Atlanta Getting Help

From an Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial:

Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue was in Atlanta this month with promising news for Georgians waiting to resolve disability claims with his agency.

The average time to settle a disability claim in the downtown Atlanta office has been reduced drastically, he said. On average, such claims are now handled in just 500 days. ...

Astrue lobbied for funds to hire more hearing officers and authorized a third field office for metro Atlanta.

I note with interest that Commissioner Astrue now wants it known that he has lobbied for more funds for his agency. He also mentioned this in the broadcast e-mail he sent out yesterday.

5,000 to 6,000 New Jobs

A broadcast e-mail to all Social Security employees:

From: ^Commissioner Broadcast
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 5:51 PM
Subject: COMMISSIONER'S BROADCAST -- 02/17/09

A Message To All SSA And DDS Employees

Subject: Economic Stimulus Bill

President Obama has just signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly referred to as the stimulus bill. I’d like to take a few minutes of your time to explain what I think this legislation means for SSA in both the short run and long run.

In the short run, our most immediate task is to issue the $250 stimulus payments to our beneficiaries and recipients as soon as possible. The legislation is complex and requires extensive coordination with other agencies to avoid duplicate payments, but I am optimistic that we will issue payments to the public by late May—about three weeks earlier than the statute requires. We are working on a communication plan and guidance for field offices so that we can handle the inevitable questions that will arise.

The legislation provides $90 million for the administrative cost of the stimulus payments and an additional $500 million to process the additional work that we are receiving as a result of the economic downturn. However, we are still under a continuing resolution, so we must continue to operate cautiously. We believe that when Congress passes the FY 2009 appropriation in March or April, we will have an opportunity to hire between 5,000 and 6,000 new employees before the end of the year. If you have hiring responsibilities, please do not let the legislative situation translate into inaction. Post the jobs, interview the candidates, plan for training, and hope Congress provides the money to pull the hiring trigger in the next 30 – 45 days.

As part of the legislation, Congress is investing about $20 billion in health information technology across the Federal government which has important strategic implications for us. Our pilot testing at Beth Israel-Deaconess Hospital in Boston demonstrates that we can become significantly more timely, efficient, and accurate if our field and DDS staff can access complete electronic medical records early in the process. We are running additional pilots in Virginia and expect to expand into many other locations in the next three years.

Congress has also provided a critical $500 million for replacement of the National Computer Center (NCC). When I first started as Commissioner, I was disturbed to learn that the NCC was physically fraying and was increasingly at risk of failure from electrical interruption or other facility issues and that we had no plan in place to address the problem. Replacement of the NCC will allow us to provide 24/7 service and avoid outages and slowdowns that disrupt service delivery. Building the new NCC with today’s technology will, in three to five years, make your lives easier and greatly improve our service to the public.

The kind of progress we have made in the past few months doesn’t happen by accident. We started planning early and extensively for the possibility of additional funding, and we have had excellent support from President Obama’s transition team and the new officials at the Office of Management and Budget. This teamwork allowed us to make an effective case to Congress in a difficult time.

We should all be grateful to the people who worked with us and for us on this bill.

Michael J. Astrue

Commissioner

The Other Two Childhood SSI Rulings

For unknown reasons, Social Security published only six of eight new rulings on childhood disability in the Federal Register today. The other two will be published in the Federal Register on Wednesday, but you can read them today:

• SSR 09-2p Determining Childhood Disability - Documenting a Child's Impairment-Related Limitations
• SSR 09-4p Determining Childhood Disability - The Functional Equivalence Domain of "Attending and Completing Tasks"

Changes In Critical Case Rules

The Social Security Administration has just adopted changes to its HALLEX Manual concerning "critical" cases. Critical cases are those where:

• The claimant's illness is terminal
• The case involves a disability claim for any military service personnel injured October 1, 2001 or later regardless of how or where the disability occurred, whether in the United States or on foreign soil, provided that the individual was on active duty when the injury occurred.
• The claimant's file is flagged as a Compassionate Allowance case, which means that the claimant has or is alleged to have a condition on a list maintained by Social Security.
• The claimant is without, and is unable to obtain, food, medicine or shelter.

Here is a link to the prior version of this HALLEX section, available on the Wayback Machine, if you want to compare it. Anybody else remember the original Wayback Machine?

The main changes are to add the language italicized above which makes it clear that Social Security intends to be quite inclusive about the military service personnel category and to add military service cases to the TERI (Terminal Illness) category, the subcategory of critical cases that get the very most expedited review.

Treating military service cases as TERI cases seems over the top to me Let me say something out loud that I have only heard whispered because it is so politically incorrect. Why are the military service cases so urgent? These folks already have an income from their military service pension or VA or both. Most military service personnel who become disabled are not disabled as a result of hostile action. Have a heart attack while on military service stateside and you get TERI treatment? Get injured in a car wreck because you were drunk and you qualify for TERI because you happened to be in the Army at the time? Why? Shouldn't we be worrying more about the disability claims of people who are in homeless shelters? I think someone got carried away.

By the way, Social Security also removed a list of possibly terminal illnesses that it had in the prior version. One condition which was on the list previously was being on a liver transplant list. I guess that turned out to be a little embarrassing since Social Security is turning down most claims of people who are on a liver transplant waiting list.

$250 Economic Stimulus Payment Questions And Answers

Here are some questions and answers that I have prepared about the $250 stimulus payments under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA):

• Who is eligible? Anyone who was entitled to Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or to any of the following Social Security benefits at any time during the period November 2008 to January 2009: retirement, wife's and husband's, disabled adult child (but not other child's benefits), widow's and widower's, mother's or fathers', parent's, disability insurance benefits, special age 72 benefits. Note that my answer relates only to eligibility based upon Social Security entitlement. There is also eligibility based upon receiving VA or Railroad Retirement benefits.
• Update: Are children eligible for $250 payments? I thought that I had already made this clear, but I keep getting questions about it, so let me be very specific. Children only qualify if they are on SSI or if they are receiving disabled adult child benefits. Only children who are receiving benefits because they are disabled are eligible for the $250 payments. Generally, children do not qualify for the $250 payments.
• Update: Do I have to do something to get the $250 payment? No. It is supposed to come automatically.
  
• Does the payment to Social Security beneficiaries come out of the Social Security trust funds? No. The Act says that these payments come out of appropriated funds.
  
• Will the payments be made to people living outside the U.S.? No. The Act limits it to those whose listed residence is in the U.S. or a U.S. territory.
• Will I be taxed on this income? Not by the federal government.
• Can my $250 payment be seized for payment of my debts? Generally no, but it could be seized for a federal tax debt or a child support obligation to the same extent that Social Security benefits could be seized. I think it could be seized for a debt owed the Social Security Administration or for another federal debt, such as a student loan, but I would have to study it more to be certain.
  
• Will an individual who is entitled to two benefits, such as Social Security and SSI, get two checks for $250? No, but avoiding this will be a challenge for the computer systems at Social Security and the other agencies involved. Mistakes, even a lot of them, would not surprise me. The databases were not set up with the idea of administering this program.
  
• Can more than one $250 payment be made on a Social Security number? Yes.
• Can more than one $250 payment be made to a household? Yes.
  
• When will the checks or direct deposits be issued? As soon as the Treasury can do it, but no later than 120 days after enactment. If President Obama signs the bill on Tuesday, February 17 as planned, the deadline for payment would be June 17. Update: Social Security hopes to get the payments out by late May.
  
• I am applying for benefits for the time period November 2008 to January 2009 but I have not yet gotten the benefits yet. Once I get approved for these benefits, do I get the $250 payment? Yes, but there is a time limit on this. No payment can be made after December 31, 2010.
• I am on SSI. Does the $250 count as income which would reduce my SSI benefits? No and it will not affect your Medicaid or Food Stamps or other federally funded needs based benefits either.
• I am an attorney who represents Social Security claimants. My fee is one-quarter of my clients' back benefits. Some of them will receive a $250 payment as back benefits. Will I receive a quarter of the $250 payment? Probably not. Update: I had earlier thought that the problem of claimants dying before receiving payment was an argument in favor of these payments being treated as a Social Security benefit subject to attorney fee withholding, since the Social Security Act has rules which are convenient to the agency on how payments to decedents are handled, but this Act actually forbids payment to those who die before receiving payment. That does not completely solve the problem of people dying before receiving their money but it does greatly limit the problem -- and Social Security may be able to offload the remaining problem to the Department of the Treasury anyway. Probably, they will not treat these benefits as being subject to attorney fee withholding since the Social Security Act limits withholding to benefits paid under the Social Security Act. 42 USC §406(a)(4). The ARRA does not amend the Social Security Act, so the benefit payments are not made under the Social Security Act. It may be easy for Social Security's Office of General Counsel to say this, but it may be considerably more difficult for Social Security's payment centers to implement it in this way.
  
• Will computing and authorizing these payments and dealing with questions from the public relating to them cause problems for an understaffed Social Security Administration? My guess, or perhaps hope, is that this will not be too hard for Social Security. The Act is fairly simple and Social Security is getting a $90 million appropriation for administering it. The holdup might be Social Security's computer system. They did do something like this last year without much of a problem, but this is still going to be a challenge. Avoiding double payments may be the hardest part and that problem goes beyond Social Security, since the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Railroad Retirement Board are also involved.
  

An Extra $90 Million!

I had missed it. There is an extra $90 million appropriation for the Social Security in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (page 392) on top of the $1 billion that I had already posted about. The $90 million is for the costs of administering the $250 economic stimulus payments to Social Security beneficiaries. I doubt that the Social Security Administration could say with any confidence what it is going to cost them to administer this, but my gut tells me that $90 million is a very generous amount to give Social Security for administering these payments.

"Looting" Social Security

William Greider of The Nation has posted a piece claiming that President Obama is planning to "loot" Social Security or maybe he thinks that Obama will just get hoodwinked into "looting" Social Security. It is a hard to tell what he thinks.

What I think is that the piece is beyond alarmist and may be all the way to paranoid. Of course, those on the right provide a counterpoint by claiming that a Social Security catastrophe is at hand and the only way to save Social Security is to destroy Social Security as we have known it.

"Reforming" Social Security

From Dean Baker at TPM Cafe:

Word has it that President Obama intends to appoint a task force the week after next which will be charged with "reforming" Social Security. According to inside gossip, the task force will be led entirely by economists who were not able to see the $8 trillion housing bubble, the collapse of which is giving the country its sharpest downturn since the Great Depression. ...

My guess is that this task force will not be very popular except at the Washington Post [which it might surprise you to know has become a right leaning newspaper] and on Wall Street.