Almost 110,000 people died, between 2008 to 2019, as they awaited outcome of an appeal after initially being denied Social Security disability benefits, according to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Between 2014 and 2019, 50,000 people filed for bankruptcy waiting for their cases to be resolved. The appeals backlog swelled to a median wait time of 839 days — more than two years — in 2015, although by last year the waiting game had shrunk to 506 days, the GAO said.
“We have had clients who have died while they were waiting for hearings,” Claire Grandison, a staff attorney at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, where she works on applications for so-called Supplemental Security Income (SSI), told CBS MoneyWatch. “We have had clients with horrible outcomes — evictions, utility shut-offs and declining health even before the point that they pass away,” She was quoted as saying in a CBS news report.
The Social Security Administration operates two programs that provide disability payments: SSI, which offers financial assistance to working-age adults who can’t work because of a physical or mental disability; and Disability Insurance (DI), which is targeted to lower-income people.
The backlog of appeals swelled after the Great Recession, partly due to an increase in applications. Grandison now worries that the economic chaos caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which has driven unemployment to levels not seen since the Great Depression, will again cause the appeals process to bog down after the Social Security Administration made progress in recent years. Disability applications have dropped during the health crisis, but could jump once the worst is over, she said.
The findings underscore the need to whittle the appeals backlog and provide more funding for Social Security, according to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent, and Rep. John B. Larson of Connecticut, a Democrat, who commissioned the GAO study.
“It is absolutely unconscionable that thousands of Americans suffer and die every year waiting for a final decision to get the modest Social Security benefits they need to survive,” Sanders said in a statement. “People with disabilities trying to access their earned benefits are forced to wait years before they even get a hearing.”
