Nearly 400,000 disability claims were pending at the VA as of February, including 135,741 that exceeded the VA's 160-day goal for processing them. The department takes six months, on average, to process a claim, and the waiting time for appeals averages two years.
This already strained system may grow more overburdened in years ahead as many of the troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan return from those wars, experts say. The VA gives veterans from those two conflicts top priority in claims processing.
"The projected number of claims from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will rapidly turn the disability claims problem into a crisis," said Linda J. Bilmes, a Harvard University public policy professor who has studied the claims process and met with VA Secretary Jim Nicholson last month to discuss ways to improve it.
Apr 11, 2007
Disability Claim Backlogs At VA Too
Medicare Waiting Period
Each year, tens of thousands of Americans like [Roxianna] McCutchan find themselves disabled and unable to work. After going through the process to get Social Security disability income, most are shocked to discover that they have to wait two more years to be eligible for Medicare, the federal health program for elderly and disabled people ...McCutchan and 20 others tell their stories about life in the two-year waiting period today in a report released by New York-based advocacy group the Medicare Rights Center, which is lobbying to end the waiting period.
"There's no more desperate group of uninsured Americans than people who are severely disabled, suddenly unemployed and without any access to health coverage," says Robert Hayes, the center's president ...
But cost could be a barrier: Estimates range from $5 billion to more than $8 billion a year to offer Medicare to disabled people in the waiting period — and Medicare's hospital fund is already expected to hit insolvency in just over a decade.
"There's a judgment call here about how big a problem is this," says Joe Antos, a health policy researcher at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "If Congress decided to change the rule … (it is) locking in a permanent increase in entitlement spending of some amount forever." ...
Debating expansion of Medicare to cover disabled people in the waiting period thus puts Democrats in a dilemma, says Antos.
"Kids are a very appealing group politically," he says. "The disabled may not be as appealing politically."
Why Wasn't Mary Chatel Fired?
Second, I am not saying that Mary Chatel deserves to be fired or that she will be fired. Probably, she deserves nothing of the sort.
However, Martin Gerry was abruptly fired. The firing came at a time when the new Commissioner of Social Security was reviewing former Commissioner Barnhart's DSI plan and, apparently, not liking what he was seeing. The easy inference was that Gerry was fired over DSI, since Gerry was heavily involved in developing DSI. That may well be the case. However, Mary Chatel, is still in her job, according to Social Security's organizational chart. If Commissioner Astrue decided that DSI is a disaster and wanted to clean house of everyone responsible for it, one might think that Chatel would get fired or demoted at the same time, but it has not happened. It is not like Chatel can hide. Unlike Gerry, Chatel works in the Office of the Commissioner of Social Security. Whatever else one can say, there is no sign that the apparent failure of DSI is leading to indiscriminate career carnage.
I imagine that Mary Chatel and Commissioner Astrue have had some long conversations about DSI. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall. I wonder what she had to say about DSI and about former Commissioner Barnhart and Martin Gerry. It must have slowly dawned on Chatel as she tried to get DSI going that she was trying to execute an incoherent and unworkable plan.
Apr 10, 2007
What Is This About?
Defense Contract Audit Agency's Audit of Lockheed Martin Services, Inc. Incurred Costs for Calendar Year Ending December 31, 2004 (Limited Distribution)
What is this about? Why are the Defense Contract Audit Agency and Social Security's OIG looking at the same thing? Why is Social Security's OIG concerned with a secret audit report at the Department of Defense? There may be some harmless explanation of this, but it has an Orwellian ring to it.
Apr 9, 2007
Results Of Last Week's Unscientific Polls
Should Martin Gerry have been fired in the manner in which he was fired (lock on door changed, escorted out of building by security guard)?| Yes (68) | 54% |
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| No (32) | 26% |
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| Don't Know/No opinion (25) | 20% |
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Total Votes: 125
How do you rate the overall quality of service that the Social Security Administration currently gives to the public?
| Excellent (10) | 16% |
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| Good (10) | 16% |
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| Fair (21) | 34% |
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| Poor (21) | 34% |
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Total Votes: 62
Large Scale Hiring At SSA
What Will Andrew Biggs Role Be?
There has been no sign that Biggs has ever had any interest in the day to day operations of the Social Security Administration. Why would you want to be responsible for keeping the trains running on time if your goal was to blow up the locomotives and tear up the tracks? The Policy office does research, which is closer to the kind of work Biggs has done in the past, although recently he has been more of a polemicist than a researcher.
Apr 8, 2007
NY Times On Biggs
...Andrew Biggs, the president’s choice to be deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, is a champion of partially privatizing the program he is being sent to administer. The agency dispenses checks to beneficiaries and traditionally provides factual information on the state of the program. But under this president the agency has become increasingly politicized, using questionable arguments and projections to support Mr. Bush’s drive for private accounts. As a lower ranking official in the agency, Mr. Biggs was in the thick of that politicization. His appointment is a sure sign that Mr. Bush intends to keep using the agency as a propaganda machine to push a privatization scheme that has little public support.