Conn Reviews Causing Stress

     The upcoming reviews of the cases of 2,000 more former clients of Eric Conn are already causing stress. At this point, we don't know exactly who will be reviewed. In the last round, 53% of the former Conn clients kept their benefits despite the reviews and many more were approved on new claims. In the end, I wonder how many of those reviewed will actually lose benefits for good. My guess is that it will be less than 25% of those reviewed.

Daniel Bernath Dies In Plane Crash

     Daniel Bernath, who used to be an attorney representing Social Security disability claimants, has died in a plane crash. Take a look at this old post on this blog. Bernath had threatened to sue me for libel if I didn't make that correction! To give you an idea of what he was like take a look at this old blog post as well as this one. I had great sympathy for the Administrative Law Judges who had to cope with such an obnoxious person. I don't understand how anyone comes to be like Bernath.

To Be Continued

     That big Senate bill that settles all budget matters for the next two years that you've been reading about -- it's not quite what it's advertised to be. For one thing, it actually only funds the government through March 23. For another, it's only a budget bill. Budget bills only set top line limits. They don't specify what each agency gets. That's done in appropriations bills. There could easily be a partial government shutdown over one or more of the appropriations bills and the Labor-HHS appropriations bill that includes Social Security is always the most contentious of the appropriations bills. So, we don't know how much Social Security will get and we can't say that the threat of a government shutdown affecting Social Security has passed.

Backlogged In Chicago

     From a TV station in Chicago:

A widow in desperate need of her husband’s survivor benefits from Social Security is stone-walled for five months, until 2 Investigator Pam Zekman gets involved.

“I was very angry, very upset and I felt that the government let me down,” Darlene Groth, who was recently widowed, tells Zekman. ...

Groth had serious problems after she applied for survivors benefits from Social Security last  August.  She was told the money would  arrive in 30 to 45 days, but it didn’t.

Groth called and came to the Social Security offices in Waukegan multiple times to find out what was going on with her benefits. ...

Within days after the [the TV station] called the Social Security Administration, the sum of $4,594 was deposited in her bank account for benefits due back to August. Her $1,648 benefit check is set to arrive this month. ...

A Social Security spokesperson says the normal processing time is about two weeks and Groth’s five-month delay was due to “an oversight by an employee.”  He did not answer questions about exactly what the oversight was, adding they are unaware of any similar complaints. ...

     I've got a similar case, except worse. A recent widow came to me for help with her disability claim. I noticed that she had a couple of minor children and asked if they were getting child's benefits on her late husband's Social Security number. She said they weren't his children but the children of her first husband and that she had been told by Social Security that they couldn't get benefits on her second husband's account. I asked if her second husband, the one who had died, had supported these stepchildren. She told me he had supported them 100% since she hadn't been working the last couple of years before he died and there was no child support from the natural father of the children. I told her that the children were definitely entitled to benefits on their stepfather's account. She applied for the benefits. The Social Security employee who took the claim, like me, was surprised that the widow had been misinformed. That's more than five months ago and the children still haven't been paid. We keep calling and calling.
     As I've written before, I know there are horrible backlogs at the Birmingham Payment Center, the one I deal with mostly. Routine work takes forever. The problem seems to affect retirement and survivor claims that are even slightly out of the ordinary rather than disability claims. This piece from the Chicago TV station suggests there are horrible backlogs at other Payment Centers.

Rep Payee Bill Passes House

     From a press release:

The House voted 396-0 today to pass H.R. 4547, the Strengthening Protections for Social Security Beneficiaries Act of 2018 – bipartisan legislation to strengthen and improve the representative payee program to better protect vulnerable Social Security beneficiaries who are unable to manage their own funds. ...

CLICK HERE for the legislative text of the Strengthening Protections for Social Security Beneficiaries Act of 2018.

CLICK HERE to read the Ways and Means Committee's technical explanation outlining H.R. 4547, and CLICK HERE to read the letter that the Committee sent to the Social Security Administration afterwards.

CLICK HERE to learn more about how this bipartisan bill helps millions of Americans.

Welfare For People Too Lazy To Work?

     From Dylan Matthews writing for Vox:

Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said in 2015. “Join the club. Who doesn’t get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts?”

It’s a common line from conservative politicians: that the Social Security Disability Insurance program is just welfare for people too lazy to work.

Many of those politicians haven’t spent much time at all actually talking to the people they’re denouncing — people like Randy Pitts.

Before his body started to fail him, Pitts, a 43-year-old in Lake County, Tennessee, was a public servant. He loved his job as a 911 dispatcher for the county’s emergency services; he recounts with pride the story of the day he kept residents calm as trees crashed around them in an ice storm. He was elected county commissioner, a position he used to champion solar power.

Then in 2013, Pitts, who already had moderate arthritis and herniated discs in his back, was diagnosed with renal failure, an extreme form of kidney disease — the beginning of a chain of events that would leave Pitts and his family dependent on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which offers assistance for workers who develop disabilities and illnesses that render them incapable of working any longer.

Pitts’s renal failure led to a medical emergency that left him with what a doctor told him was likely post-traumatic stress disorder. Too weak to stand and talk, he campaigned for reelection but narrowly lost his seat. At his dispatcher job, he struggled to remain calm and form clear sentences to reassure callers. In 2015, struggling mentally and physically, he had to give up his job; these days, he’s unable to dress himself without help from his teenage son.

Pitts’s son works, as does his daughter, who is in college. But the family’s major lifeline is the $1,196 per month Pitts gets through Social Security Disability Insurance — which has been, over the past several years, under intense political assault from the likes of Sen. Paul....

Stereotypes about recipients wasting or not needing the money are common even among people on the program. ...

After visiting Tennessee, talking to SSDI recipients across the state, and scouring the rich economic literature on the program, I was left with a starkly different conclusion from the prevailing criticism. SSDI is not a gusher of free federal money for lazy people with backaches. It’s a stingy, hard-to-access program that helps some of the country’s most desperate citizens scrape by; applying takes months or years, and more than 60 percent of applicants wind up being rejected anyway. ...

According to Bloomberg’s Joshua Green, nine of the 10 counties with the highest share of working-age adults on SSDI voted for Trump, with each of those nine giving him at least 70 percent of the vote; all but one of those nine counties are in Appalachian West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky ...

The regions where people are more likely to be on disability map onto objective measures of health status — like years lost due to early death, diabetes and heart disease rates, and even cancer rates. SSDI serves people who are desperately sick or injured; its beneficiaries have a mortality rate triple that of other people their age, and one-fifth of men and one-sixth of women on the program die within five years of first getting benefits. It’s no accident that it’s concentrated in areas where that kind of severe hardship is also concentrated. ...

Only about a fifth of people on SSDI lack a high school diploma, but education nonetheless is a powerful predictor of the program’s geographic distribution. That’s largely because low levels of education are correlated with poor health. ...

Conn Story Refuses To Die

     To repeat, the Social Security Administration is planning to review the cases of 2,000 more of Eric Conn's former clients.
     And, there's this, "Officials say additional information has been received from Conn which implicated another bribery scheme. This scheme involves at least one other judge."

Lucia To Be Heard In April

     There is now confirmation that the Lucia case on the constitutionality of Administrative Law Judges (ALJs), as presently appointed, will be heard by the Supreme Court in April of this year. There's an accelerated briefing schedule.

     I don't think the Supreme Court should find ALJs unconstitutional. I don't think they will. If they do find ALJs unconstitutional, they may find some way to exclude Social Security ALJs although I don't know how. If you're off on the sort of excursion into pure logic, possibly tinged by a strong desire to prevent regulation of businesses, that leads you to find that ALJs are unconstitutional in other agencies, I don't see how you'd be concerned about the practical consequences for Social Security. Exempting Social Security removes the pure logic part and makes the desire to hinder regulation of businesses obvious. The pretense that your actions were dictated by the Constitution would be hard to maintain.