Quiz Answer

Question: Which of the following actions by the Social Security Administration is NOT an initial determination subject to appeal?

Possible Answers:

• Determination that a representative payee is required for a person not already declared legally incompetent
• Citizenship determination
• Determination of marital relationship
• Denial of request to reopen prior determination

Correct answer:  Denial of request to reopen prior determination

But This Costs Money And More Money Is Out Of The Question

From the Huffington Post:

Fourteen Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee want more scrutiny of how the Social Security Administration oversees benefit checks sent to disabled adults and minors to make sure the money does not fall into the hands of predators.

A recent Philadelphia case found that a woman accused of locking mentally disabled people in a squalid basement was able to cash their benefit checks without being discovered by authorities.

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Major WSJ Article

There is a major article on Social Security's disability program in today's Wall Street Journal.

Recessions And Disability Claims

     From the Social Security Bulletin:

We use data from Social Security administrative records to examine the lifetime patterns of initial entitlement to retired-worker and Disability Insurance (DI) benefits across cohorts born in different years. Breaking out age-at-entitlement patterns for different birth-year cohorts reveals close adherence in entitlement ages to changes in program rules, such as increasing the full retirement age. The proportion of a cohort that becomes newly entitled to DI benefits rises noticeably during recessions and at ages 50 and 55, and cumulative entitlement rate patterns show that more recent cohorts rely increasingly on DI benefits in their late 30s and 40s.

     If you look at the actual data, the correlation between recessions and disability claims seems to be weak to the point of being non-existent. Here's what the study says further on:

To further investigate the effect of the economy and the stance of the DI program regarding new entitlements, we next examine the incidence of new entitlements by year, 1969–2006, for the same cohorts studied above. Chart 8 shows the effect of the 1974–1975 recession, with a modest increase in entitlement rates across all cohorts. The 1980–1982 double-dip recession is notable in that no increase in new entitlements occurred: Those years correspond to restricted allowance rates. However, the 1984 Social Security Amendments relaxed some of the prior restrictions and extended allowances to people with certain mental and musculoskeletal impairments. That legislation not only changed labor market conditions, it likely contributed to increases in new entitlements in the 3–4 years leading up to the recession of 1990–1991. We also see rising entitlements in the years leading up to 2000–2001. The slow pace of the economic recovery following the 2001 recession corresponds with the continued high incidence of new DI entitlements in 2002–2006.

     Basically, the report says that there is an association between recession sand disability claims except when there isn't and that increases in disability claims that come before a recession or after a recession are proof that recessions cause disability claims.
     Overall, what I see here is proof that the number of people approved for Social Security disability benefits depends largely upon the policies followed by Social Security which should surprise no one.

Not Much Parking

From the Social Security Bulletin:

Fewer Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries have their earnings suspended or terminated because of work than those who are actually working, partly because beneficiaries "park" earnings at a level below substantial gainful activity (SGA) to retain benefits. We assess the extent of parking by exploiting the 1999 change in the SGA earnings level from $500 to $700 monthly for nonblind beneficiaries using a difference-in-difference analysis that compares two annual cohorts of beneficiaries who completed their trial work period, one that was affected by the SGA change and one that was not. Our impact estimates, along with results from other sources, suggest that from 0.2 to 0.4 percent of all DI beneficiaries were parked below the SGA level in the typical month from 2002 through 2006. The SGA change did not yield any difference in mean earnings, although it did result in a small reduction in months spent off of the rolls because of work.

Social Security Crucial For Rural America

The map is from a report by the Southern Regional Development Center at Mississippi State University. The report notes that "In urban counties, 5 percent of personal income comes from Social Security. In rural counties, an average of 9.3 percent of personal income arrives in the form of a Social Security check." And yet, these rural counties are mostly electing Republicans to Congress and those Republican representatives seem determined to gut Social Security even though it is clear that the people they represent want Social Security to remain intact.

ALJ Suspended For Five Days

Edmund Round, a Social Security Administrative Law Judge, was suspended without pay for five days for insubordination. He appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Round has lost.