Unexpected Effect Of Gay Marriage

The recent wave of state legislation allowing same-sex domestic partnerships with the same rights as marriages may have an unexpected effect upon Social Security. No, Social Security will not recognize these civil unions as marriages, but read this excerpt from an Associated Press article about civil unions in Washington state.

Unmarried, heterosexual senior couples would also be eligible for domestic partnerships if one partner were at least 62. Lawmakers said that provision was included to help seniors who are at risk of losing pension rights and Social Security benefits if they remarry.

An Expensive Request

Witold Skwierczynski, who is head of Social Security operations for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) which represents 28,000 Social Security employees, made a request in 2004 under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for certain Social Security documents. The response he received has shown up on the web. He was told that cost of responding to his request would be $813,747!

I know this is history, but the breadth of this request and the ridiculous response are both amazing. I knew there was bad blood there, but this is stunning!

Disability Appeals Chart

The National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) published the chart shown above that it obtained from Social Security. The chart shows the current results of Social Security's disability appeals process. Click on the image to get it in a full screen version.

NCSSMA On Budget And Backlogs

The National Council of Social Security Management Associations (NCSSMA) has posted a statement that it made for the record to the House Appropriations Committee on March 30. However, the House Appropriations Committee website shows no hearing on that date. Maybe, the hearing is still to be scheduled. Here is an excerpt from their statement:

For Fiscal Year 2008, the President has proposed an increase for SSA of approximately $304.0 million over the final level of funding for Fiscal Year 2007. And yet, staffing levels in offices across the country are being cut. In fact, SSA will lose about 4,000 positions from the beginning of Fiscal Year 2006 to Fiscal year 2008. The most significant staffing losses in SSA have occurred in the agency’s Field Offices. Field Offices have lost about 2,300 positions in the past 18 months and about 1,200 positions in the past 6 months. The vast majority of these losses have been in the most critical positions in the Field: Claims Representatives and Service Representatives. All of this comes after five years of reductions to the President’s Budget Requests, which total $720.0 million dollars, and about 8,000 work years. It is interesting to note that while total Executive Branch Employment is expected to increase 2.1% from FY 2006 to FY 2008, SSA’s employment is expected to decrease by 6.2%.

NCSSMA has also posted the minutes of a conference call of their Executive Committee on March 22. Here are a couple of excerpts from that:

NCSSMA’s contacts related to the FY 2008 Budget Resolution have been very productive. Rachel is optimistic that there will be good news about the FY 2008 Budget Resolution and its recommendations for SSA very soon. Rachel and Rick are very encouraged with the reception they have been getting from the staff of key members of the House and Senate related to the Budget Resolution and SSA’s resources needs. There is definitely interest in SSA-related issues and the information we have been sharing has been both well-received and appreciated. ...

Rick and Greg met with Commissioner Astrue on March 1. The Commissioner spoke at length about disability backlogs and it is clear this will be his primary focus, at least for the short term. Congress is expecting him to respond to them about the problems with ODAR and disability backlogs by April 15. He has been working with Linda McMahon and other senior staff on many issues, and we can probably expect some changes to be announced in the near future.

Disability Claim Backlogs At VA Too

From the Houston Chronicle:

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.

Medicare Waiting Period

Some excerpts from a USA Today article:

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?

First, just who is Mary Chatel? She is the director of the Disability Service Improvement (DSI) project. She is a career Social Security employee. Before being hired for this job by former Commissioner Barnhart, Chatel had worked in field office operations. I am pretty sure that she had not previously worked in the disability program or Social Security's appellate structure.

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.

What Is This About?

From a list of audit reports prepared by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

Defense Contract Audit Agency's Audit of Lockheed Martin Services, Inc. Incurred Costs for Calendar Year Ending December 31, 2004 (Limited Distribution)

No copy of this audit report is available to the public. The stated explanation of "Limited Distribution" is "These reports contain information that is sensitive and confidential. For security reasons, distribution of these reports is limited to those with a need to know."

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.