Mental Illness And Disability

From a press release from the National Institutes of Mental Health:

Mental disorders rank among the top ten illnesses causing disability—more than 37 percent worldwide—with depression being the leading cause of disability among people ages 15 and older, according to the Global Burden of Disease and Risk Factors published in 2006. Yet, the world’s mental health care needs are largely going unmet, especially in less developed nations but also in high-income countries, according to results from a new survey of 17 countries conducted as part of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) World Mental Health Survey Initiative. The results of the initiative, partially funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), were published in The Lancet in September 2007. ...

Inadequate services were most commonly found in low-income countries, but even in some high-income countries, people received inadequate services. For example, in the United States, only 18 percent received minimally adequate services—much lower than any other high-income country.

An Image From 1959

Improvement On Aged Cases

Here is a nugget from press release Social Security issued about the new Quick Disability Determination (QDD) regulations:

Commissioner Astrue said. “I also am proud of our improvements with pending disability cases that have reached 1,000 days waiting for an appeal hearing. We have aggressively worked on these cases and now have fewer than 600 pending, down from more than 63,000 cases in October of last year.”

Cost Of Privatization Campaign

From the Associated Press:

The Bush administration spent at least $2.8 million traveling around the country promoting its plan to let many people divert a portion of their Social Security taxes into private retirement accounts, congressional investigators said Friday.

The Government Accountability Office, acting on a request from Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., counted 228 different Social Security reform public speaking events by Bush administration officials in 2005. ...

Fee Payments Increase In August

Payments of fees to attorneys and others for representation of Social Security claimants climbed to over $100 million in August, according to figures released by Social Security. This was a 29% increase over July. I believe this is the first time that more than $100 million has been paid in one month. Here are the figures for the entire year of 2007 so far.

Fee Payments
Month/Year	Volume	Amount
Jan-07	15,331	$55,149,991.81
Feb-07	19,301	$69,731,683.72
Mar-07	26,505	$94,396,916.02
Apr-07	26,889	$96,650,134.82
May-07	24,429	$86,625,391.60
June-07	27,716	$99,357,038.71
July-07	21,807	$78,273,082.88
Aug-07	28,607	$101,523,346.40

New UNUM LTD Class Action

The Insurance Journal is reporting that a federal judge in Chattanooga, TN has certified a new class action lawsuit against UNUM, the nation's largest Long Term Disability (LTD) carrier over an alleged scheme to deny of terminate benefits for thousands of disabled people. This is not the first class action on UNUM's LTD practices.

Is SSA Independent?

From today's New York Times:

The Social Security Administration says a federal judge’s ruling last week suspending a crackdown on employers who hire illegal immigrants could cause a major disruption in its processing of millions of routine retirement and disability claims.

In papers filed late Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, David A. Rust, an acting Social Security deputy commissioner, said a vast bureaucratic logjam would result unless the agency was allowed this month to mail about 141,000 already-prepared letters advising employers of discrepancies between workers’ Social Security information and agency records. Government lawyers said any delay in the mailing — or any requirement that the mailing be revised — would cause “significant harm” to the agency and “interfere with its ability to carry out its core functions.” ...

In a statement, Mr. Rust said the Social Security Administration had already delayed sending the letters to employers for several months this year as officials negotiated with immigration authorities over the new rules and the Senate debated an immigration bill, which failed in June.

Although Judge Chesney did not bar the agency from sending the letters if references to the new rules were removed, Mr. Rust said it would take 30 days to fix the mailing. He said any delay past mid-September would cause a backlog that would spread into the first half of 2008, when he said the agency was expecting a “significant increase” in its workload, though he did not say why. He said the agency was facing “severe budgetary constraints” and a staffing shortage. ...

This is utter balderdash. Delaying sending out the letters does no harm to the Social Security Administration. Sending them out is going to cause a huge workload increase. I am appalled to see this sort of misrepresentation to a federal court. This is not the sort of thing that we would want to see from an "independent" Social Security Administration. This is a sign of an agency acting as if it reported directly to the White House.

Technical Denials Soar -- Why?

The Social Security Administration has issued its 2006 Annual Statistical Report on the Social Security Disability Insurance Programs. Oddly, the report seems to contain almost no information on backlogs, even though statistics on adjudication backlogs may be of more interest to more people than anything included in the report.

Take a look at the outcomes chart. You can click on it to make it larger. It shows a recent dramatic increase in the number of technical denials. There were 104,344 technical denials in 1999 and 615,924 in 2004, according to an accompanying table. That would seem to call for a good explanation, but I cannot think of one other than that Social Security employees were using technical denials as a shortcut to getting their work done. Instead of helping a confused claimant, a Social Security employee would use that confusion as a pretext for denying the claim for failure to cooperate. Does anyone have a better explanation?

The chart also shows that initial awards and Appeals Council awards went down significantly after George W. Bush became President (and Jo Anne Barnhart became Commissioner of Social Security).