It's Time To Get These Problems Solved

      From some television station in central New York:

On March 17th, 2020, Social Security offices across the country closed their doors to the public. The federal agency cited the emergence of COVID-19 as the reason - aiming to "protect" those they serve.

While restaurants, schools, and other government agencies like the Department of Motor Vehicles have all since resumed in-person business, social security offices are still closed. They won't open again until early April, according to a spokesperson, over two years since the pandemic began.

This has caused problems for people in Central New York, left to try to reach representatives on the phone. Some have reported waiting for hours trying to get through to someone at Social Security - at times, the call will just drop without anyone answering.

Jeanne Marshall first reached out to CNY Central in November of 2021. Having moved to Nedrow at the end of the summer from Colorado - Marshall said she was in a desperate situation, missing thousands of dollars worth of checks from Social Security.

 She said she had spent over 48 hours cumulatively on the phone - finally learning that there was an alleged issue with her bank routing number. Even after learning that, she said nothing was actually fixed, left without money coming in for three months in a row. ...

Checking the google reviews for the office, she's not alone.

As recently as one month ago - a user wrote "been calling for couple months and no one ever answers."

Another from 3 weeks ago said, "I can't wait till they reopen this office and these people go back to work and are held accountable for their actions of not doing their job!" ...

SSA Phones Down?

      My firm has been experiencing even greater difficulties than usual communicating with Social Security since yesterday. There seem to be technical difficulties so that nothing is going through. I'm hearing reports that this problem extends at least into other parts of North Carolina and South Carolina.

     How extensive is this problem?

Black History In Social Security's Early Days

   

The "Black Cabinet"

   From Black Past (emphasis added):

The Black Cabinet was an informal advisory group of African American civil servants who lobbied for African Americans to receive equal access to federal benefits and employment and job training programs associated with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Often promoting programs closely aligned with the demands of working-class Blacks, they encouraged First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and white liberals to press FDR on institutionalizing support for racial justice within his New Deal administration. ...

The leaders included Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women, economist Robert C. Weaver in the Department of the Interior; educator Ambrose Caliver in the Works Projects Administration (WPA) and the Office of Education; lawyer William Hastie in the Department of the Interior; former National Urban League Executive Director Eugene K. Jones in the Department of Commerce; social worker Lawrence W. Oxley in the Department of Labor; and sociologist Ira De A. Reid in the Social Security Administration. ...

Officially this group called itself the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, but it was popularly known as FDR’s “Black Cabinet.” Its central leadership usually met every Friday for group updates and planning sessions...

Who Is Naive Enough To Believe This?

      From Roll Call:

If Republicans take one or both chambers of Congress in November, don’t be surprised if shoring up Social Security’s finances becomes an area of bipartisan focus.

Pronouncements like that have been made before only to die on the next election campaign’s vine. But the spirit of compromise that animated discussions around last year’s bipartisan infrastructure package appears to be creeping into nascent talks about finally, really, this-time-we’re-not-joking doing something to stave off Social Security insolvency.

The prospects look brighter now in the Senate, where veterans of previous bipartisan “gangs” have begun talking about the need for fixes. ...

     What are the chances that Democrats agree to benefit cuts? Nearly zero. What are the chances that Republicans agree to tax increases? Nearly zero. Spirit of compromise? Are you kidding? Nothing's going to happen until there's a gun to their heads.

What Will Social Security Do About The Marasco & Nesslebush Case?

      I had written recently about Social Security's inability to react to an adverse ruling by a court at anything other than a glacial pace. Let me ask when the agency might decide what it's going to do about Marasco & Nesselbush v. Collins. On July 16, 2021 the First Circuit Court of Appeals held that:

... SSA's rule barring payments to attorneys for work completed before they enter government service is both arbitrary and, in some circumstances, in conflict with the statutory mandate to pay "a reasonable fee" for successful representation of SSA claimants. ...

and further held that:

... SSA must adjust its rules, as described above, to ensure that the law firms that employ salaried associates to represent SSA claimants may receive direct payment of the attorney's fees to which the firms' associates are entitled for representation performed while employed by those law firms. ...

     This didn't go to the Supreme Court so Social Security has no choice but to implement it in the First Circuit area (most of New England) but it makes little sense to try to apply it just to that one area of the country. Payment centers all over the country are involved in authorizing attorney fees in the cases of claimants residing in the First Circuit area. Why would you want to have two systems? I can't exclude the possibility that Social Security will be that pig-headed but I hope that wiser heads prevail. Something should have been done about this problem decades ago.

So, Wendell Primus Is The Problem?

      From The Intercept:

Democratic Rep. John Larson of Connecticut has written a bill titled“Social Security 2100: A Sacred Trust” that would immediately expand the program’s benefits for all 65 million recipients. It has at least 200 co-sponsors, all Democrats, in the House. And increasing Social Security payments should be an easy lift for Democrats, especially in an election year.

Yet the bill still awaits a vote in the Subcommittee on Social Security — chaired by Larson — of the House Ways and Means Committee, much less a vote on the floor. Why?

Part of the answer appears to be Wendell Primus, a senior aide to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Primus is seen by many in the world of Washington, D.C., progressive politics as embodying a mindset from the Democratic Party’s past, when all that seemed possible was preventing cuts to important social programs, rather than going on offense.

Primus “passionately cares about children, he’s always made the point that we have to make sure that we’re taking care of the children,” Larson said in a recent appearance on The Intercept’s podcast Deconstructed. “Wendell’s concern would be that there’s only so much money to go around. We have only so many expenditures.” Pelosi’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. …

According to Larson, Mark Meadows, former chair of the House Freedom Caucus and later chief of staff for former President Donald Trump, once told him that if his legislation “makes it to the floor, you’re going to find a lot of Republicans are going to be voting for [it].”

Social Security 2100 would then face a tougher challenge in the Senate. According to Senate rules, changes cannot be made to Social Security via the reconciliation process, which requires a simple majority. It would therefore need to attract the votes of all 50 Democratic senators as well as 10 Republicans to end a certain filibuster. …

Workshop On Covid And Social Security Disability

      From the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine:

REGISTER HERE

Monday, March 21, 2022 | 10:30am - 4:00pm ET

Tuesday, March 22, 2022 | 10:30am - 3:30pm ET

A planning committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will hold a public workshop to explore the long-term and potentially disabling health effects stemming from COVID-19 infection and how they might impact survivors’ ability to work.

This two-day virtual workshop, sponsored by the U.S. Social Security Administration, will bring together invited experts to discuss a range of topic a

reas including:

• Overview of long COVID, characteristics of the population affected, and research initiatives underway
• Postacute sequelae of SARS-COV-2 infection and implications for recovery
• Experiences of long COVID patients and their caregivers
• Long-term impairments from COVID-19 and effects on work-related functioning
• Best practices to improve recovery and potential future advancements in knowledge

The workshop agenda and list of confirmed speakers will be posted to this page soon.

     By the way, my impression over the years has been that the National Academies are less a scholarly organization and more a Beltway Bandit, set up to attract lavish consulting contracts from government agencies. They always produce lengthy reports that say nothing of consequence and which contain the vaguest imaginable recommendations, except that there's always a definite recommendation for more "research", presumably done by them. I've never seen a report from a Beltway Bandit that had the slightest impact on actual operations at Social Security. Hiring them is what you do when you think you're supposed to do something but you really don't want to do anything other than kick the can down the road.

     It doesn't take any grant of money from Social Security for me to tell you the state of knowledge at this point. There hasn't been enough time elapsed to get a really good idea of the long term impacts of Covid. While there are suggestions that Covid will lead to disability claims, either directly or indirectly, there hasn't been more than a trickle of such claims filed at Social Security so far. No one knows what that means. I'll be amazed if we learn anything more specific that that at this workshop.

Post-Covid Anxiety And Depression

      From the New York Times:

Social isolation, economic stress, loss of loved ones and other struggles during the pandemic have contributed to rising mental health issues like anxiety and depression.

But can having Covid itself increase the risk of developing mental health problems? A large new study suggests it can.

The study, published Wednesday in the journal The BMJ, analyzed records of nearly 154,000 Covid patients in the Veterans Health Administration system and compared their experience in the year after they recovered from their initial infection with that of a similar group of people who did not contract the virus.

The study included only patients who had no mental health diagnoses or treatment for at least two years before becoming infected with the coronavirus, allowing researchers to focus on psychiatric diagnoses and treatment that occurred after coronavirus infection.

 People who had Covid were 39 percent more likely to be diagnosed with depression and 35 percent more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety over the months following infection than people without Covid during the same period, the study found. Covid patients were 38 percent more likely to be diagnosed with stress and adjustment disorders and 41 percent more likely to be diagnosed with sleep disorders than uninfected people. ...

     You might say this won't have much impact on Social Security since there aren't many people found disabled due to depression and anxiety much less stress and adjustment disorders but I think that would be naive. Depression, anxiety, stress and adjustment disorders are bad for a person's physical health. These conditions also make people less able to cope with their physical ailments. There are many people who are still tenuously holding on to employment despite serious physical health problems. Add in depression and anxiety and those health problems can become too much to bear while still working. There are many people on the borderline who are still working but who can be easily tipped in the other direction. There's also the question of Covid's effects on those who already suffered significant mental illness. What effects will Covid have on people with bipolar disorder, for instance? I'm sure somebody is studying that question but I haven't heard of any research reports yet.

     I'm getting almost no calls from people with post-Covid syndrome but we'll have to see whether Covid is a significant indirect factor in producing disability.