Effective October 1, 2019 Social Security is changing the process for getting a disability decision.
Applicants now wait up to 18 months to get a hearing before an administrative law judge. Many die waiting for a hearing that could have approved their disability benefits.
Social Security has promised that they will take action. They have. They are going to make it a lost worse.
Beginning in October of 2019, claimants who are denied for benefits in Alabama can no longer file an appeal with an administrative law judge. They will have to re-file with the same state agency which denied them in the first place. The state agency will "reconsider," (meaning delay) the decision, adding several additional months to the process.
One might ask, will this "Reconsideration" process approve claims without the need for a hearing? The answer is no, it won't. Forty states have used the Reconsideration process for years. Tennessee uses it. And it results in no significant number of approvals. It only delays.
So, an already over burdened and barely functioning system adds more bureaucratic delays. The main problems with Reconsideration include:
1. The Disability Determination Service (DDS), which makes the initial decision on disability applications, has an error rate of up to 50 percent. This is evidenced by the fact that a large number of denials get reversed when the cases come before judges.
2. The DDS is already over worked and too slow. When you dump tens of thousands of Reconsideration cases on the agency, they will be even slower.
3. The Reconsideration process is of questionable value to begin with. The same agency looks at the same set of data and, in about 98 percent of cases, makes the same decision--often flawed. It's the fox guarding the chicken coop.
4. Neither the claimant nor his/her representative gets to appear for this Reconsideration.
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