Aug 15, 2015
They've Got Opinions And Some Facts
- Michael Hiltzik on the lack of a confirmed Commissioner of Social Security
- Tom Margenau on the Lump Sum Death Payment (LSDP)
- Laurence Kotlikoff and Robert Pozen on how the retirement earnings test for those between age 62 and full retirement age discourages people from working
Aug 14, 2015
House Appropriations Committee "Believes" In Functional Assessment Batteries
From the report (page 150) of the House Appropriations Committee on the Labor-HHS Appropriations bill, which covers the Social Security Administration:
The Committee can "believe" what it wants but any function assessment battery will be worthless in determining disability. You cannot test someone's work capacity over the course of a few hours and extrapolate from that to determine the person's ability to work eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. You cannot say that because a person has run 100 yards that they can run a marathon, much less say that the person can run a marathon at the same pace that they have run 100 yards. There's no way around this problem.
Functional assessment batteries have always been and will always be fool's gold. They appeal only to those who give little thought to the matter, especially if they have no interest in justice, and to those who stand to profit from performing the functional assessment batteries.
The United Kingdom has started using functional assessment batteries in determining disability. It's been pretty disastrous.
If you think disability determination in the United States is problematic, you'd right. Disability determination is an inherently messy, imprecise business. That doesn't mean that things can't be made worse. Things could get a lot worse with widespread use of functional assessment batteries.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) has partnered with the National Institutes of Health to create a functional assessment tool that is reliable and objective and may inform the disability determination process. One of the major projects of this partnership is the Functional Assessment Battery (FAB). The Committee believes the FAB tool could serve to provide uniform, objective evidence to the disability determination.The Committee notes its concern that SSA is currently limiting the use of this tool for only survey research. The Committee directs SSA to test the use of the FAB as part of the demonstrations undertaken within the Disability Early Intervention Initiative.The bill has now been reported out of Committee.
The Committee can "believe" what it wants but any function assessment battery will be worthless in determining disability. You cannot test someone's work capacity over the course of a few hours and extrapolate from that to determine the person's ability to work eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. You cannot say that because a person has run 100 yards that they can run a marathon, much less say that the person can run a marathon at the same pace that they have run 100 yards. There's no way around this problem.
Functional assessment batteries have always been and will always be fool's gold. They appeal only to those who give little thought to the matter, especially if they have no interest in justice, and to those who stand to profit from performing the functional assessment batteries.
The United Kingdom has started using functional assessment batteries in determining disability. It's been pretty disastrous.
If you think disability determination in the United States is problematic, you'd right. Disability determination is an inherently messy, imprecise business. That doesn't mean that things can't be made worse. Things could get a lot worse with widespread use of functional assessment batteries.
Aug 13, 2015
Aug 12, 2015
Eric Conn's Former Clients Awaiting Word From Federal Court
There was a hearing Monday on a motion to prevent the Social Security Administration from forcing almost 1,500 former clients of Eric Conn to prove all over again that they're disabled. There's no decision yet from the Court but the attorney representing the class has posted about the hearing on Facebook. He says that he gave the judge his best estimate that only about a third of the claimants would be able to obtain legal representation. Training for volunteer attorneys is tentatively scheduled for August 29.
Some Right Wing Ideas On Reforming Social Security Disability
The Washington Examiner, a right wing publication publication owned by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz, has a compendium of ideas for reforming Social Security disability. Here are some:
- Add temporary disability benefits
- Add partial disability benefits
- Change the definition of disability to "a medically determinable physical or mental impairment that has resulted in a substantial impediment to employment and is expected to result in death or has lasted or is expected to last for continuous periods of at least 12 months."
- Early intervention to help disabled people to work such as providing career coaches.
Those proposing these ideas do so because they actually believe that in the long run they would cut costs. They're dead wrong.
I'd love to see the first three ideas implemented but they're complete non-starters. Temporary disability benefits would be extremely expensive to implement. Partial disability benefits would multiply costs by, who knows, three or four or five times. Changing the definition of disability to merely require a "substantial impediment to employment" would have a similar effect. Early intervention would be extremely difficult to implement and would be ineffective. People can't wrap their minds around the fact that most people who meet Social Security's current definition of disability either suffer from chronic, progressive conditions or suffer from overwhelming mental illness. Early intervention doesn't help them.
The underlying problem is that no one on the right has a good understanding of Social Security disability. They have attitudes about Social Security disability. Boy, do they have attitudes! But when it comes to actual knowledge, they just don't know their stuff, which is how they come up with this blue sky stuff.
Aug 11, 2015
Astrue Not A Fan Of Obamacare
I was wondering what Michael Astrue, the most recent Commissioner of Social Security, was up to. I found an opinion piece that he had done in May for The Weekly Standard, a right wing publication, on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which he and many others call Obamacare. I won't bore you with the details of Astrue's piece. I'll just list a few of the words he used and you can infer the rest:
- Self-preservation
- Waste
- Fraud
- Abuse
- Criminal
- Wreckage
- Massive
- Failure
- Mislead
- Stonewall
- Failures
- Reckless
Astrue was a Massachusetts resident at the time that state implemented a health care plan devised by its Republican governor, Mitt Romney. Astrue was active in Massachusetts politics at the time. I can't find any record of him publicly criticizing Romney's plan. The Affordable Care Act was modeled after Romney's plan. It's no exaggeration to say that Obamacare is Romneycare writ large. If you hate the Affordable Care Act, you should have hated Romney's healthcare plan too.
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