Triple Dippers?

     Apparently at the request of Republican Senator Tom Coburn, the Government Accountability Office has done a study of the concurrent receipt of Social Security disability benefits, Veterans benefits and military retirement. Here is an excerpt:

Out of the 1.9 million DOD [Department of Defense] nondisability and disability retirees, we identified 59,251 individuals who received concurrent payments in fiscal year 2013 from DOD retirement, VA disability compensation, and SSDI.  The payments totaled over $3.5 billion.  From our population of individuals receiving concurrent payments, we also selected a random sample of seven individuals to provide illustrative examples.  These seven examples individually received from $19,210 to $152,719 in concurrent benefits.

It's An Old Story But Worth Repeating

Not A Good Idea

     From WKMG:

Someone got into the Halloween spirit at work, but it's not a co-worker's treat. An employee at the Social Security Administration office in Lake Mary said she's offended by decorations that transformed a cubicle into a fake Ebola hospital ward.

Happy Halloween

Many People Don't Know About Social Security Disability Benefits; Varied Opinions On Benefit Rates

          From a survey conducted by Greenwald and Associates for the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) in June 2014:

"More SSA Crazy"

     Here's an e-mail I received recently from a member of my staff, labeled "More SSA Crazy.": "Prospect [prospective client] called the DO [District Office] to set up an appt to file a SSI claim. Whoever he talked with denied him an appt to file b/c[because] he did not have a doctor." 

     No, that's definitely not Social Security policy and, yes, that person at the District Office wasn't trained that way.  This isn't at all typical but this sort of off the wall thing does happen. 

     We'll get it sorted out.

Huge Majorities Willing To Raise Taxes To Support Social Security

     From a survey conducted by Greenwald and Associates for the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) in June 2014:

Thousands Die Each Year Waiting For Action On Their Social Security Disability Claims

     For decades there have been newspaper articles on Social Security disability claimants dying while their cases were being adjudicated. We'll soon have a study of these deaths. It's to be released on November 1. However, the abstract is out now. The authors say they identified 24 conditions where claimants are unlikely to survive the adjudication process. However, the big takeaway from the abstract is that they found that 42,000 people died while their disability claims were being adjudicated during the time period 1996 to 2007. That's thousands of deaths a year. Certainly some of these deaths were unavoidable because the claimants lived only a short time after filing their claims but not all.