Washington, Dec 14 : In an effort to ease the burden of being stricken with a
debilitating condition, the Social Security Administration is expanding a
program that fast-tracks disability claims by people who get serious illnesses
such as cancer, early-onset Alzheimer's and Lou Gehrig's disease — claims that
could take months or years to approve in the past.
While providing faster
benefits, the program also is designed to ease the workload of an agency that
has been swamped by disability claims since the economic recession a few years
ago.
Disability claims are up by more than 20 percent from 2008. The
Compassionate Allowances program approves many claims for a select group of
conditions within a few days, Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue said.
The program is being expanded to include a total of 200 diseases and
conditions.
Many of the conditions are rare; all of them are so serious
that people who suffer from them easily meet the government's definition of
being disabled, Astrue said. With proper documentation, these are relatively
easy cases for the agency to decide, too easy to put through the usual
time-consuming process that other applicants face, he said.
"Why for
someone who is going to die within 15 months do we need 15 years of medical
records?" Astrue said in an interview. "If somebody's got a confirmed diagnosis
of ALS, you know that in essence, it's not only a disability, it's a death
sentence, and there is no use in burdening them with paperwork."
High
demand during the sour economy has made it difficult for Social Security to
reduce disability claims backlogs and wait times for decisions. About 3.2
million people have applied for disability benefits this year, up from 2.6
million in 2008, the agency said.
Disability claims usually increase when
the economy is bad because people who managed to work even though they had a
disability lose their jobs and apply for benefits. Others who have disabilities
may not qualify for benefits but apply anyway because they are unemployed and
have nowhere else to turn.
Two-thirds of initial applications are
rejected, according to the agency. If your benefit claim is rejected, you can
appeal to an administrative law judge but the hearing process takes an average
of 354 days to get a decision. In 2008, it took an average of 509 days,
according to agency statistics.
Judge Randy Frye, president of the
Association of Administrative Law Judges, said judges have been working hard to
reduce backlogs while some decide more than 500 cases a year. But, Frye said,
his group was not consulted on the Compassionate Allowances program.
"We
want claimants that are worthy of the benefits, that meet the definitional
standard for disability, to be paid as quickly as possible," said Frye, who is
an administrative law judge in Charlotte, N.C. "On the other hand, I think we
are not interested in seeing programs designed to simply pay down the backlog.
Whether this is that kind of program or not, I don't know."
Social
Security's standard is to award benefits to people who cannot work because they
have a medical condition that is expected to last at least one year or result in
death.
More than 56 million people get Social Security benefits. Nearly
11 million beneficiaries are disabled workers, spouses and children. Benefits
for disabled workers average $1,112 a month, or about $13,300 a year.
The
Compassionate Allowances program is designed to render decisions in 10 days to
15 days. It was started in 2008, about a year after the agency did an internal
review of how it handled initial applications from people with a handful of
serious but rare conditions.
In about 40 percent of the cases studied,
the agency mishandled the claim, either rejecting valid claims or taking too
long to approve them, Astrue said. Among the conditions studied was ALS, also
known as Lou Gehrig's disease, a debilitating condition that causes people to
lose muscle strength and coordination, eventually making it impossible to do
routine tasks such as walking up steps, standing or even
swallowing.
Since the Compassionate Allowances program was started,
200,000 people have received expedited benefits, Astrue said. The agency is
scheduled to announce that it is adding 35 more diseases and conditions to the
program, bringing the total to 200.
The program includes some well-known
conditions, including many kinds of cancer such as acute leukemia, adult
non-Hodgkin lymphoma and advanced breast cancer that has spread to other parts
of the body.
Others are more obscure, such as Alpers disease, a
progressive neurologic disorder that begins during childhood, type 2 Gaucher
disease, an inherited disorder in which the body accumulates harmful quantities
of certain fats, and Menkes disease, a genetic disorder that affects the
development of hair, brain, bones, liver and arteries.
"Some of the
(conditions) aren't killing you, some of them are just keeping you to the point
where you can't physically work," said Peter Saltonstall, president and CEO of
the National Organization for Rare Disorders. "But you're still alive and
breathing, and in that case you need to buy groceries, you need to be able to
support yourself in some fashion. And so this is a program that helped solve
that problem."
Robert Egge, vice president of public policy for the
Alzheimer's Association, said the program is a godsend for people who have just
received diagnoses that promise to be extraordinarily difficult for patients and
their families.
"This is difficult for anybody to negotiate," Egge said
of the disability claims process. "But by the nature of the disease it can often
be especially difficult for this community, as they are dealing with not only a
terrible diagnosis but then the nature of the disease makes it very hard to go
through this year-by-year process of getting the benefits they are entitled to
under the law."
Ends
SA/EN
