Congressional Hearing Scheduled

     The House Social Security Subcommittee has scheduled a hearing for June 21 on "the recently released 2012 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the OASDI [Old Age Survivors and Disability Insurance] Trust Funds, the effect of the trust funds’ current cash flow deficit status and future exhaustion, and the cost of delaying actions to address Social Security’s fiscal challenges for workers and beneficiaries."

Changes In Causes Of Disability

     This is from the Social Security Advisory Board's Aspects of Disability: Decision Making: Data and Materials.As with many of these charts, it can be read in different ways. One can certainly note the dramatic increase in disability based upon mental illness. However, I would submit that this has far more to do with the dramatic changes wrought in psychiatry by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) than by anything intrinsic to Social Security. If you're not familiar with the DSM, it's probably the biggest development in the history of psychiatry. It's the Bible of psychiatry. While there are plenty of critics of individual portions of the DSM, I think that few people deny that it has been a dramatically positive development. If you are outraged by this increase in the number of people found disabled due to psychiatric illness, be careful to note the dramatic drop in disability benefits awarded due to circulatory disorders -- mostly heart disease. This is also due to developments in medicine, in this case cardiology. You can't take one type of improvement in medicine without taking the other types of improvement in medicine. 

     My best guesses are that the increase in musculoskeletal approvals has to do with the aging of the population and, perhaps, to different coding at Social Security. I don't think there has actually been much change in Social Security policies or practices in evaluating musculoskeletal disorders. 

News You Need To Know

    The Zombielaw blog discovers the connection between Social Security and zombies.

Early Processing Of Social Security Number Applications

Wild Inconsistency At Appeals Council

     This is from the Social Security Advisory Board's Aspects of Disability: Decision Making: Data and Materials.Notice the wild inconsistency at the Appeals Council.
     I think there are those at Social Security who believe that if upper level management at the agency had better control over the state agencies and the Administrative Law Judges, that they could make the entire disability rational and consistent. Upper level management has the Appeals Council under near complete control and look at the results.

Senate Appropriations Committee Reports Out Bill To Fund Social Security's Administrative Expenses

     The full Senate Appropriations Committee has reported out the Labor-HHS appropriations bill for fiscal year 2013, which begins on October 1, 2012. The bill provides $11.736 billion for Social Security's administrative budget, a $290 million increase. I have not yet seen anything other than the summary of the bill, which may not tell the whole story. The bills themselves are complex and confusing. Sometimes I think the bills are deliberately made confusing.

     The House Appropriations Committee has yet to take up its version of the Labor-HHS appropriations bill.

Social Security Awards $233 Million Telecommunications Order To Century Link -- Largest Such Order Ever Awarded By The Federal Government

From a press release:

CenturyLink, Inc. (CTL) recently won a $233 million task order to provide primary managed data networking services over the next five years to the Social Security Administration (SSA) under the Networx Universal contract. The General Services Administration's Networx program is the largest telecommunications contract vehicle ever awarded by the federal government. 

CenturyLink will provide network infrastructure for data, video and voice services to the SSA, which has more than 62,000 employees worldwide.  As the primary service provider, CenturyLink will help SSA drive the pace for the transition from the current providers to the new service providers.

In this capacity, CenturyLink will serve all SSA data centers, regional offices, program service centers, remote operations communications centers and more than 1,500 field office locations around the world. Under the task order, CenturyLink will also provide management and implementation support and lifecycle engineering. 

SSA had previously awarded a broad voice services task order to Qwest, which was acquired by CenturyLink, in 2008. The services that CenturyLink provides under the 2008 award help SSA with everything from internal communications and collaboration via audio conferencing to lowering its disability case hearing backlog via video conferencing.

Appropriations Process Begins In Earnest

     The Labor-HHS Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee has marked up the Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 appropriations bill that covers the Social Security Administration. This is from the Subcommittee's summary of the bill as marked up:

Social Security Program Integrity.—The bill includes $1.024 billion, an increase of $268 million for the Social Security Administration (SSA) to conduct continuing disability reviews and redeterminations of nonmedical eligibility under the Supplemental Security Income program. This investment will save approximately $8.1 billion over 10 years for the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs, a return on investment of $8 for every $1 spent.

     The rest of the summary is unclear on Social Security's overall budget.