From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Last week, I wrote about Acworth resident Mary Ann Statler and her devastating, ruinous trek through the Social Security disability process. ...
The column prompted response from people intimately familiar and utterly frustrated by the backlog, including some lawyers who make their living at it.
“The toll is a human toll,” said Jonathan Ginsberg, an Atlanta attorney who devotes a lot of his practice to disability claims. “It’s very, very frustrating.”
The choke point in the process occurs when an applicant appeals a denied claim to an administrative law judge. That process is so backed up that applicants wait an average of 23 months to get a hearing in the agency’s downtown Atlanta office.
To add insult to the injury, Ginsberg said once one of his clients gets a hearing scheduled, the outcome can largely depend on who gets the case. Some judges approve a vast percentage of their cases, while others deny an equally large number. ...
The administrative law judges in the agency’s downtown Atlanta office approve an average of 47 percent of the claims they hear, but that figure hides an incredible deviation among the judges. On the high end, one judge approves 74 percent of claims before him, while at the low end another approves just 19 percent. ...
n fiscal 2010, administrative law judges approved 62 percent of disability claims and denied 25 percent. The rest of the cases were dismissed for various reasons, including from people who abandoned their claims after months or years of delay. By fiscal 2016, approvals had dropped to 46 percent while denials increased to 35 percent. ...
[Marilyn] Zahm [president of the Administrative Law Judge union] said there is definite pressure from the agency to get judges to find against workers....
Zahm said she has offered a streamlined way to process paperwork for cases where a worker’s disability claim is found “fully favorable.” These are non-controversial cases where a judge has already decided in favor of the worker, and there are tens of thousands of these cases, she said.
“I even had someone draft the (decision) templates for them,” she said.Maybe I just want it to be so but I'm getting the feeling that tectonic plates are shifting. Even Republicans who really wanted to believe that there is vast fraud in the Social Security disability programs now realize that Eric Conn was a bizarre one-off that had nothing to do with what was happening elsewhere. Their hope that they could pour lots of money into fraud investigations and turn up one juicy story after another hasn't panned out. There was a reason that I and others who work on behalf of the disabled were never concerned about more money going to program integrity. We knew that there was nothing of consequence to be found. We were only concerned about the diversion of money from the day to day work of making decisions on disability claims. Now, reporters and others are focusing more and more on the tragic reality of horrible delays and harsh decisions at Social Security. Stories such as the ones we've seen lately in newspapers have a cascade effect. A reporter somewhere else in the country reads the Atlanta Journal-Constitution piece and gets an idea for a story that he or she can write with new quotes from local people. Republicans on the House Social Security Subcommittee are now struggling to come up with a cover story to explain why their inadequate appropriations are the reason why Social Security has such terrible backlogs. I don't think their excuses are going to give them cover for long.
But, so far, there has been no response. ...
