It's really damn difficult. The stats I have seen are 2% on first try and they usually have an attorney going in. Even so, it takes 2 years before medical benefits kick in after you have been accepted. It's a maze so if you have a person that is mentally ill or intellectually disabled they aren't going to be able to navigate that.
That's utter bullshit, and you damn well know it!
If that were true, no one would have been able to get disability under Obama and the number of people on SSI disability literally exploded during his term in office. If you didn't want to work, all you had to do was file for some imagined disability and you were set!
No. In fact, one of the groups I work with are those that have severe mental illness often untreated, intellectual disabilities and some with physical disabilities that on top of all of that are freaking homeless. Obama was not the really great guy that just opened up the doors and welcomed all. The Democrats are not some really great life saving mofos. The changes occurred over several decades.
Look now, there is the Social Security Administration and then it shifts:
The field office is responsible for verifying non-medical eligibility requirements, which may include age, employment, marital status, or Social Security coverage information. The field office then sends the case to a DDS for evaluation of disability.
The DDSs, which are fully funded by the Federal Government, are State agencies responsible for developing medical evidence and making the initial determination on whether or not a claimant is disabled or blind under the law.
Usually, the DDS tries to obtain evidence from the claimant's own medical sources first. If that evidence is unavailable or insufficient to make a determination, the DDS will arrange for a consultative examination (CE) to obtain the additional information needed. The claimant's treating source is the preferred source for the CE, but the DDS may obtain the CE from an independent source. After completing its development of the evidence, trained staff at the DDS makes the initial disability determination.
Then, the DDS returns the case to the field office for appropriate action. If the DDS found that the claimant is disabled, SSA completes any outstanding non-disability development, computes the benefit amount, and begins paying benefits. If the claimant was found not to be disabled, the file is kept in the field office in case the claimant decides to appeal the determination.
Disability Determination Process
Depending on the state, what many of them did was shift the cost of TANF in which the states had to come up with the money to match to federal funds onto SSDI which is federally funded.
Like so:
PCG is a private company that states pay to comb their welfare rolls and move as many people as possible onto disability. "What we're offering is to work to identify those folks who have the highest likelihood of meeting disability criteria," Pat Coakley, who runs PCG's Social Security Advocacy Management team, told me.
The company has an office in eastern Washington state that's basically a call center, full of headsetted women in cubicles who make calls all day long to potentially disabled Americans, trying to help them discover and document their disabilities:
"The high blood pressure, how long have you been taking medications for that?" one PCG employee asked over the phone the day I visited the company. "Can you think of anything else that's been bothering you and disabling you and preventing you from working?"
The PCG agents help the potentially disabled fill out the Social Security disability application over the phone. And by help, I mean the agents actually do the filling out. When the potentially disabled don't have the right medical documentation to prove a disability, the agents at PCG help them get it. They call doctors' offices; they get records faxed. If the right medical records do not exist, PCG sets up doctors' appointments and calls applicants the day before to remind them of those appointments.
PCG also works very, very hard to make the people who work at the Social Security happy. Whenever the company wins a new contract, Coakley will personally introduce himself at the local Social Security Administration office, and see how he can make things as easy as possible for the administrators there.
"We go through even to the point, frankly, of do you like things to be stapled or paper-clipped?" he told me. "Paper clips wins out a lot of times because they need to make photocopies and they don't want to be taking staples out."
There's a reason PCG goes to all this trouble. The company gets paid by the state every time it moves someone off of welfare and onto disability. In recent contract negotiations with Missouri, PCG asked for $2,300 per person. For Missouri, that's a deal -- every time someone goes on disability, it means Missouri no longer has to send them cash payments every month. For the nation as a whole, it means one more person added to the disability rolls.
http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
If you aren't on that list of people receiving TANF, then what?
