Although a 60 Minutes broadcast recently depicted Social Security Disability as an excessively liberal system that hands out money to everyone and his or her dog, that couldn't be further from the truth.
The present grant rate for Social Security judges nationwide is at an all-time low. According to www.disabilityjudges.com, only 44% of individuals who attend a Social Security hearing are granted benefits. At the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR) in Hartford, Connecticut, the grant rate is even lower: 42%.
As an attorney whose practice is limited to representing Social Security claimants, I can attest to the dramatic changes in the system since 2001. Overall, the judges are getting tougher- much tougher. Whereas many judges used to grant benefits over 60% of the time, some with grant rates over 80%, the typical judge today is safely within the 35-49% range.
Why the change? Are people not as disabled as they used to be?
Many factors play into the higher rates of denial. It is true that The Great Recession caused many non-disabled people to apply for benefits when their unemployment or welfare related subsidies ran out.
However, the main reason for the increased denial rate is that the Baby Boomers are getting older, so the volume of applicants with disabilities has greatly increased. Now combine this reality with the fact that the trust fund that supports Social Security Disability will run out of money in 2016, and you get an unbelievably harsh and unfair outcome: many judges are denying more claims to save the system money.
I am not saying that all judges are motivated by this misguided sense of financial responsibility. Nor am I saying that the judges with ever-increasing rates of denial may even be aware of the changing mindset in the system as a whole, and how it impacts their decision-making process. That said, the changing mindset is real. There seems to be a greater suspicion towards the claimants and the lawyers who represent them, and this fuels higher denial rates. It also makes for some very adversarial hearings in a system that is, in theory, designed to be "non-adversarial."
Such an outcome is wrong on so many levels.
Should a Social Security judge see him or herself as a fiscal steward of the trust fund? Should that motivation guide his or her decisions in the courtroom? I was always taught that a judge acts as a politically neutral arbitrator, objectively applying the law to the facts and arriving at a consistent outcome. Thus, the person granted benefits in 2001 should be granted benefits today. Fundamentally, Social Security law has stayed the same, and facts are facts, after all.
Sadly, many Social Security judges across the nation have been placed in the position of enabling our pitifully dysfunctional Congress and its inability to fix Social Security. It is the role of the legislative branch to find solutions to the financial plight of the Social Security program, not the individual judges who determine the issue of medical disability.
Unfortunately, Congress has a 13% approval rating, and rightfully so. This ineffective body of politicians fights like children while the Social Security trust fund is on the brink of bankruptcy. In turn, Social Security judges become increasingly more conservative and denial oriented as a misplaced and entirely ineffective way of "saving" the system.
In the end, truly disabled individuals are denied benefits. And this, my friends, is wrong.
