 |
| Carl Boatner |
Carl Boatner suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, coronary artery disease, two liver diseases, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, major depressive disorder and anxiety disorder.
The administrative law judge handling his appeal of the denial for disability payments determined those medical conditions “could reasonably be expected to cause” disabling symptoms.
And then he denied Boatner’s appeal.
He concluded the Carthage man’s severe medical conditions failed to “meet or medically equal the criteria for any listed impairment,” despite the fact they had once landed him in hospice, a care facility designed to give supportive care to people in the final phase of a terminal illness.
Boatner didn’t die before getting his benefits, but that wasn’t the case for Phillip E. Herring of Tupelo.
Vonda Peters of Tupelo received her brother’s third denial letter in the mail the day after his funeral in July 2019. “I don’t normally cuss, but I thought, what the f---?” Peters said.
U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, in a ruling that eventually awarded Boatner disability benefits, pointed to a pervasive attitude among many administrative law judges to view applicants with skepticism, adding Boatner’s judge issued denials at a rate 25 percent higher than the national average.
“The injustices of the disability payment system are both many and deep,” Reeves ruled. “Research suggests the majority of denials may be incorrect, and applicants struggling to manage their disabilities say such denials can amount to a ‘death sentence.’” ...
In a May 11, 2018, ruling, Reeves posed the question: Did the administrative law judge review the evidence properly?
Reeves’ response: No.
In his blistering opinion, he detailed where each component of the disability process had failed Boatner before he then awarded the veteran truck driver his long-denied benefits.
Reeves turned his focus on the state agency acting on the Social, Security Administration’s behalf — Disability Determination Services. ...
n his ruling, Reeves described the “waiting” Boatner had to do, saying, “Boatner has spent nearly a decade seeking disability payments from the Social Security Administration, filing his last application in 2014. Despite acknowledging the severity of Boatner’s medical conditions and his trips to death’s doorstep, the Administration has denied each of his four applications. These denials have been painful. One caused Boatner to walk out of his house, put a gun to his head, and threaten to kill himself.” ...
In his ruling, Reeves took aim at the disability examiners and the administrative law judge that handled Boatner’s case, noting the ALJ had resolved more than 600 cases in 2016. Reeves also said examiners are not prepared to handle as many cases as SSA asks them to handle.
Mississippi DDS’ 111 examiners processed approximately 64,000 cases last fiscal year, according to Patti Patterson, regional communications director for the Atlanta regional office of the Social Security Administration. Caseloads per examiner range from 65-125 cases, said Chris Howard, head of the Department of Rehabilitation Services. ...
Telework at the Social Security Administration is boosting call center answer rates and otherwise improving customer service, the leader of a union that represents about 25,000 field office and call center workers says.
The agency should allow employees to continue teleworking to the maximum extent possible even after the Covid-19 pandemic abates, said Ralph de Juliis, president of Council 220 of the American Federation of Government Employees. The union is asking the agency to consider a plan that would allow the SSA to close most of its 1,300 field offices in the U.S. and save hundreds of millions of dollars on facility costs, he said. Though the agency has clashed with its unions in the past over telework, de Juliis said he’s hopeful agency officials are seeing the benefits now that most employees are working from home.
“If they want to go that way, they have the union’s support,” he said. ...
... Senior White House economic officials also are exploring a proposal floated by two conservative scholars that would allow Americans to choose to receive checks of up to $5,000 in exchange for a delay of their Social Security benefits, according to three people familiar with the internal matter. That plan was written by Andrew Biggs of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and Joshua Rauh of the right-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford University. ...
37- year-old John J. Scoggins of Omaha, Nebraska, was sentenced on Wednesday for making a threat to a Social Security Administration Official.
Scoggins was sentenced to five months of prison with an additional one month home detention, followed by a one-year term of supervised release.
According to United States Attorney Joe Kelly, on February 8, 2019, Scoggins contacted the Social Security Administration by telephone to confirm his address and other information related to his benefits.
During the conversation, Scoggins became belligerent with the Social Security Administration employee and threatened to physically harm her, according to officials.
This article examines the experiences of Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) applicants aged 51 or older who were initially denied benefits because the disability examiner determined that they could perform either their past work or other work. ... We find that few older DI applicants who were denied benefits on this basis resumed work at a substantial level following denial. More commonly, applicants denied at this stage continued to pursue benefits, often successfully. Nearly two-thirds of initial work capacity-related denials were ultimately allowed DI benefits after appealing the initial decision or reapplying, and our estimates suggest that many of the rest claimed Old-Age and Survivors Insurance benefits before they reached full retirement age.Is it just me or does this suggest that it would be fairer to allow more of the disability claims filed by older people? Denying so many of the disability claims filed by older people creates misery and doesn't end up saving much money anyway. It makes work for me and other attorneys but that's certainly not a valid policy objective.
