Where Everyone Knows Your Name and Mod

Those of us who live outside the Baltimore area may have negative attitudes towards the staff at SSA headquarters in Woodlawn, MD, but for those who work there, it is a job like any other job. As this Baltimore Sun article shows, these SSA employees have Monaghan's Pub, a nearby place where everyone knows their name.

Ominous Headline

Today's Wall Street Journal includes a short item with the headline "The White House Wants to Make Entitlement Cuts An Annual Event." The article quotes a "senior official" as saying that the 2007 budget due out in early February will likely include "another substantial set of savings in entitlements", with a figure of $40 billion over five years mentioned.

SSAB on Ticket to Work

The Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB) has filed comments on SSA's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on the Ticket to Work program. The comments include this gloomy assessment of the current state of Ticket to Work:

After three years of operation, the participation rate in the Ticket program is very
low. The most recent available data shows that over 11 million tickets have been mailed, yet less than 1 percent of the eligible beneficiaries have actually assigned their ticket. Much work still needs to be done to entice a larger fraction of the remaining millions of beneficiaries to enroll in the program. We applaud SSA’s efforts over this past year to market the Ticket program to beneficiaries, employers and job placement organizations. However, it is clear that more beneficiaries need to access return-to-work services if the program will ever fulfill Congressional desire to facilitate self-sufficiency for a significant proportion of beneficiaries.

The marketplace does not seem to be responding either. The number of employment networks has declined over time. Experience to date shows that there are still financial disincentives for the ENs. Only 45 percent of approved ENs are actively engaged in providing services, and very few, if any, are actually making any money. The ENs state that it is too costly to provide the level of services that are truly required to return beneficiaries to the work place.

Medicare Part D Subsidy Rules

On the last possible day, SSA has published final rules on their part of the administration of the subsidy part of the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit (Part D of Medicare).

The Costs of Delay

The New York Times has an article (registration required) that demonstrates the human costs of delaying filing a claim for Social Security disability benefits -- and the human costs of delay in adjudicating disability claims at SSA. This formerly middle class family was thrust into dire poverty primarily by disability and their delay in seeking disability benefits from SSA.

The indignities of poverty are endless. In this case, the family had a Thanksgiving meal only because of the generosity of Catholic charities and the wife has been forced to sell her wedding ring. Sadly, this sort of story is repeated hundreds of thousands times a year and gets almost no publicity.

One Week To Go on Age Proposal

There is only one week left to comment on Social Security's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on the age classifications in the grid regulations. The proposal would add two years onto each of the age categories, making age 57 the new 55 and 52 the new 50. The change is predicted to cut Social Security disability benefits by almost $6 billion over ten years. Anyone wanting to comment on the NPRM may do so online at an SSA website.

Organized Comments on Age NPRM

Despite being predicted to cut Social Security disability benefits by almost $6 billion over 10 years, Social Security's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on the age classifications in the grid regulations has drawn surprisingly few comments. This may be changing as the January 4, 2006 final date for making comments approaches. A series of identical comments started appearing on SSA's website on December 22. There are now several dozen of them, probably arranged by the ARC (Association for Retarded Citizens).

Anyone wanting to comment on the NPRM may do so online at an SSA website.

Top Management Challenges For SSA

Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has released to the public its report to the Commissioner of Social Security on what OIG views to be the top management challenges to the agency.