Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
March 24, 2009 at 08:00 PM
Cash-strapped states are aggravating Social Security Disability Insurance benefits decision delays by putting SSDI staffers on unpaid leave – even though the federal government pays the staffers’ salaries.
Witnesses talked about the furloughs during a hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee income security subcommittee on efforts to eliminate the Social Security disability backlog.
Private disability insurers are eager to see the SSDI backlog eliminated, in part because they believe their seriously disabled claimant deserve to collect SSDI benefits – and to qualify after 2 years on SSDI for access to Medicare health insurance benefits for the disabled – and in part because they coordinate their own benefits with SSDI benefits.
The number of backlogged SSDI claims was about 576,000 in 2006, according to written testimony submitted by Daniel Bertoni, a U.S. Government Accountability Office director.
The size of the backlog was about the same as in 2005, but it was 40% bigger than in 2002, Bertoni estimates.
Peggy Hathaway, vice president of the United Spinal Association, Silver Spring, Md., who testified on behalf of the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities Social Security Task Force, presented bleaker backlog statistics.
The number of pending cases fell to 765,527 in February, down from 768,540 in December 2008, but the backlog is up from almost none in 1997, Hathaway reports in her written testimony.
Rick Warsinskey, a Social Security district office manager in Cleveland, said staffing shortages and the high volume of calls have forced many Social Security Administration offices to all but give up on answer the telephones.
In written testimony, Warsinskey quoted the following SSA district manager survey response:
Most days, we are so short of staff that we don’t even assign a person to answer the incoming lines. What we do instead is just pick up the phone when it goes to over ring, which is 20 minutes after it goes to hold. Usually I am the one who answers it then. Our phone service is deplorable. And we are so busy interviewing face-to-face or teleclaims or adjudicating Internet claims that we don’t return phone calls left on voicemail promptly either.
