is out now. The authors say they identified 24 conditions where claimants are unlikely to survive the adjudication process. However, the big takeaway from the abstract is that they found that 42,000 people died while their disability claims were being adjudicated during the time period 1996 to 2007. That's thousands of deaths a year. Certainly some of these deaths were unavoidable because the claimants lived only a short time after filing their claims but not all. 

Trouble In Social Security's Backyard

     The Baltimore Sun is running a story on the huge backlog of cases awaiting a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) in the Baltimore, Maryland hearing office. The backlog is now up to 17 months. This has led to bankruptcies, people losing their homes and people dying before being approved. Social Security's headquarters are just outside Baltimore.

Finding A Way To Record The Deaths Of Claimants Who Are Awaiting A Social Security Disability Hearing

It has been suggested to me that it would be a good idea if there were some way to publicly record the deaths of claimants who are awaiting a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) on a Social Security disability claim. There are far more of these deaths now than there used to be because of the enormous hearing backlogs. The deaths are a depressing fact of life for attorneys who represent Social Security claimants. Not a few of these deaths are suicides. Other deaths could have been prevented if the claimant could have had the Medicare or Medicaid that goes with Social Security disability benefits.

There are some technical issues of how best to publicly record these deaths. At best, we will never be able to record anything like all of them. There are also confidentiality issues for attorneys if they list their late clients' names. Still, there ought to be some way of doing this so that the public could get some rough idea of the terrible effects of these backlogs. It would be nice if we could also have these show up on a map.

If anyone has any thoughts about how we could do this, please share it with me either as a comment in response to this item in the blog or by e-mailing me.