Disability backlog grows to 3 years

There's a maxim some people use to try to rationalize horrid dictatorships. They'll say a regime is brutal and tyrannical but at least it makes the trains run on time. This story, however, proves tyranny doesn't bring efficiency.

There's no doubt that Americans have enjoyed less and less freedom in recent years. I call it tyranny creep. Liberty gets chipped away little by little in the hopes people don't notice. Yet a strange thing has happened at the same time. While personal freedom becomes scarcer, government inefficiency grows at the same rate. Weird, huh? You might think it's because the government has to spend so much resources busting people for things that used to not be crimes that it just gums up everything else. And that's true to a large extent. But I think it's also true that the ruling party (and you know what party that is) was willing to sacrifice efficient government services in the name of cutting the "fat" out of the government, and that the patronage hacks they did hire are totally incompetent.

The fact is that most of America has been under a one-party Republican machine since the mid-'90s, and it's been unmistakably true at the national level in the current decade. Corruption does not breed well-organized government.

Now the New York Times reports that the backlog in Social Security disability claims has more than doubled just since 2000. Well, who's been running the country since then? This is one thing the ruling regime can't blame "the liberals" for - though I'm sure they will. There's now close to 800,000 Americans on this backlog waiting to collect disability benefits - which they already paid for. Worse, they now have to wait up to 3 years just for a decision on their claim! The average wait has nearly doubled since 2000.

Not only that, but it's harder to qualify than it used to be. So a disabled person may find their claim rejected and have to be hamstrung by more red tape.

The result of this is that many people who became disabled have had to declare bankruptcy - or if they were a small homeowner they ended up losing their house. That's one reason we need to have more laws to restrict foreclosures. Then again, authorities aren't required to enforce foreclosures to begin with (although they almost always do now). Some claimants even died before they saw any of the benefits from the system they paid into.

To help remedy this logjam, the Social Security Administration wants to hire 150 new appeals judges to handle cases. But this plan has been pushed back because that lying sack of shit Bush vetoed an important appropriations bill.

There's another problem you never hear about, and that's the so-called Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995. Seeing how this law was passed by the 104th Reich and all, the law means the exact opposite of its name. In other words, it creates more paperwork - which of course falls on the claimant. It used to be that once a claimant was found to be disabled, they were set until it came time for their doctor to see them again. The payments only stopped when the doctor decided the claimant's condition had improved enough. Now the government sends disabled Americans a seemingly constant stream of forms to fill out, which are inevitably followed by letters in which the government has scheduled an appointment with a doctor of the government's choosing (as opposed to the claimant's own doctor) at a time of the government's choosing. Often these doctors are miles from where the claimant lives. By the time a person is approved to keep collecting benefits, it's time for them to receive more forms and start the cycle over.

The ruling party tells the disabled that they're bilking the system even though they paid into it the whole time they worked. Ironically, the people who attack the disabled in this manner have never done any real work their whole lives.

The Republicans govern by talking about cleaning up "waste." What this means is that they eliminate important government jobs and let government functions not get carried out. When they do hire someone, it's usually some right-wing crony. I know this, because I've seen it in action for years. This is why you see some incompetent bully from high school getting a highly-paid government job while everyone else makes minimum wage at Hogg Mart.

If someone dies because they can't get disability benefits on time, that's more blood on the party's hands. Government policies have the power to hurt people. I've long supported a tribunal to try American government officials for crimes against humanity over the war on the poor of the '90s. It's fair to have a similar trial of Bush for knowingly allowing Social Security to amass such a big backlog that leads to deaths of claimants.

(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/us/10disability.html)