One Million and Counting

Opinion today by the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle

RJE - Good factual article. While the article mentions fraud as a factor, it pales in comparison to under staffing. SSA employees are aging, burning out and retiring. Processing claims requires a skill set that takes years to learn. Even if Congress were to wake up and increase staffing, the results will be slow as staff come into competency. System changes, like the ones Mr. Astrue has been pushing, must be coupled with staff increases. And, accountability for employees at all levels should accompany increases. Morale is low in many offices, from the local SSA Field Offices, to the Disability Determination Services in each state and in the Appeals offices where too few Administrative Law Judges are under pressure for more and faster hearings with little accountability. System changes must include more than staffing, fraud finding and tweaking. All aspects of SSA should be re evaluated and simplified. One step that SSA took several years ago was implementing Process Unification. That kind of bold, systemic change is what the agency needs in our opinion ...

One million people by 2010. That's the estimated backlog of pending cases for Social Security Disability Insurance benefits.To handle that increase, due largely in part to the aging of baby boomers, the approval and appeals process must be altered.The Social Security Administration is making an effort to screen and prioritize cases that are or will be 1,000 days old by the end of September.That's a start. But those are just bare minimums. Implementing those things won't be enough to address the growing backlog, currently at 745,000 cases.

Michael Astrue, SSA commissioner, blames understaffing and an increase in claims. While not much can be done to decrease the number of claims as boomers age, an increase in staffing should be a top priority. Congress, which has provided an annual average of $150 million less to SSA than President Bush has requested since 2001, needs to ease the strain on the system.Practicing fiscal responsibility as well as preventing fraudulent claims from slipping through are priorities. Yet ensuring that the country's disabled population is being adequately and promptly assisted is of greater import.

Some people have been able to get assistance through other avenues such as Veterans Affairs benefits while waiting on SSDI benefits, but not everyone has that option. The long waits — the national average is 17 months — are leading to troubling outcomes such as bankruptcies, foreclosures, drug use and even suicide.

Allowing a streamlined process for those applicants who have already gone through an extensive vetting process from the VA or suffer from a certain type of disability may be one way to decrease caseloads. Change is needed immediately. Congress and SSA officials must act or the future of the country's disabled population will grow even bleaker.