http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9557763Oh my.
Any news having to do with the primitives' gravy train immediately catches their attention.
Joanne98 (1000+ posts) Sun Nov-14-10 02:42 PM
THE JOANNE98 PRIMITIVE, #07 TOP PRIMITIVE OF 2009
Original message
Social Security Judges Face Violent Threats
WASHINGTON — Judges who hear Social Security disability cases are facing a growing number of violent threats from claimants angry over being denied benefits or frustrated at lengthy delays in processing claims.
There were at least 80 threats to kill or harm administrative law judges or staff over the past year – an 18 percent increase over the previous reporting period, according to data collected by the agency.
The data was released to the Association of Administrative Law Judges and made available to The Associated Press.
One claimant in Albuquerque, N.M., called his congressman's office to say he was going to "take his guns and shoot employees" in the Social Security hearing office. In Eugene, Ore., a man who was denied benefits said he is "ready to join the Taliban and hurt some people." Another claimant denied benefits told a judge in Greenville, S.C., that he was a sniper in the military and "would go take care of the problem."
"I'm not sure the number is as significant as the kind of threats being made," said Randall Frye, a judge based in Charlotte, N.C., and the president of the judges' union. "There seem to be more threats of serious bodily harm, not only to the judge but to the judge's family."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/14/social-securit...
The judges are corrupt.
davidinalameda (1000+ posts) Sun Nov-14-10 02:44 PM
Response to Original message
1. corrupt?
in what way
ThomCat (1000+ posts) Sun Nov-14-10 03:33 PM
THE PRIMITIVE WHO LIKES.....oh, never mind
Response to Reply #1
8. Having first line people who are not medical professionals decide who gets disability, and by default they deny, deny, deny.
Your wait for an appeal takes an AVERAGE of 2.5 years and as long as 6 years! In that wait time, you are considered Not Disabled by every agency you need to go to for help, because Social Security turned you down.
It makes your life hell as a person with a disability, all because the social security administration wanted to save some money by hiring people who were not skilled medical professionals.
People DIE because of this decision. There will never be any way of knowing how many, because we have no way of knowing how many:
had no way of getting income and become homeless and died
were denied an essential service that they needed and died as a result
could not get any health care and died (if you need the care of a specialist, they may not accept medicaid, so you may absolutely need medicare to survive)
I am mostly home-bound because of my disability. A friend takes care of me in my home. She has moved in with me as my roommate. Trying to get a personal care aid from an agency was a nightmare because according to them, I am not disabled, because Social Security says so.
I have income only because my last employer, where I was a high level corporate consultant, has the foresight to provide disability insurance for me as a perk. I have a percentage of my salary until I am 65 years old. (In another post I could tell you about how that insurance companies is scamming and cheating us, even here. It cheats me out of about 20% of the income I should have received. But that's another post.) If I had to depend upon Social Security, I'd have starved 2.5 years ago.
I'd have instead been depending only upon public assistance for the last 2.5 years, and almost certainly been homeless, but for a home-bound person to navigate and get public assistance successfully is nearly impossible.
All of this because Social Security has a mandate to save money. That mandate started under Clinton, and never stopped.
Is saving money that important?
Should it ever be that important?
What else would you call that, if not corrupt?
Yeah. Saving money's pretty important.
And one way to save money is by not giving the above primitive any money; better to spend it on those who really need the help.
(Disclosure: the ThomCat primitive is a notorious layabout, and his request to board the gravy train was denied last year because it was determined he's just lazy, nothing more than that.)
liberalhistorian (1000+ posts) Sun Nov-14-10 05:13 PM
SOMEONE WHOSE HUSBAND IS A SOCIAL SECURITY ATTORNEY
Response to Reply #8
14. While everything you say is quite true, it isn't just the mandate to save money that is the cause of this, it's the fact that the SSA has been severely underfunded these past nine years, beginning with G.W. Bush's presidency. You know, the "starve the government then claim it doesn't work" model of business. As a result, the agency is grossly understaffed and underfunded, with some offices in major cities even being closed, at the very time when there are more applicants, and more desperation, than ever.
The thing is, many people are denied because they don't have specialist attorneys and, thus, don't know how to navigate the system. It is a very specialized area of both the law and government and it takes a long time for even attorneys to learn the ropes with it. Most attorneys will not charge anything for it until you are granted benefits, then will take a percentage of the lump sum of the retroactive benefits you receive at first once your disability is granted.
Most people don't want to do that because they see that percentage going to the attorney, but what they need to do is think long-term. They are generally not going to be granted benefits if they don't have an attorney, except in really severe, cut-and-dry cases, which are very rare. You are almost always denied at first, no matter how legitimate the case, they make you fight for it. Attorneys know the specialized law, they know how to navigate the system and how best to present your case, and their involvement can cut down greatly on the amount of time you'll wait to receive benefits. And I wouldn't complain about fees, either, most who work on contingency take the chance that you won't be granted benefits and they won't be paid, and most work for months, if not a couple of years, receiving nothing. And the work is very intense and complex, also, it's not just a matter of knowing how to fill out the paperwork and shuffling papers. Far from it.
ThomCat (1000+ posts) Sun Nov-14-10 05:50 PM
THE PRIMITIVE WHO LIKES.....oh, never mind
Response to Reply #14
19. It has nothing to do with navigating the system.
There is nothing to navigate. Do you know anything first hand?
You fill out the application for hearing. You present your medical information. If you have an attorney you provide your attorney's information. Then you wait. That's it. That's Everything.
You should get called in for an interview by the person reviewing your case. But that doesn't always happen.
If you get approved, good for you. If you don't get approved, you will be given a bureaucratic reason why. Either way, you receive the notice int he mail. It takes about 6 months to get this notice from when you applies for your disability application.
If you were rejected, you have to apply for an appeal. You have 30 days to file for that appeal. The appeal is handled by a judge. The wait is as little as 1 year, and average of 2.5 years, or as long as 6 years.
That is the entire system. Everything! There is nothing, nothing, nothing to navigate. All an attorney does for you is show up at the interview, and/or the appeal to answer questions for you. They cannot do anything else for you.
Many attorneys, at the interview, will deliberately cause their clients to lose the case and go to an appeal. Why, because that DOUBLES the percentage that the attorney gets for representing your case.
All attorneys work for a percentage of your first year's benefits. That is the law in SS cases. All of them. Not Most. All of them.
The fact that the percentage doubles if your case gets to the appeal level, and that attorneys take advantage of this, is very well known among disability advocates, and they will warn you if they know you are applying for disability. Especially if they know you are represented by one of the major law firms that are well known for always doing this. So it usually does not make any sense to get an attorney until the appeal stage. Just show up on your own for the interview if you are called, bring all your medical records, and be prepared to answer questions. You will know your medical records better than your attorney anyway.
It is nice if you to respond to my posts, but it really seems like you don't know what you are talking about. You seem to be posting so that you can defend those poor misunderstood attorneys.
franksolich is pissed now. The above primitive doesn't know who the liberalhistorian is.
The liberalhistorian knows more what she's talking about in her little finger, than the above primitive knows in his whole head.
franksolich is pissed.
davidinalameda (1000+ posts) Sun Nov-14-10 06:20 PM
Response to Reply #8
22. but does that make the judges corrupt?
it makes the system ****ed up but it in no way makes the judges corrupt
ThomCat (1000+ posts) Sun Nov-14-10 06:56 PM
THE PRIMITIVE WHO LIKES.....oh, never mind
Response to Reply #22
25. It makes the system corrupt. If the judges are going along with it and voluntarily purging people, then yes, they are also corrupt.
If there are honest judges fighting to get people into the system so they get all the benefits they are entitled to, then no, those judges are not corrupt. They are just the easiest targets for the people who are incredibly frustrated and angry because the entire system is corrupt.
So, the answer is, it depends.
In general, I would say that Social Security is systematically defrauding people out of social security disability, and at least some Judges MUST have a hand in it. There is definitely SOME corruption involved.
People are paying into social security. People have a right to that social security. But the system has been rigged so that most people who become disabled and need it will never, ever see a penny of that money.
Many who have severe disabilities will die before they can collect just because of the automatic delays, and the long, years long waits for appeals. The mortality rates for people with serious disabilities, combined with crushing poverty, (and a high chance of homelessness) a significant number probably won't live to see their appeal.
As morbid as this sounds, this is probably a deliberate cost savings strategy. Make a certain predictable percentage die before they can collect. The higher the denial rate, and longer the wait, the higher the attrition rate.
I'm sure they have a bland, whitewashed table for it somewhere in an accountant's office with cost savings calculated.
Judges are being pressured to purge an additional X%, and extend waits by an additional Y weeks, leading to Z Million dollar additional savings this year.
Yeah, how could that be anything but corrupt if it boils down to suffering and the gradual lost lives of real people?
The real problem is how do we ever prove it when Social Security never releases information that can be used to study the mortality of clients after filing, how cases are handled, and internal policies over time?
The government will happily give away our private information in many other agencies and departments, as long as they're giving it to corporations (see medicare and patient info, Dept of the Interior and info on indigenous peoples, CDC and medical info if it's politically convenient, etc.) but here they won't give out anything supposedly in the name of privacy, but it is really in the name of covering their asses. The double standard in where and when and how our personal information is handles is often astounding. Only when it is in their best interest is our information suddenly in a lock-box, so that nobody can study it.
Without studies of how our cases have been handled, we will never prove the corruption. And that's the way they want it. No agency ever wants accountability.
tularetom (1000+ posts) Sun Nov-14-10 02:54 PM
THE PRIMITIVE WITH LAKEFRONT REAL-ESTATE
Response to Original message
2. Gee, who could have ever seen this coming?
This is what we have to look forward to after the recommendations of the deficit commission are adopted. Except an order of magnitude or two more frequent. And worse.
(Disclosure: the primitive with lakefront real-estate out there in an exclusive area of California, who prospered mightily during the lousy George Bush economy, is retired with a comfortable pension gotten in a lifetime governmental job, and has a whole stable of horses. His wife is on the social security disability gravy train.)
ThomCat (1000+ posts) Sun Nov-14-10 03:05 PM
THE PRIMITIVE WHO LIKES.....oh, never mind
Response to Original message
5. I keep hearing about more and more of us getting denied for bullshit reasons. There seems to be a purge going on. Nobody will officially admit that there is a purge. But it seems that every effort is being made to come up with excuses to deny benefits to people, no matter how absurd those excuses are.
If you have a "celebrity disability" or a "simple diagnosis" you have it easier. That means that you have something with a name. You can tell the judge what your disability is in 3 words or less. If a doctor backs up the diagnosis, I keep hearing that you're pretty good to go.
But everyone else, all the rest of us, who have collections of symptoms that add up to a disability, or syndromes that are disabling, we have to argue for everything. We have to methodically prove each and every symptom and every limitation.
And the more complicated our medical case, the more stuff we need to argue and defend, the less they want to hear about it. It's long and tiring, and very, very boring.
All a judge has to do is nit-pick and argue that "I don't believe that this one symptom is really as bad as you think it is." It's subjective. It's impossible to prove. It's your word against the judge. And once the judge decides that you're being dishonest about one symptom, every symptom is in doubt, and everything slides downhill. One by one, everything can get denied and suddenly you're declared "not disabled" regardless of what your doctors say and all that pile of medical documentation. Just because the judge was bored, or tired, or in a bad mood. And then what are you going to do?
And what if it wasn't because the judge was tired or bored or in a bad mood? What if it really was deliberate because the judge has numbers to meet? What if the judge has to remove a certain number of people from the rolls this month, and by the end of this year? How are we going to know that? How are we going to prove it? We'll only know it for sure as a statistical trend looking back years from now if that data is eventually released to researchers.
I have a hearing scheduled for the end of this month. I've waited two and a half years for this hearing, and it is scheduled for the Friday after Thanksgiving, on a day the Judge is definitely not going to want to be there. He's going to want to get out there as quickly as possible, and my case is a complicated one.
I would be a fool to say I'm not scared about what that judge is going to be thinking and what is going to happen...
If I were the above primitive, I'd be scared. I wouldn't even show up for the hearing.
ThomCat (1000+ posts) Sun Nov-14-10 04:09 PM
THE PRIMITIVE WHO LIKES.....oh, never mind
Response to Reply #10
11. That's it right there. If you don't have an attorney they dismiss your case no matter what evidence you have. They want to force you to hire an attorney, as if giving a huge chunk of money to some rich guy to speak for you for a few minutes somehow makes you credible, but you have no credibility without an attorney. That is exactly the attitude.
It is YOUR disability money that YOU paid into, but unless you are willing to give it away to an attorney, you will never see any of it.
liberalhistorian (1000+ posts) Sun Nov-14-10 05:19 PM
THE MEMBER OF SKINS'S ISLAND WHO KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT SHE'S TALKING ABOUT
Response to Reply #11
15. Excuse me, but most ss attorneys I know are not rich by any means, far from it. And it is NOT NOT NOT just a matter of "speaking for you for a few minutes". There is a LOT of complex work that goes on in preparing and presenting cases and it takes years of hard, rigorous study to first get a law degree in the first place and then to become an expert in what is a very specialized, complex area of law. Most work on a contingency basis and can work for months or years on a case without being paid anything and they'll get nothing if the claim is ultimately denied. How many people would work for months or years for no money? Many I've known have actually closed their practices and gone on to something else because they weren't making it. Many do it because they genuinely want to help and hate the way the system is as much as those who are stuck in it do.
ThomCat (1000+ posts) Sun Nov-14-10 05:34 PM
THE PRIMITIVE WHO LIKES.....oh, never mind
Response to Reply #15
18. My attorney had me do all the work collecting all my records which is often most of the hours. He met with me for half an hour 2.5 years ago. He is meeting with me for an hour later this month before the hearing. At then he will be at the hearing itself. That's it. Total!
I have been asking around to all the people I know who gone through this before me (quite a few, given that I volunteered with an advocacy group for people with disabilities for years) and you are the FIRST person to tell me that this isn't typical. All the feedback I have getting, some of it less than polite, is saying that the attorneys typically give you only a few hours of their time total. The big law firms that specialize in disability claims apparently make a system out of it so that they are able to give the absolute minimum time.
Of attorneys change their practice to start handing some other type of law, that's probably because they were not getting enough clients.
Months or years? No attorney that I've ever heard of puts months or years into a disability case. That's fantasy!
And, yes, they all work on a contingency basis. They are REQUIRED to work on a contingency basis. That's how the social security system works. Attorneys get paid a percentage of their client's first year's social security payments, regardless of the number of hours they put in. So they have no incentive to put in a lot of hours. 1 hour, or 100, they get paid exactly the same percentage.
That is exactly why attorneys put in so little time. Do you really think attorneys are going to invest more time than they need to when their pay isn't going to change? Do you think attorney's aren't smart enough to realize that they make the same money even if they only do the minimum? Do you really think they aren't smart enough to realize that in this system their income comes from Volume of total customers, not from number of hours?
The liberalhistorian not only "thinks," dumb****; she KNOWS.
franksolich is pissed. Primitives don't know shit.
