Yesterday I posted the news about the Supreme Court agreeing to hear a case concerning whether it is constitutional to deny SSI benefits to disabled individuals who live in a U.S. territory. That was not the only announcement yesterday of a Social Security case that the Supreme Court would hear. The Court also agreed to hear Babcock v. Saul, which presents an issue of more limited importance, "Whether a civil service pension received for federal civilian employment as a “military technician (dual status)” is “a payment based wholly on service as a member of a uniformed service” for the purposes of the Social Security Act’s windfall elimination provision."
The Supreme Court has granted a writ of certiorari, that is it has agreed to hear, the case of U.S. v. Vaello-Madero, which presents the issue of whether it is constitutional to deny SSI benefits to U.S. citizens who reside in the territory of Puerto Rico. I don't know whether this will be argued in this term of Court. If it's too late for this term, it will be heard in the next term, which always begins on the first Monday in October.
Nobody knows what the long term impact of the pandemic will be on Social Security. How much will the trust funds be affected by the economic downturn? Will the trust funds be healthier because of the people dying early from Covid-19? Will there be a surge of disability claims? Will the pandemic combined with the failed Trump presidency have generalized effects upon public attitudes towards government support programs? These are important questions but it will be years before we have answers to all of them. This article in the Philadelphia Inquirer contains some interesting speculation from some well informed sources.
The National Association of Disability Examiners (NADE), an organization of the personnel who make initial and reconsideration determinations on disability claims for the Social Security Administration, has posted its Winter newsletter.
Here's an excerpt that concerns something I haven't yet seen in my office but probably will, eventually:
For more than a year, analysts across the nation have seen a huge influx in CDB cases [Childhood Disability Benefits, also known as Disabled Adult Child or DAC cases] cross our desks, with people filing for Childhood Disability Benefits years or even decades after they were approved for SSI. A 38-year-old applying for Childhood benefits? Why now?The OIG’s office conducted an audit last year, summarized in a report submitted in December entitled, “Follow-up on Dis-abled Supplemental Security Income Recipients Potentially Eligible for Childhood Disability Benefits.” ...
OIG recommended that SSA instruct their staff in the importance of following up on potential leads to other benefits and assessing eligibility for other programs during redetermination and initial claims. They renewed their recommendation that SSA establish an automated solution that identifies SSI recipients who may be entitled to CDB. ...
Social Security has released its Annual Statistical Supplemental for 2020, the mother lode of statistics about Social Security.
Below is an interesting table from the Statistical Supplement. I often post Office of Personnel Management statistics showing the number of employees the agency has. This can be misleading since some are part time or out sick. The table below shows the number of work years. Click on the image to view full size. Notice the decline after Republicans gained control of Congress in the 2010 election. In 2020 the agency had the lowest staffing level in at least 25 years.
Social Security Administration Commissioner Andrew Saul upset many agency staff when he canceled a popular teleworking program in 2019.
“A time of workload crisis is not the time to experiment with working at home,” Saul said when he announced the policy, citing a need to reduce wait times for Social Security claimants.
But Saul himself did not work in the agency’s main Baltimore office even before the pandemic forced everyone into telework, says Ralph de Juliis, president of the AFGE Council 220, which represents Social Security employees in field offices and call centers.
“We were told he’s spending his time in New York because that’s where he’s from,” de Juliis told HuffPost.
De Juliis said agency workers could see that Saul wasn’t logging into his Skype account, either, which employees and managers use for internal communication at the agency. In January 2020, his Skype account had been inactive for 67 days, according to a screenshot de Juliis shared with HuffPost. ...
“We really think Biden should find new people to run the Social Security Administration, who haven’t made it a point to be bad and horrible to employees and the union,” de Juliis said.
The SSA’s press office ignored requests for comment for this story.
From National Public Radio:
When COVID-19 first arrived in the U.S., Jodee Pineau-Chaisson was working as the director of social services for a nursing home in western Massachusetts called Center for Extended Care in Amherst. By the middle of April, residents were getting sick.
In early May, Pineau-Chaisson was tapped for a particular duty: "I was asked to go on to the COVID-19 units to do FaceTime calls, so they could say goodbye to their family members," she recalls. "I was very scared."
She was worried about contracting the virus, but also felt like she owed it to her residents. So, at 55 years old and with no pre-existing conditions, Pineau-Chaisson put on an N95 mask, a white jumpsuit, and she entered the units to help. Three days later, she had COVID-19. ...
It's now been almost ten months since Pineau-Chaisson got sick, yet she is still dealing with a series of devastating ailments. She says she has memory problems, body pain, heart palpitations, depression and chronic fatigue. ...
Pineau-Chaisson is a so-called long-hauler. These are people who survive COVID-19 but have symptoms – sometimes debilitating symptoms – many months later. As scientists scramble to explain what is going on and figure out how to help, disability advocates are also scrambling: They are trying to figure out whether long-haulers will qualify for disability benefits.
Disability advocates and lawmakers are calling on the Social Security Administration or SSA to study the issue, update their policies and offer guidance for applicants.
"If we end up with a million people with ongoing symptoms that are debilitating, that is a tremendous burden for each of those individuals, but also for our healthcare system and our society," says Dr. Steven Martin, a physician and professor of family medicine and community health at UMass Medical School.
"We know what's coming. So, we have to make sure that we're on top of this," says U.S. Rep John Larson, a Democrat from Connecticut, who joined with another member of Congress to write a letter asking the SSA to work with scientists to understand what support long-haulers might need. ...
In a statement, the SSA told NPR that the current disability policy rules should be sufficient for evaluating COVID-related applicants, though the agency did not rule out taking additional action in the future. "Researchers are still learning about the disease and we will continue to look at our policies as research evolves," the statement said. ...
As I've said before, it's easy for me to predict what Social Security will do with post-Covid "long hauler" cases. They'll delay and delay and delay doing anything with the claims. They'll then deny virtually every one of them but many will be approved after a hearing. Meanwhile, the agency will release a vague Ruling that will give no criteria whatsoever that could be interpreted as a standard by which a claim could be approved or, for that matter, denied. The Ruling will say that all evidence must be considered, blah, blah, blah. The agency is quite experienced in issuing such Rulings that seem to say something but which actually say nothing. If you refuse to say what the standard is, no one can blame you for not following the standard.
By the way, I have my first post-Covid long hauler case now. Other attorneys tell me that they're starting to see a trickle of these cases. No one has any idea whether this will stay a trickle or become a flood but there's evidence that a significant percentage of those who suffer even mild cases of Covid-19 are still having symptoms six months later so the flood scenario is quite real.
