Failure To Follow Up On Failure To Cash Checks

     Here's another of the many ways that Social Security has trouble fulfilling its mission because of lack of staff. An Inspector General report shows that Social Security is having a hard time dealing with situations in which a claimant fails to cash his or her Social Security check. The failure could indicate many things that Social Security should address, such as the claimant being dead, the claimant being mentally incompetent or a representative payee being irresponsible but the agency doesn't know unless it does an adequate follow up and that takes staff time but staff time is in short supply at Social Security. Social Security tries to follow up on these cases but isn't doing all that it should. 

     I suppose that switching to electronic payment might seem to be the solution for the problem but, if anything, electronic payment merely hides problems that need resolution.
     Congress may not like it, Social Security management may not like it, but the Social Security Administration cannot avoid social work duties. People's lives tend to get a bit messy when they get older or become disabled. Dealing with that messiness is an inherent part of the agency's mission. It's social work and it takes staff. Staff costs money. If you don't spend the money to allow an adequate staff, vulnerable people suffer and taxpayper money is wasted.

Romney Praises Government Run Health Care

     I suppose this is off topic but I cannot resist posting this from BuzzFeed Politics:

“Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the GDP in Israel? eight percent," Romney told donors at a fundraiser at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, speaking of a health care system that is compulsory for Israelis and funded by the government. "You spend eight percent of GDP [Gross Domestic Product] on health care. You're a pretty healthy nation. We spend 18% of our GDP on health care. Ten percentage points more. ... Our gap with Israel is 10 points of GDP. We have to find ways — not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to find and manage our health care costs."

What Is A Somatic Contractor?

     Can anyone explain this contracting notice posted by Social Security?

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is seeking to award three somatic RMC contractors to establish Regional Medical Contractors (RMC) Blanket Purchase Agreements (BPAs). Under a BPA, the contractor will assess and document impairment severity in SSA disability claims based on the listing of impairments in SSA'S Program Operations Manual System (POMS) Section DI 34000.000. Contractors may also be asked to provide additional services that are related to their area of specialization but not directly related to any particular disability claim.

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.