In March, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) testified before the House Committee on Ways and Means on the dismal the state of our Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program run by the Social Security Administration (SSA). For those unfamiliar, SSDI is an insurance program that provides a monthly income for people who cannot work due to illness or injury.
During this hearing the CBO stated that between fiscal years 1970 and 2012, DI expenditures on benefits (adjusted for inflation) rose more than ninefold. The CBO also went on to testify that when the SSA found issues of fraud, the cost of resolving the matter was often more costly than the fraud originally.
In an 18-month investigation launched by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, auditors found that during a five year period between 2006 and 2010, “25 percent of 300 sampled disability cases were granted benefits without properly addressing insufficient, contradictory and incomplete evidence.” The study also determined that many of the opinions given by Adjudication Law Judges (ALJ) were “childlike,” at best. One of the more striking focuses on “16 disability opinions by ALJ Howard O’Bryan, age 87, of Oklahoma City, OK. (These) stand out for their numerous problems and require their own analysis. Judge O’Bryan’s opinions not only lacked sufficient judicial analysis or evidentiary support, but were at times incomprehensible.”
Among other findings in the report:
* ALJs failed to hold proper hearings, preventing them from collecting objective and useful information.
* SSA relied on insufficient and contradictory medical evidence at every level in the application process.
* ALJs often gave most weight to medical records from attorneys and least weight to independent DDS doctors.
The Social Security Administration’s (SSA) incompetence has led to 8.8 million disabled workers as of January 2013, totaling nearly $135 billion in benefit payments and a projected bankruptcy date of 2016.
Putting SSA’s ineptitude and financial problems aside – If you want to see the effects it has on the very people it is supposed to help, take a minute and review the recent NPR Report “Unfit For Work”
