Social Security Disability

A lot of claimants and even representatives going through Social Security Disability appeals are slightly terrified of vocational experts. There’s good reason to feel this way. After all, their testimony can torpedo a claim by making it seem like there are plenty of jobs available and no reason why work can’t be found.

Experienced disability lawyers, though, know that there are a number of ways to poke holes in VE testimony and make sure that they are the ones being put on the defensive.

When you go through the disability appeals process and prepare for your hearing in front of a judge, you’re going to need lots of evidence proving your impairment and have to go through a wide variety of tests and evaluations. You’ll deal with doctors, vocational experts, and more, all looking at you and poring over the evidence to decide if you’re really disabled enough to get benefits.

Not surprisingly, a lot of weight is given to the evaluations of physicians who perform what are called consultative examinations, or CEs. The reports from these examinations are used by ALJs to determine the extent of a person’s disability and whether or not they’re able to work and make a living, so you would think they’d be pretty thorough and exhaustive.

Unfortunately, that’s not always the case, and disparities between CE reports can mean that two claimants in extremely similar situations have entirely different outcomes, with one getting maximum benefits and the other one being denied.

Most people probably don’t even know what intestacy is, because it’s not a subject that comes up all that often – even in Social Security Disability claims. But a recent ruling by the Supreme Court means that some children of deceased benefit recipients are going to have to get a crash course on the subject if they want to win their claim.

Why? To understand the ruling and what it means for some claimants, first you have to know what intestacy is. Basically, when someone dies without creating a will or creates a will but doesn’t account for everything they own in it, their estate goes to probate court and most often goes to their surviving relatives.

The SSA also has rules in place that allow for spouses and children to continue receiving the benefits of a deceased spouse or parent, but there are some cases where there have been questions about whether or not someone should continue getting these benefits.

Politicians who’ve gotten elected based on their stance against government spending and talking heads on TV looking to get a bigger audience love to say that disability numbers swell whenever unemployment is high, but is it true?

Not at all. In fact, it only takes a quick glance at the award rates of the past few years to prove this. Moreover, far from going up, the numbers have actually decreased!

2010 – 35%

2011 – 34%

2012 – 33%

This is in spite of the fact that more people have been applying to receive disability. What it shows is that the system works – the people getting through and ultimately receiving the benefits that they need are the ones who have truly serious issues.

If you’ve been listening to the talking heads on TV or the headlines coming out of Washington, you probably know that we’re getting closer and closer to the point where we’re going to have trouble paying for Social Security. Simply put, more people need benefits than ever before, and the money just isn’t there right now to make it last. Those in charge are running around like their heads have been cut off, saying that nothing can be done and that cuts are going to have to be made in order to keep the program going. After all, what else can they do?

Well, a poll from earlier this year might have answered the question for them: ask taxpayers for more money. Normally, such a thing would seem like political suicide, but that doesn’t seem to be the case where Social Security is concerned. Why? Because when people were given several options on what they would do about the Social Security budget issue, they overwhelmingly said that they wanted to increase benefits, not cut them, and that they would be willing to pay more to reach those goals.

Drug and alcohol addiction has always been somewhat of a tricky gray area where Social Security Disability benefits are concerned. SSA guidelines existed, but they were in several different places and the ruling hadn’t been updated in almost two decades. Rather than following an official SSA ruling, representatives have been relying on what was supposed to be a temporary “Emergency Message” released 16 years ago!

Well, no longer. As of March 22, 2013, the SSA started using a new ruling that describes how drug and alcohol addiction cases should be evaluated. What’s this going to mean for your case? Read on.

When you apply for disability through Social Security, you can expect to be inundated with strange terms and acronyms that probably won’t make much sense at first. SSA. ALJ. DSM. If you don’t have someone knowledgeable on your side who can explain things, it’s something that can quickly become overwhelming. Some people simply shut down because there’s just too much to take in, and that’s one of the reasons I started this blog – to explain things in plain language whenever I can.

One acronym that used to be vital is GAF . It stands for Global Assessment of Functioning, and it’s basically a report from your doctor that talks about what you can and can’t do on a daily basis. The GAF was one of the big things that the Social Security Administration used to decide whether or not a claimant should get benefits.

Stop me if you’ve heard this argument before: we need to change our Social Security Disability system because too many people are getting overpaid in benefits!

Time and time again, people have tried to make this argument, and they’re always discredited when someone does a truly in-depth study. Why, just this past July there was a brief from the Urban Institute showing that the people who get SSDI not only need the money, but that they’re surviving (barely, in most cases!) on far less than their healthy counterparts who don’t receive benefits.

You’d think that this brief would put an end to these kinds of attacks for a while, but you’d be wrong. In August, less than a month after the Urban Institute brief, a report came out of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) saying that some SSDI payments were “potentially improper” based on their findings. Basically, their report accuses the SSA of overpaying people.

In June of this year, the Supreme Court ruled that section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unconstitutional. This is the section of the law that excludes same-sex marriages, and it impacts an incredible number of federal laws – more than 1,000. One of the biggest laws impacted is the Social Security Act, and the SSA’s still trying to figure out exactly how this ruling’s going to impact eligibility for benefits going forward.

What this means for same-sex partners is that they still don’t know exactly what kinds of benefits their dependents and survivors might be able to get. It’s a frustrating position to be in, but definitely a lot better than the one they were in before the June ruling. After all, “we don’t know” can’t help but be a step up over “you get nothing.”

Way back in 1992, after years of disability lawyers complaining about ALJs who showed bias against people applying for disability benefits, the SSA released what they call a “Notice.” This notice described the procedure that they would use to handle these types of complaints. However, the procedure in the notice was considered “interim” rather than “final,” which basically meant that it couldn’t actually be used in practice.

No big deal, right? This is the way the SSA works with new rules. They publish a rough draft, work out the kinks, then release the final version so that it can be used in real cases. But here’s the problem: no final rules were ever published. For the last 20 years, claimants and reps have been able to point to the interim procedures as proof that the SSA knew there was a problem with biased judges, but they still couldn’t do anything about it unless they wanted to file a class action lawsuit against the SSA itself.