Make sure you show this to your leftist friends and remind them that if they want their healthcare run like this, all they have to is vote for a Democrat (or Romney).
Steadily lengthening delays in the resolution of Social Security disability claims have left hundreds of thousands of people in a kind of purgatory, now waiting as long as three years for a decision.
Two-thirds of those who appeal an initial rejection eventually win their cases.
But in the meantime, more and more people have lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or even died while awaiting an appeals hearing, say lawyers representing claimants and officials of the Social Security Administration, which administers disability benefits for those judged unable to work or who face terminal illness.
The agency’s new plan to hire at least 150 new appeals judges to whittle down the backlog, which has soared to 755,000 from 311,000 in 2000, will require $100 million more than the president requested this year and still more in the future. The plan has been delayed by the standoff between Congress and the White House over domestic appropriations.
There are 1,025 judges currently at work, and the wait for an appeals hearing averages more than 500 days, compared with 258 in 2000. Without new hirings, federal officials predict even longer waits and more of the personal tragedies that can result from years of painful uncertainty.
…
The disability process is complex, and the standard for approval has, from the inception of the program in the 1950s, been intentionally strict to prevent malingering and drains on the treasury. But it is also inevitably subjective in some cases, like those involving mental illness or pain that cannot be tested.
In a standard tougher than those of most private plans, recipients must prove that because of physical or mental disabilities they are unable to do “any kind of substantial work†for at least 12 months — if an engineer could not do his job but could work as a clerk, he would not qualify — or prove that an illness is expected “to result in death.â€
And an increasing number of appeals are ending in the death of the petitioner because the court dates are so far in the future.
Sure, a private company can deny a claim, but they aren’t also the judge. Modern civil justice can be slow, but not “500 days to prove you’re really disabled” slow.
But hey, if we didn’t have liberals to only think an idea halfway through, what would we do?
Oh.
To be fair, the article you quoted talks about Suplemental Security Income, SSI, which is disability and NOT retirement. Those are two very distinctly separate parts of the Social Security system.
SSI has been badly abused. Under the (D)onk administration of Jimmah, drug addicts were put on it because drug addiction had just been designated a “disease” (by the CDC in Atlanta, where else?). It took a lot of years, into the late 90’s, before this absurdity was corrected by Congress.
In the meanwhile, a branch of the legal fraternity grew up which does nothing but twist the government’s arm to approve disability claims under SSI. Even after Congress removed the dope addicts from SSI, the sharks remained, and the usual dot.gov reaction to getting sued is to s.l.o.w. everything down, so that is why this process got stretched out as much as it did. The sharks also inserted language in the appeals process which gives them more fees (they win, the dot.gov pays their fees) with more appeal twists, so they don’t always use the most expedient ways to appeal.
This is also a case of just how political the liberal Federal judiciary is: any of those judges COULD entertain a motion to speed up any particular appeal, but then that would short the fees which their buddies, the sharks get.
The same reasons coming from the same places are why the addition of more appeals officers hasn’t happened.
The sharks like the system just like it is, and don’t want it changed to improve either the dot.gov’s lot or the lot of the claims applicants. At any point, the Federal judiciary could order the appointment of pro-tem judicial referees to hear this backlog of cases, so ask your friendly local magistrate why they don’t do that.