COBOL Isn't Going Away

     Social Security is stuck with a lot of old mainframe computer programs written using the COBOL computer language. The agency is trying to transition from COBOL but an article in Computerworld makes me wonder whether the transition is really necessary or practical.
     In any case, Social Security is not alone in having lots of COBOL code. COBOL remains ubiquitous in large data processing operations.
     If you know someone who wants really good job security, tell them to study COBOL. No matter what anyone says, it's clearly not going away in the foreseeable future.

Social Security Subcommittee Schedules Hearing

     From a press release:

U.S. Congressman Sam Johnson (R-TX), Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security, today announced a hearing on how disability is decided.  The hearing will take place on Tuesday, March 20, 2012, in B-318 Rayburn House Office Building, beginning at 10:30 a.m. ...

In announcing the hearing, Social Security Subcommittee Chairman Sam Johnson (R-TX) said, "Americans with disabilities deserve to get the right decision as early as possible, but that’s just not how it currently works.  States struggle on the front lines to make sense of the program’s complex rules to decide who gets benefits.  At the same time advances in treatment, rehabilitation, and the workplace have created new opportunities for those with disabilities to return to work.  Securing the future of the disability insurance program should address these challenges and opportunities while keeping the process fair for both claimants and taxpayers."  

      Could someone tell me what those advances are in rehabilitation and the workplace that create new opportunities for those with disabilities to work? Don't try to tell me the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) changed anything. Have you seen how the Supreme Court has interpreted the ADA out of existence? The ADA is a dead letter. The only people who still think it means anything are those who fought against its approval.
     Have medical advances really created new opportunities for people with disabilities to work? I think that joint replacement surgery and coronary stents would qualify but those are old news. New treatments for stomach ulcers would certainly qualify but that's such old news that few people reading this can even remember the days when stomach ulcers caused considerable disability. (For those who do, remember Billroth II? Dumping syndrome?) Roux-en-Y surgery for obesity might qualify. Better diagnosis and treatment of obstructive sleep apnea has made a difference but it's not like Social Security was ever putting many people on benefits for this anyway. The medications we have available for HIV are wonderful and certainly allow more people to work but in the past those people would not have been drawing Social Security disability benefits for long because they would have been dead. Spinal surgery has gotten a bit better over the years but it's far from being a reliable solution for back or neck pain. When it comes to psychiatric illness, suffering has been reduced a bit but I don't think many knowledgeable people would claim that this has done much to restore the ability to work. Schizophrenia remains horrible, horrible, horrible. Counter to the advances that enable some people to work are advances that keep disabled people alive longer to draw Social Security disability benefits longer. To what extent do those longevity advances offset advances that enable people to continue to work? And what about medical advances that allow better diagnosis so that some people who were denied disability benefits in the past are now approved? The advent of the MRI certainly put more people on Social Security disability benefits for multiple sclerosis. Lupus is much more easily diagnosed now than in the past. And further, what about the obesity epidemic. It's certainly making more people disabled. And what about crack cocaine? People aren't found disabled as a result of using crack cocaine but it damages people's health to the point that they are found disabled based on physical illness. And then, there's the hepatitis C epidemic. It gets little press but it's a much bigger deal than HIV-AIDS and medicine can hardly treat it! It's producing a lot of disability that was not present in earlier years. My opinion is that the whole notion that disability is being significantly reduced by scientific advances is just wishful thinking. At ground level, it's just not happening.

It's Not Just Social Security ALJs Who Are Inconsistent

     From the New York Times:

A new analysis of hundreds of thousands of cases in federal courts has found vast disparities in the prison sentences handed down by judges presiding over similar cases, raising questions about the extent to which federal sentences are influenced by the particular judges rather than by the specific circumstances of the cases....

In the Eastern District of New York, for example, the 28 judges in the study delivered a median sentence of 24 months for drug cases in the past five years. But there were disparities: Judges Jack B. Weinstein and Kiyo A. Matsumoto gave median drug sentences of 12 months, while the median drug sentence for Judge Arthur D. Spatt was 64 months. 

     I sometimes wonder if we have too much respect for the title "judge." We expect anyone with that title to give us JUSTICE that no one can question. However, JUSTICE is merely a general goal. There is no way to be certain of what JUSTICE is in an individual case or even in the aggregate, whether we are talking about criminal sentences or Social Security disability determination. Justice must be administered by flesh and blood people who have to cope with laws that give them discretion to deal with individual circumstances. Dealing with those individual circumstances is what judging is all about. If we want judges to deal with those individual circumstances, and I think we do, we must expect disparities. Don't expect omniscience when you give someone the title of "judge" because you won't get it.

Tennessee Man Arrested For Threatening ALJ

From KNOX:

A Knoxville man was arrested by federal agents when they learned he had been released from a mental health facility only a few days after allegedly vowing to murder a judge he had already stalked once in an ambush try.

Last month, Roy Kenneth Wade Jr. voluntarily sought help for depression and thoughts of killing himself, but during his medical and mental health evaluation stated that he also intended to kill Social Security Administrative Law Judge K. Dickson Grissom, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court. ...

Wade expressed "overwhelming anger and hate toward Judge Grissom" and was "adamant" in his desire to kill him, according to the affidavit. Wade added that he had a 9mm handgun and had already waited outside Grissom's office to shoot him, but that plan fell through when Grissom did not come out, according to the affidavit.

Scapegoating ALJs

     Jon Dubin and Robert Rains have written an Issue Brief for the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy titled Scapegoating Social Security Disability Claimants (and the Judges Who Evaluate Them) in response to the Richard Pierce hit piece in Regulation, a publication of the Cato Institute. Here is one paragraph from the Dubin and Rains piece (footnote omitted):

Policy is often initiated, and sometimes adopted, based on popular misconceptions, partial truths, commonly repeated falsehoods, and isolated anecdotes with unfortunate consequences. Because neither the Pierce proposal’s media-anecdote-driven factual assumptions nor core legal suppositions about the identified problem are well-founded and because the proposed solutions are both misguided and unsound, this initiative, and other similar initiatives, should be non-starters.

     My experience tells me that if there were simple solutions that would produce consistent decision-making  on Social Security disability claims, we would long since have achieved those solutions. The people administering the Social Security disability programs, like the rest of us, occasionally do stupid things but they are far from stupid and they have had decades to study the problem. Disability determination has been studied many, many times over the years by outsiders and many of them spent far more time on it than Pierce. The only people who think there are easy solutions are people like Pierce, who have only studied the problems superficially.  I think the worst label one can put on a policy recommendation is "naive" and naive is the kindest thing I can say about what Pierce has written.

Report On 53rd Week Problem

     From report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General:

In an October 6, 2011 letter, [Congressional] Committee members expressed concern that managers in the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR) may have instructed ALJs and hearing office employees to set aside their disability cases during the last week of September 2011 and refrain from issuing decisions until the following week, which would have delayed the award of benefits to thousands of claimants awaiting ALJ decisions. ...

Since as early as 1983, SSA has not counted workload totals for the 53rd week [of the Fiscal Year] in its year-end management information (MI) data. As a result, from September 24 through 30, 2011, also referred to as Week 53, SSA did not include its process workload count toward either its Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 or 2012 MI totals. This policy affected how workloads were counted throughout the Agency and not only ODAR’s hearing workloads. Several ODAR nationwide hearings workload counts, namely hearing dispositions and decisions written, decreased significantly during Week 53. For example, hearing dispositions dropped 87.8 percent compared to an average week in FY 2011. Even when we compared this workload decrease to end of FY 2010 data, this decline was significant. Other workloads, such as cases pulled and hearings held, did not appear to change. ODAR executives stated these Week 53 workload decreases may have related to some employees deferring certain workloads which did not count toward performance goals.

Why Hire A Paralegal When You Can Hire An Attorney For The Same Money?

     Law firms representing Social Security disability claimants frequently use paralegals and legal assistants to help their attorneys represent more clients. Lee Rosen, an NC attorney who practices family law, raises a issue that may extend to Social Security practice:

Over my 25 years of practicing law, I’ve seen the economy change quite a bit. The biggest impact in my little world has been the price of associates [that is, non-partner attorneys]. Over the years, it has come steadily down to the point where we can now pay an associate very, very little money.

That has an impact on the mix of employees in a law firm. I’d advocate that you stop hiring paralegals and replace them with lawyers.

      The current glut of young attorneys may not last a long time but if it does a lot of things are going to change in the legal profession.

Gotta File The Whole Appeal Online.

     From today's Federal Register:

We are clarifying the requirement that appointed representatives file certain appeals using our electronic systems in matters for which the representatives request direct fee payment. Specifically, we are clarifying that the electronic filing requirement includes both the submission of the forms we require to file the appeal request and the Disability Report--Appeal.

     Filing the appeal itself online is the easy part. Filing the Disability Report -- Appeal is the tedious, time-consuming part.

     Sending out tons of e-mail touting a webinar starting at a specific time to train people on how to file these appeals online and then not being able to handle the web traffic you generate for the webinar isn't a good way of encouraging compliance with this directive.