The St. Petersburg Times is running a
local follow-up story to the New York Times article that set forth the proposition that Social Security is overburdened with disability claims because Long Term Disability (LTD) insurance carriers are forcing their insureds to file disability claims when they have no chance of being approved.
I have a low regard for the LTD carriers, but this story is preposterous. Blaming the LTD carriers for Social Security's backlogs is about as pathetic as saying the dog ate the homework. The few excess claims that may be attributable to LTD carriers is a drop in the bucket compared to the flood of disability claims caused by the aging of the baby boom population.
If the Social Security Administration wants to cut down on excessive claims, it needs to look at its own conduct. Field offices are routinely taking Supplemental Security Income (SSI) claims for many individuals whose income is far too high for them to qualify. Part of the reason for this is a genuine desire to avoid missing SSI claims, but a good part of this is that Social Security field offices are alloted staff based upon the number of claims they take, giving field office managers an incentive to try to increase the number of claims taken. I would daresay that the number of unnecessary SSI claims taken by Social Security field offices vastly exceeds the number of unnecessary disability claims taken as a result of LTD carrier pressure.
I also have to question how unnecessary these claims taken at the behest of LTD carriers really are. Let me set forth an example. The claimant has been in an automobile accident and has been seriously injured. The expected return to work date is eight to ten months after the accident. Is it abusive to tell this person to file a Social Security disability claim -- since the definition of disability requires that the claimant have been or be projected to be disabled for at least a year? I would say not. Projections on when an individual will return to work after serious trauma are inherently uncertain. There is a real chance that a person in this situation will take more than a year to recover. So why not just wait and see how long it takes them to recover? You do not want to wait in this situation because it takes Social Security so long to adjudicate claims! The best thing to do is to get the claim filed as quickly as possible. The claimant can drop the case if he or she can get back to work in less than a year, but if not, the claimant will be much further along with the case if he or she files the claim shortly after the accident. This is just common sense.
