Five Field Offices To Close

     From the Federal Times:

The Social Security Administration will close five field offices by the end of September, according to the union representing agency employees.

Those five, among almost 1,300 nationwide, are in Biloxi, Miss., Ketchikan, Alaska; Louisville, Ky.; Washington, D.C.; and Clinton, Iowa, the American Federation of Government Employees said in a news release.

The agency has already closed eight field offices since January.

In an email, SSA spokesman Mark Hinkle said the five offices are being consolidated with others and no worker will lose their jobs. The single employee in the Ketchikan office is retiring, Hinkle said. ...

“Given the tight budget situation, we’ve had to make tough choices, including consolidating a small number of our offices,” Hinkle said. ...

The latest step is already drawing protests from lawmakers who represent affected communities. Closing the Ketchikan field office would reportedly save only $100,000, members of the Alaska delegation said in a July 13 letter to Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue. They urged Astrue to consider “all feasible alternatives.”

Hearing On Removing SSNs From Medicare Cards -- What Do You Use Instead?

     From a press release:

House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee Chairman Sam Johnson (R-TX) and Health Subcommittee Chairman Wally Herger (R-CA) today announced that the Subcommittees will hold a joint hearing on removing Social Security numbers from beneficiaries’ Medicare cards.  The hearing will take place on Wednesday, August 1, 2012, in 1100 Longworth House Office Building, beginning at 9:30 A.M. ...

In 2008, the Social Security Administration (SSA) Inspector General found that displaying SSNs on beneficiary Medicare cards unnecessarily places millions of Americans at risk for identity theft and recommended that the SSN be removed from Medicare cards.  Also in 2008, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 6600, the “Medicare Identity Theft Prevention Act of 2008,” introduced by Representatives Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) and Sam Johnson (R-TX), directing the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish cost-effective procedures to ensure that SSNs are not included on Medicare cards moving forward.  This legislation passed the House by voice vote on September 28, 2008.  Unfortunately, the Senate did not act on this legislation. ...

To date, CMS [Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services] has not developed a plan for removing the SSN from the Medicare card to protect beneficiaries from identity theft and protect taxpayers from fraudulent billing.

Dayton Improving

      From the Dayton Daily News:

... T]he Dayton hearing office of the Social Security Administration has been one of the nation’s worst when completing applicants’ appeals for the benefits. 

For the past two fiscal years, the Dayton office was the second slowest nationally, trailing only Buffalo, N.Y., to process appeals.... [C]laimants who appealed last year to administrative law judges in Dayton had to wait an average 491 days to receive a ruling for benefits. Last year, the average wait time was 345 days at the 157 Social Security offices nationwide. ...

So far this year, the Dayton hearing office has improved its appeals process, is no longer ranked among the 20 slowest in country, and the average wait is about 200 days shorter than it was just two years ago. But the office still ranks as the slowest in Ohio.

Did You Watch The Olympic Opening Ceremony?

     Did you notice that Great Britain is so proud of the civil servants who work in its national health system that they were a major feature of the opening ceremony for the London Olympics? This leads to a couple of obvious questions. 

• Why aren't we in the U.S. proud of our civil servants, especially those who help people, like most Social Security employees?
• Why are some people so afraid of "Obamacare"? It doesn't even involve anything that can reasonably be described as nationalized health care yet Britons who are not so unlike us are so proud of their truly nationalized health care system that they feature it in their Olympic opening ceremony! Why shouldn't they be proud? They receive better health care than Americans at a lower cost.

Over The Top Press Release

     See if you can make any sense of the press release issued by the South East Michigan Health Information Exchange touting its work on a contract with Social Security to create a system that "automatically pulls health records and creates a comprehensive set of medical information that populates a Continuity of Care Document (CCD)."  According to the press release, the contractor has succeeded in "accelerating the [Social Security disability] process from an average of 457 days by paper to 6 hours electronically." In case you don't know, this claim is preposterous in many ways. There is no way that every health care provider in the area is part of this exchange. There is no way that the exchange can guarantee that every person is accurately identified in all their medical records. There is no way that the exchange can make reasonable determinations as to what records to obtain. A single hospitalization that lasts a few days can generate a record running into hundreds of pages. How much of that does Social Security need or want? How can any software make that determination? Records created before a provider switched to electronic records -- which may have been last year -- are unlikely to be searchable electronically. Not all providers in any area of the country have made the switch to electronic records. There is no way under current circumstances that disparate electronic records software can work together seamlessly. Finally, 457 days would have to be the entire time from the date a claimant files a claim to the date he or she receives a decision from an Administrative Law Judge. Reducing that to six hours? Give me a break.

Cutting Social Security's Budget Would Cost A Lot Of Money

     From a letter from Stephen Goss, Social Security's Chief Actuary, to Xavier Becerra, the ranking Democrat on the House Social Security Subcommittee:

Our current estimates for long-term program savings in benefits and payments to recipients from program integrity efforts is about a $9 long-term program savings for each $1 spent on medical CDRs [Continuing Disability Reviews], and about a $6 long-term program savings for each $1 spent on SSI [Supplemental Security Income]  redeterminations. ... Given these relationships, we can provide the following approximate range estimates [for the following appropriations scenarios]:

1. Assume 2013 funding for continuing disability reviews (both Title II and Title XVI) and Title XVI eligibility redeterminations was $272 million, rather than its current (2012) level of $757,484,000 [which would be the case under the appropriations bill for Social Security put forward by Republicans in the House of Representatives]. With this reduction in funding for 2013 of about $485 million, assuming that the funding levels assumed in all other years in our baseline estimates are unaffected, we would expect program benefit/payments to be between $3 billion and $4 billion more over the lifetime of those who would not be reassessed due to the reduced funding.
2. Assume 2013 funding for continuing disability reviews (both Title II and Title XVI) and Title XVI eligibility redeterminations was $272 million, rather than $1.024 billion, as provided for in the Budget Control Act of 2011 (P.L. 112-25) [the sequestration provided for under last year's budget deal]. With this reduction in funding for 2013 of about $752 million, assuming that the funding levels assumed in all other years in our baseline estimates are unaffected, we would expect program benefit/payments to be between $5 billion and $6 billion more over the lifetime of those who would not be reassessed due to the reduced funding.

     Update: This letter is starting to draw media attention. See Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo. These sites may not be familiar to you  but I guarantee you that they are read widely on Capitol Hill. Themes that first appear in Huff Post and TPM often spread quickly to other media that are more widely followed. And, by the way, Huff Post and TPM are well worth reading.

Only 18% Of Women Wait Until Age 66 Or Later To Retire

     The Senate Special Committee on Aging held a hearing yesterday on Enhancing Women's Retirement. The hearing featured a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). There is much in the report that is interesting but not directly relevant to the subject of this blog, such as the fact that the poverty rate among married women and men 65 and older is 3%, while the poverty rate in this age group among separated men is 20% and among separated women it's 22%. Also, Asians 65 and older have a higher poverty rate than whites, blacks or hispanics. Didn't see that one coming. Of relevance to Social Security are these facts:

• The majority of women claim Social Security retirement benefits at 62 - the earliest age possible.
• Only 18 percent of women wait until their normal retirement age of 66 or later. 

     How many of the people who think it would be a great idea to raise full retirement age to 70 are women?

Biloxi Office To Close

     The Associated Press reports that the Biloxi, Mississippi Social Security field office will permanently close its doors on September 30. This is supposed to save $3 million, although the report does not say how long it will take to save that amount. It has a population of 44,000.