Waiting In Minnesota

From the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

Patricia Heimerl landed her first job in high school, bought a house at 22 and worked the last eight years of a long office career at Intel. She paid her bills, built a retirement account and, like most Americans, watched as Social Security took its cut from every paycheck.

Part of those deductions went to an insurance fund that pays benefits to people who become too sick or injured to work. Heimerl couldn't imagine that would ever mean her.

Then it did.

Doctors diagnosed her with fibromyalgia, which causes chronic muscle pain. Heimerl couldn't hold a job.

In January, the Social Security Administration decided the 55-year-old McMinnville, Ore., resident was disabled and approved her for benefits.

Here's what it cost her: six years.

Six years fighting Social Security's delays. Six years dealing with lawyers and paperwork. Six years burning through savings and selling her house to survive.

A Little Help, Please

On a daily basis I take a look at the FedBizOpps website to see what goods and services the Social Security Administration is interested in purchasing, but I would also like to look at who gets those contracts. I see some of that now because vendors who get major contracts often issue press releases, but I would like to look at this on a more systematic basis. Is there a database of contracts issued by the Social Security Administration available online? If you know, please use the feedback button on the right side of the page to clue me in.

Lou Dobbs Take Note: Social Security Trust Fund Projections May Be Unreliable Due To Failure To Consider Immigrant Earnings

The most recent issue of the Social Security Bulletin has been released. It is labeled Volume 68, Number 1. I think they got so far behind in issuing the Social Security Bulletin that they no longer even put a date on them.

One interesting article tells us that the earnings of immigrants have not been factored into projections of the future financial status of the Social Security trust funds. Given the volume of immigration into the United States in recent decades, this tells me that the projections we now have of the future status of the Social Security trust funds may be unreliable. The trust funds may be in better shape than anyone realized. I am surprised that this is the first time that I have heard of this issue.

Sort Of Saying One Thing, While Meaning Another

Take a look at this memo from Social Security's Office of Disability Policy (ODP) in answer to the question, "Whether an individual with a below-knee amputation and no indication of stump complications, who does not use a prosthesis due to inability to afford one, can be found disabled." The memo was obtained by the National Association of Disability Exmainers (NADE). It sounds like a simple question that ought to have a simple answer.

Social Security's answer to the question, however, rambles on. While the memo suggests that the answer is "Yes", the memo mostly discusses various way in which an individual in the situation described could be denied and never says how such an individual could be approved. The overall impression I get from the memo is that the answer is actually "No, we want you to deny those folks, but you can't quote us on that."

Actually, it does not matter what the memo says. The real policy will never be in writing in a memo. Actually saying what the policy is might be embarrassing. NADE members will intuit the true answer from the tone of the memo and from the cases they see returned to them by Social Security's Quality Assurance process. Those Quality Assurance returns are hidden away in individual claimant files and cannot be released to the public, allowing Social Security to hide its true policy from public scrutiny.

If you are on the outside of Social Security wondering why so many disability claims get denied, study this and think about it. It is a microcosm of disability policy at Social Security. The policy documents released to the public are always hazy and hard to understand, but do not sound too unreasonable, while the actual results on the ground do not seem to match up with what the policy documents seem to say.

OMB Clears Hearing Loss Listings

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is part of the White House, must clear all proposed federal regulations before they are published in the Federal Register for public comments. OMB has just cleared proposed new Listings for hearing loss. The OMB website lists the "completed action" on the proposed regulations as "Consistent with Change."

Normally, these proposed regulations appear in the Federal Register within a few days after OMB clears them. The proposed new mental impairment Listings were cleared by OMB almost a month ago but have still not been published.

The Oregonian Editorial On Backlog

The Oregonian followed its stories on the terrible backlogs at Social Security with an editorial. Here are a few excerpts:

Hundreds of thousands of disabled workers in America have become Hurricane Katrina-style victims of a failing federal bureaucracy. ...

This is yet another stain on the legacy of President Bush. A backlog in claims existed before he took office, but it had been shrinking under the Clinton administration. Under Bush it has nearly doubled. ...

Underfunding is part of the problem. ...

But White House ideology plays a role in this disgrace, too. Bush plucked Jo Anne Barnhart from the Republican political trenches to serve six years as his Social Security administrator, and she appeared to share her boss's lack of enthusiasm for the entitlement program. ...

It's fair to question the competence of the Social Security bureaucracy under Barnhart, too. In just one example cited by Denson and Walth, the agency mistakenly overpaid more than $4 billion in disability payments in 2006, and now it's adding grief to the lives of millions of recipients by billing them for reimbursement.

I think the cracks about "a failed federal bureaucracy" and the "[in]competence of the Social Security bureaucracy" are unfair. Any government agency will fail if it lacks the basic resources to get the job done. Blaming the "bureaucracy" is part of what got us where we are. If the incompetence of the "bureaucracy" is the problem, the solution is not to give the bureaucracy more money but to demand that the bureaucracy become competent. That is what has been done since 1994 when Republicans took control of Congress, with disastrous results. The ideology that incompetent federal bureaucrats were to blame for any problem in the federal government led to the fiascoes of "Reinventing Government," "Hearing Process Improvement" and "Disability Service Improvement," three efforts at "reforming" the bureaucracy that made things dramatically worse, while providing the crucial justification for cutting Social Security's operating budget.

The truth is that, on the whole, the Social Security Administration runs a pretty tight ship. Squeezing out further efficiencies is difficult. Only small incremental improvements can be achieved. Most of what is currently being presented as evidence of increased efficiency at Social Security is misleading. Employees and managers try to meet statistical goals -- for that which is being measured -- while that which is not being measured, primarily quality, goes to hell. As I have said before, it is reminiscent of Soviet five year plans.

What is needed at Social Security is not so much competence as honesty and modesty. We need upper management to be honest with itself and with Congress and the Office of Management and Budget about what is possible given current funding. We need upper management to be modest about the agency can do with the resources they have been given and more modest in talking about Social Security's productivity "gains."

Astrue Interview

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has published a transcript of an interview with Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Q: How stressful is your job?

A: If you are doing this job right, you can't help internalizing some of this stuff. I am taking more hypertension medication than I was a year ago. ...

Q: There have been reports that even with all your efforts the backlog continues to grow?

A: We are nine months into this fiscal year, and we are at an increase of about 18,000 cases for the year. I am not happy about that. But the rate keeps going down. If you look historically, it went up at about 75,000 cases a year for many years in this decade.

So how come Commissioner Astrue is putting out a report talking about his plan to eliminate the backlog and prevent its recurrence when he has not yet been able to even stop the backlog from growing?

New ALJ Assignments Questioned

From the Charlotte Observer:

The federal government admits sick workers in the Charlotte area wait longer for help than almost anyone else in the nation.

But when officials hired nearly 200 new administrative law judges this year to expedite disability hearings, only one was assigned to Charlotte's Disability Adjudication and Hearing Office.

Instead, the Social Security Administration sent three or more judges to places like Huntington, W.Va.; Portland, Maine; and New Orleans, where waits are among the shortest nationwide. ...

Social Security Administration officials didn't directly explain why they put only one new judge in Charlotte.

“The new ALJs were assigned on the basis of the national workload needs assessment,” a Social Security Administration official said in an e-mail response to the Observer.