Month: February 2022

A long experience in frustration. Waiting for Social Security to approve disability benefits can be a painfully long process. According to the Social Security, it takes typically three to five months to get a decision on whether you qualify. And first-time applications for “regular disability” have an initial denial rate of about 65%. So most people going through the process are going to need to appeal to have a chance at getting benefits.

To speed things up, it can help to provide the critical information about your employment history and medical treatment as soon as possible in the process, including names of doctors and hospitals, dates of treatment, and a list of your employers in the past 15 years with job titles, duties, and the requirements that you can no longer meet. If possible, an opinion from your doctor(s) showing the things you can no longer do can help show you can no longer work on a regular, full-time basis. Filing an appeal on the date you get a denial in the mail can also make the process a little shorter.

You can file four levels of appeals – but I believe the most important one is the hearing before a judge. I tell people that is the real decision, where a win or a loss is likely to “stick.” And although winning in front of a judge is definitely not guaranteed, the odds are a little more in your favor than at the first stage, when you submitted your application.

Disability claims are down, for both insured and SSI claims. They are down to the smallest number since at least 2006, with a 13% drop in SSI claims over one year. But despite fewer claims going to the state agencies that review claims, there are longer processing times and growing backlogs. On average people are waiting six to eight weeks longer just for the initial-level decisions. And some have to wait much, much longer. Reconsideration delays are similarly growing. In short, Social Security is taking too long. We can’t even call adjudicators and rely on getting someone to talk to. The phone system appears to depend on callers getting fed up with the wait and hanging up. If that doesn’t work, the telephone system will just hang up on persistent callers.

The real problem is a lack of funding for sufficient staff to handle the calls Social Security gets. They have no choice but to deprive us of telephone service, at least until Congress properly funds them. Even though the number of new claims filed has gone down significantly since the Social Security offices closed their doors, cases are so piled up at the initial and appeal levels that many cases get sidetracked for months. Some even seem to get lost. Social Security adjudicators almost certainly get tired of lawyers repeatedly contacting them about cases, but if you’re one of those lawyers, it’s impossible to tell a case that’s just backlogged from one that’s just disappeared from the process.

Until more funding appears and more staff are hired, the lack of ability to deal with Americans who need Social Security will just keep growing.