Creating Two, Three, Many Katrinas?

     From the Federal Times:

The Social Security Administration — which saw its staff shrink 6 percent last year — warned Congress last month it cannot keep up with swelling workloads as baby boomers retire and more Americans file for benefits. ...

With the White House and Congress facing increasing pressure to cut the deficit — and steep cuts looming in January as part of the sequestration process — budgets are certain to get even tighter. And some experts fear Congress will continue cutting budgets without scaling back agencies’ missions, which will force some agencies to cut staffing to dangerous levels. ...

“If you keep ratcheting down, at some point something breaks,” said John Palguta, vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service....

“Unfortunately, it keeps going until we run into a [Federal Emergency Management Agency] that can’t respond to [Hurricane] Katrina, or the 9/11 Commission says part of the problem was that we didn’t have enough people in intelligence agencies to pick up on the 9/11 threat,” Palguta said. ...

SSA Commissioner Michael Astrue told the Senate Finance Committee on May 17 that staffing cuts are already hurting his agency’s ability to serve the public. To deal with a nearly 4,500-employee decline in 2011, SSA had been relying on overtime and having employees stay late to interview and help members of the public.

But budget cuts have forced SSA to cut out most overtime. SSA’s $11.5 billion fiscal 2012 budget is about $1 billion less than Obama requested, and about $400 million less than the agency had in fiscal 2010. As a result, Astrue said, SSA began closing field offices to the public a half-hour early each day to make sure employees finish up their interviews during their regular work hours.

And Astrue fears he may be forced to cut staffing even further — between 2,500 and 3,000 employees this year and another 2,000 or more in fiscal 2013. That would force SSA to close its offices even earlier next year, he said.

“I recently visited our Springfield, Mass., office, and the waiting room was filled to capacity,” Astrue said. “The office has lost 11 employees, 19 percent of its staff, in the last few years. We are doing what we can to assist this office, including implementing a video connection with another office, but few offices have excess capacity to help.”

How Much Would It Cost Social Security To Give All Disability Claimants The Assistance They Need?

      From the San Francisco Chronicle:

In a legal settlement that advocates described as the first of its kind, Social Security has agreed to provide staff training and assistance to two mentally disabled San Francisco men who said they lost benefits because they couldn't understand the rules.

The settlement, approved Tuesday by a federal judge, requires the Social Security Administration to assign a staff expert to meet regularly with each man, explain the agency's forms and requirements, and help them respond in ways that protect their rights.

The agency also agreed to pay $900,000 in fees for the two men's lawyers, who have worked on the case for five years. ...

The agency offers no such assistance to at least 2 million Social Security recipients, and an undetermined number of applicants, who have mental or learning disabilities and have to decipher the complex eligibility requirements on their own, Bruce [the attorney for the plaintiffs] said.

The Older You Get, The More Likely You Are To Be Disabled

     This is from the Social Security Advisory Board's Aspects of Disability: Decision Making: Data and Materials. A person's chances of becoming disabled soars as he or she ages. This is the sort of thing that is obvious if you are at ground level but perhaps not so obvious if you're at 30,000 feet. This has little to do with Social Security policies. It is the unavoidable effects of aging. Any analysis of Social Security's disability programs which fails to take into account the aging of the population is inherently misleading. 

     This graph only goes up to age 64. Notice how steep the curve gets as it approaches the 60-64 age group. What do you think it would show if it went up to 70? Is increasing full retirement age really feasible?

OIG All Over The Place

An e-mail I received from Social Security's Office of Inspector General (I had signed up to receive notification of newly posted audit reports.):

Like us. Follow us. Watch us.

The SSA Office of the Inspector General recently launched its Facebook and Twitter pages and its YouTube channel. 

We’ll regularly update the Facebook page with OIG happenings and activities, and we plan to post daily Twitter updates as audit reports, investigation summaries, fraud alerts, new releases, and other reviews roll through the office. Inspector General Patrick P. O’Carroll, Jr., even sent his first tweet last week. Let us know what you think of the accounts, and please recommend the pages to any interested friends.

We’ve also stocked the YouTube channel with a collection of OIG-related videos, including a brand-new, OIG-produced public service announcement, “Protecting Personal Information.”

Connect with the OIG through the following links: 
The SSA Office of the Inspector General Facebook Page
@TheSSAOIG on Twitter
The SSA Office of the Inspector General YouTube Channel

Going Beyond "Greedy Geezer"

     The right wing rhetoric on Social Security becomes angrier and angrier.  A right-wing columnist now likens Social Security recipients to thieves.

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.