CHEFILEPTIC

55. SS round 2 (2015)

For anyone listening that hasn’t already heard, I eventually developed a habit of referring to Social Security simply as SS—mostly to save myself repeated typing and misspelling as I’ve written, but eventually this habit was validated for another obscure reason that I’ll discuss in this chapter.  Doing this certainly saves syllables.  So, if you hear me say SS that’s what I’m talking about. 

Anyways…  I’ll begin this chapter by saying straight out that there really isn’t anything funny about the Social Security system of the United States.

Except for one thing.  Well, maybe a few things.

Come to think of it, over a number of years I’ve wound up having fun with it.  Plenty, actually… I’ve just had to re-define what I call fun. 

Glee-filled as my entire experience has ended up being, though, at all points through my long dance with this fine system, I’ve always hoped that all that fun would be ending soon (believe it or not).  And as much as I always liked to think that somehow Social Security and I could still have a nice time together when I hit the ‘normal’ retirement age and all, I still wanted very much to not need to be needing to have yet more ‘good times’ with it–at all in my future.

Sometimes, I’ve found myself wandering off to ‘fantasy-land’, I must admit.  Looking back, if I only knew that I wouldn’t need disability-related ‘assistance’ ever again, I could’ve just told that machine to take my case and roll it up and shove it up its proverbial you-know-where… but, I didn’t know.   

I’ve heard for many years now that it’s very possible that the system won’t even exist anymore by the time I hit retirement age, so I guess that would make the matter moot anyways.  Either way, I’ve heard each round of presidents and politicians blame each other for the state of it ever since I had any reason to pay attention.  At every election cycle, the old un-solved problem gets dusted off again, and we hear how ‘the sky will be falling soon’ all because of each other.  It’s gone on for so long now that all related rhetoric just sounds like a wash of radio static when I hear it argued over now. 

Truth is, nobody giving lip-service about it now invented it—any ‘leader’ who was in office back at its start in 1935 is dead now, having no need to worry; it did, after all, stay intact through the end of their lives.

After I was finally forced to stop working, I had no reasonable expectation that I would be alive much longer, yet back in 2014 there I was again, filling out yet another round of paper-waste asking for what I didn’t want, once again.  It was my second-round of my second-round—I was then appealing the first ‘layer’ of my second rejection–and I was following the advice I’d gotten from one of the lawyers I’d consulted with because it was clearly the most logical path. 

You see, in spite of whether or not I felt disabled or really wanted to work or not, SS was then so backed up that it would’ve probably taken about 14 months for me to get a ‘hearing’, and as the lawyer I’d talked to made clear, if I had thought that there might have been any possibility that I could have ended up having more seizures by the time of that hearing, I needed to make sure to keep my case ‘active’.  That way, if I ended up being approved, I would be back-paid to the point of my first application submission.  Also, SS would continue to consider the income that I was making before I had to stop working as my ‘regular’ income.

So, I had to bet on the worst outcome (having ongoing seizures and being told by my doctors that I still could not do any work), so if that did happen, I’d be in the best financial situation possible.

When I first started my 2014 SS application, I called around to about a half-dozen law offices to see if I could get some advice.  At that point, all of my money wasn’t quite gone yet, and I was ready to shell out maybe $500 for a few hours of straight advice. 

None of the lawyers I called would see me, even for good old green cash on the table.  They all told me the same thing—they weren’t interested in my case until I had been rejected at least once.  As one secretary I had talked to explained: they wouldn’t take any cases that didn’t have some back-pay already tied up in the game, because they usually got a quarter of it when they’d win a case, and most of the time that arrangement would pay off better for the lawyer than a cash-for-service offer, like I was making. 

So, it was ‘go apply and ride the merry-go-round’, and wait to get rejected.  I learned that, depending where you get your info and varying state-by-state, something like70% of applicants were then being denied in their first ‘round’ at that time.  So, all lawyers I’d reached out to told me the same thing–after getting denied, I was to then give them all a call.

I did my best with my (second) first-submission.  Thankfully, I had saved most of the stuff from my first dance with the SS troop ten years before, so I could see what I had submitted and how they had used it to refuse me before.  With my memory issues, I was very paranoid that I might accidentally submit any sliver of info that would somehow conflict with what I had put in my previous application, back in 2005.  I mean, every damn document they’d ask for came with some kind of ‘under penalty of perjury’ threat (to scare applicants). 

The one thing I found that might have been a ‘perjurious mistake’ was that ten years before, probably after I was messed up from seizing, I had put on one document that I was 6’ 9” tall.  Oops, it should have been 6’ 2”… I hoped I wouldn’t end up ‘locked up’ over that one.  I wouldn’t have wanted to cost my fellow taxpayers the huge amount it took to house an inmate (which I was sure would have been far more than I’d ever collect in SS checks), especially if they’d have to put me in some kind of special rubber-room for extra-tall spazzers or something.

But, I knew nobody would give me ‘official’ legal advice until I got spit out from the new first round, so I’d just done my best… and then waited.  I knew I had some of the best doctors that anyone could ever ask to be treated by ready to rally to my cause, and that was (supposedly) a positive.  I mean, old Uncle Sam would have to understand why they’d all told me not to work, right?

Stanford had submitted a report to SS after they’d studied me that was something like 450 pages deep—and that was only the Stanford part, keep in mind… I had plenty of other medical history to submit also from the numerous ER visits and all those years of regular visits to neurologists. Surely, that would have to mean something too…  I mean, I had done everything the western-medicine chain had to offer (and more), and was clearly still not repairable.  There was plenty of documentation to prove it.  National freakin’ Public Radio had even run a story about me, so the case had clearly made national news (at least the radio-type).  How much more legitimacy could I have asked for, fer cryin’ out loud?

In November of 2014, Amy and I finally got into an appointment at the Santa Cruz SS office, and we met with someone who went over and officially submitted all of the documents for that new ‘round one’.

It took two months to hear any results, but in January 2015 I got a letter from SS telling me I needed to go see one of their ‘experts’ so I could be examined, because they needed a ‘second opinion’.  I had to go to the local county clinic two weeks later, and see a doctor that (supposedly) specialized in my realm of medical issues. 

I knew I was probably fucked.

That appointment was real fun.  I got to play with arranging little blocks to make patterns that matched the ones on the paper, do some simple arithmetic, and have my memory tested by remembering the details from a simple story and repeating back as many of the details that I could recall, several times during the visit.

A ‘wise’ lawyer later explained to me that the real bottom line of that appointment was that the doctor who tested me would be asked if I could count up to seven and back down again (without messing up), and if I could put the right colored little blocks in the right spaces.  Apparently, this was to determine if I could do the ‘simplest job in America’, and if I could do those two things, SS would say that I wasn’t disabled because I could still do ‘some kind of job’.

So, if you’re some kind of astro-physicist-chem-engineer-jet-pilot or something, and you got half of your head blown off somehow, you’d be rated on this standard, regardless of whether or not you could ever do whatever expert-level-job you went to college for because, apparently, there was still some job somewhere in the USA (that you could pay your bills with) by putting a block in a slot while counting up to seven and back down.  How much you had pumped into the system with your high-paid expert work, and for how long, and whether or not you could ever return to that job, somehow did not matter.

Also, the huge report that Stanford had put together, combined with my local neurologist’s opinions and all those trips to the Dominican Hospital ER and the shoulder-to-shoulder support of whatever celebrated medical who-evers and the (then) fifteen-plus years of documented seizure activity didn’t matter either.  The only real piece of info that mattered was if I was currently still having regular seizures.  Apparently the ‘chart’ SS uses as a standard defines this to be having “at least one small seizure per week” or “one grand mal per month”.

Funny thing was, in spite of what I was told after the procedures at Stanford, I hadn’t been having as many seizures during that stretch, so I was in the ‘rejection’ stack once again.

Then, more than ever, I could see what would ‘inspire’ someone to tell SS some BS.  I remember reflecting back to that little adage that I had heard from Zoltan; I had still not ‘painted the devil on the wall’.  Although Dostoevsky had basically been forced to do that so he could survive, I’d still never let myself consciously claim I’d had any seizure when I knew I had not, and I had adhered to that standard.  And I still plan to maintain that standard.  No paint.  No wall.  No devil.

But I couldn’t help but let myself wonder… what if (under penalty of perjury) I had my wife roll me into that appointment with the SS doctor in a wheelchair as I babbled and let some spittle roll down the chin a little for effect?  What if I started claiming that I had more seizures like at whatever rate… would that have caused the Santa Cruz County-doctor to put a check in the other box?

Well, for one thing, I might have had some guilt, if I’d done something dishonest like that.  After all, I didn’t take my miracles for granted.  At that time my hands were working right, and I could tell you what I’d done the day before.  My back sucked sometimes, and I still wasn’t letting myself consider driving, but I knew I had a lot more to work with than I did before the Stanford experience.  It was a blessing-counting time, not a ‘poor me’ time.

Also, if I’d started claiming I was having more seizures than I was, it would’ve caused my doctors to keep playing with different combos of meds–which would have both cost lots of money and caused whatever God-awful number of side effects and increased the permanent tolls on my body from using even more and more different cocktails of prescriptions.

Nope, that wasn’t the right way to go.  I had already learned that concealing my seizures was not the way to get the right treatments to stop them, and exaggerating them was, at least in my mind, not an option either. 

I knew that if I ended up in front of a judge at any point, I’d be able to state that to the best of my ability everything I had claimed was true (except for that thing ten years ago when I’d written that I was 6’ 9” tall).

I soon found myself re-filling out all the same documents over again as I started the ‘appeal’ process.  By that I mean, the same damn documents.  I was really glad that I had scanned and saved copies of all of the first round that I’d submitted—it came in handy to open those files and to have a starting point to go from.  There were really only a couple of recent differences—for one thing, since the previous round I’d been diagnosed with Obstructive Sleep Apnea (not that it would affect the outcome or anything). 

For another, as with the first round, one of the documents was to be filled out by a ‘third party’—someone who had witnessed my seizures.  In the (now rejected) first application in the second-round I had asked Amy fill out that twelve-page wod of crap.  This time, I asked Wendy to help me with it, as she had seen numerous events over the years as my bandmate and roommate.  Other than these differences, the second bunch was basically just filling out the exact same stuff I’d just turned in.

As I understood it, the updated pile would next go on to a ‘reviewer’ at SS, who could approve my disability claim, but would be like 90% likely to instead put it into the pile with all the other applicants waiting for a hearing. 

I was then waiting to see a real, live judge, but deep down what I still really wanted was to be able to just drop the whole thing because my health seemed to be improving overall, and I honestly just wanted to be seizure-free and to be able to work again… like a “real boy”.

From the time I had first started to fill out my application and had called around to all those lawyers that wouldn’t see me yet, I’d been reading any free advice I could find online about the ‘do’s and don’ts’ of filing for SS disability.  Between what I had learned directly from the SS web-site, the ‘free legal advice’ sites such as nolo.com, and then (at long last) from the consultations that finally enabled me to sit across a few desks from a few knowledgeable lawyers, I found a fresh and amusing cache of fun-facts I could use to infinitely inflate my disdain for the bloated and stumbling American Social Security mess.

Now, before I even start to describe the next round of insanities that I unearthed back in 2015, I have to make a general disclaimer—none of it was caused by any one person.

From the first person that helped look over my first application ten years before at the Santa Cruz SS office to one that did the same thing as I applied again, to the doctor I was ‘evaluated’ by at the county facility that kept glancing at the clock during our session (I eventually did realize that it was, after all, the doctor’s last appointment slot on a Friday afternoon), I’ve never had anyone to focus on when I’ve again let myself get irate over the SS system. 

All of these SS people are, after all, dealing with the pressures that come along with their jobs–including the pressure of mounting numbers of applications (constantly increasing as the “baby boomer” generation retires), and the pressures from ‘above’ to refuse as many applications as possible (since supposedly at least a few of the submitted applications are ‘fraudulent’ anyways). 

So, it’s no one person’s fault.

Of course, the CYA (cover your ass) effect has one simple, silly, but glaring example that slaps any applicant in the face right as they pull out their pen to wade into the pile of documents stapled in packets that arrive when they have first ‘pulled the lever’ to begin their case.  It has to have made many more applicants besides me wonder what the hell they are in for when they first get into the stacks of forms they are beginning to size up–and it is caused by an evil monster called ‘Best Practices’ (otherwise known as CYA). 

One can’t help but notice that, expectedly, the same lengthy statements regarding privacy appear at the beginning of every packet–but oddly, there is often an entire page containing info about the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995.  Not always, but sometimes the single paragraph-worth of (usually ignored) text manages to squeeze its way onto the bottom of another page that might contain something useful, but most of the time, no—an entire page is wasted on every single packet with a statement about how ‘if you don’t like the paper-waste, you can spend your own time (and paper) bitching to someone about it’. 

Now isn’t that helpful?  Repeatedly helpful?

Of course, most of us ‘we the timid’ applicants wouldn’t want to do anything that might make it appear that we could count up and back down from seven, so it would only seem logical that most of us would not be likely to make use of the repeated offer to reduce our own paperwork.  But they do offer.

So, we see the same Paperwork Reduction Act statement, over and over.  The application process starts off with four of these stapled packets, so right from the start, you’ve got the same info about this matter four times.  And that’s just as you get started.  As you fill out whatever else, then get rejected and fill them out again, you see this same info over and over again.  Now just imagine—there’s more than 9 million Americans that currently receive disability assistance from Social Security, after about 70% get rejected at least once, and they (like me) have likely re-applied (and filled out all the same stuff again).  So, at least 9 million times four is the minimum number of times these documents have been printed for just the first-round of successful disability applications—not that 36 million extra pieces of paper really mean anything here in the land of prosperity or anything.

And I know I’m a hypocrite.  Partly out of fear and partly out of paranoia, I never found the time to go through the ‘proper’ processes recommended by that paragraph about the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 for bitching about wasted paper myself.  I’m fairly sure though, that a committee reviews the committee that makes a committee to review whatever complaints are received and all—which, I’d be willing to guess, uses at least a little more paper along the way.

The net effect just has to be that less paper ends up being used though, right?  If not, I HEREBY DEMAND A STUDY…  with results printed–on paper, of course.  (Seriously, that’s meant to be a joke, don’t write to congress to support that demand–especially on paper.)

I think that actually, this might be kind of a subliminal-psychological-prep-thing to get you ready for the even larger world of bloat and waste you will be navigating through as you begin your begging.  After all, it’s your fault that you’re disabled, right?  So now some nice, innocent trees gotta get cut down along the way, all because of you and your inconvenient (and most likely imaginary) disability as well, slackers.

Really, so much of what I’ve been disgusted by as I’ve waded through the joys of the SS system is what all has resulted from the ‘default’ effect of everybody trying to make sure that they have covered their own ass from the bottom bottom to the top bottom.  And paper-waste is really just a tiny little part of it all.

Nobody really sets out with a grand, evil plan to make waste and dysfunction.  Nobody’s set out hoping to cause feelings like I have had when I’ve learned yet more ridiculous-nesses and heard even more stories of people that collect an SS check but have disabilities that most logical persons would likely think are far less dangerous than mine.  Nobody thought about what would happen when American families, that were once so big and bountiful, suddenly became small and fractured, with more retiring than are paying into this whole failing pyramid-scheme.

Over the years, I’ve admittedly found my ear kind of ‘tuning in’ whenever I’d hear anything about SS in the news, from how ‘doomed’ it is, to who’s now getting blamed for any of its shortcomings, to who’s gotten away with ripping it off and for how long they did so before anyone noticed.  When I’d surf around through news and see anything related to Social Security, I’d almost always click and read.  It became my click-crack.  I always knew I’d be both horrified and amazed with whatever tidbits I’d find.

Naturally, when I had stopped working, gone through the whole thing at Stanford, and then began to work on my ‘new and improved’ application, I had even more time to click and hit that SS news-pipe.

One subject I found discussed (and bitched about) repeatedly was the complete lack of consistency between the judges who actually are Social Security’s ‘deciders’.

For the longest time, everybody was too busy to notice the giant differences between the rates of approvals made by different Administrative Law Judges (ALJs)—the judges that make those final decisions on cases—until in June 2011 congress asked the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) to cough up some numbers.  The OIG finally audited the statistics from 2010 as part of their effort to fight fraud, and reported that “In our review, we found a wide variance in ALJ productivity and decisional outcomes…allowance rates ranged from a low of 8.6 percent to a high of 99.7 percent.”

The Office of the Inspector General had in its report concluded “…We believe greater Agency attention is needed to ensure outliers in ALJ performance, be it high or low, are monitored and the underlying work processes are periodically reviewed… it is important that the public have confidence in Social Security Administration’s hearings process.”

So, in all this time since the system was established back in 1935, it had taken until 2011 to realize that judges too, need to be checked up on.  Some were hitting the ‘pass’ button too often, some were hitting the ‘fail’ button too often.  Some were handling almost no cases, and some were doing tons.  But hey, it only took the government 76 years to notice.

Major accountability issues.  Good luck running any business that sloppily for that long.

Clearly, SS had apparently had it a little ‘rough’ in the news during those past few years before I’d started re-re-re-applying in 2014.  The more I learned though, the more I hoped it would get rougher. 

I’ve found it hard to have any sympathy for the ‘abused’ machine, although I did (and still do) have sympathy for the real individuals employed by it that are all just trying to do their jobs well and keep up with the building pressure to produce more, and to be more accurate while doing it. 

I’m sure those jobs can really suck, but hey–at least it’s employees are being allowed to work, right?

And I can’t blame them all individually for what resides on the ‘grid’ of rules they are following.  They didn’t all make the ‘grid’, they’re just supposed to apply it–quickly and accurately.

It was that infamous ‘grid’ itself that I started to learn more about (and develop a hateful taste for) next.  I discussed it more and more with all the lawyers I’d talked to, from the Social Security site, and from regular references to it in the news articles I was reading.

What I realized, as I started up my next long round of groveling back then, was that I would have improved my odds of having Uncle Sam call me ‘disabled’ if only I had dropped out of school sooner, was just a little older, had less ‘transferable skills’, or wasn’t an English speaker. 

Do any of those conclusions sound ‘classist’ or ‘ethno-phobic’ or ‘ageist’ or in any other way hateful?  Maybe even like beyond-paranoid?

Well, what can I say… I’ve learned quite a bit about those ‘grid rules’ that SS uses to decide approvals.

See, depending on various factors that may not seem directly related to the ‘medical realm’, the amount of how disabled SS considers you to be changes.  If you don’t speak English, for example, you are apparently more disabled in this country than if you do speak English.  If you are illiterate, or have provably lesser levels of education, how disabled you are also ‘flexes’.

According to an article I read on disabilitysecrets.com (published by Nolo, a ‘free legal advice’ publisher) entitled “When a Limited Education, Illiteracy, or Inability to Speak English Helps You Get Disability”:

 “Some disability applicants, especially older ones, can be approved under Social Security’s “grid” rules even if they could probably perform some type of easy, undemanding job. This is particularly true for claimants without high school diplomas, for those who cannot read or write… and speak in English”

Furthermore, the article states that “…other factors used in the grids are: your age, the skill level of your past work, whether you learned any skills that could be used in a new job…”

So, if you were born in the neighborhood, and speak the local language, and graduated high school, but are whatever-age-you-are and so far you have made the general effort to bust your ass a little throughout your life, and did whatever jobs you had to do, and happened to learn any skills as you did them, and paid into the SS system as you went along, just like you were supposed to do, this means that you are going to have more ‘transferable skills’ on the SS curvy-grid, and are therefore less disabled, especially if you look like you might still have some wind left in you.

Reading this wasn’t the only time I had read about these crazy factoids along my travels.  A little deeper investigating showed me that I could even verify these realities right on the SS site itself (ssa.gov).

Again, I still don’t see any of this craziness as any one SS person’s fault—it’s just the collective results of everybody in this huge contraption just trying to do the right things, and this madness is just what has somehow dribbled out of the ‘grid-rule-book’ over time. 

It’s a reality-salad that was mine to eat, even though I’d had the best doctors I could possibly have been treated by tell me I should not be working because I have a rare version of my disease that makes me dangerous not only to myself but to others around me as well. It’s not any one person’s fault if the ‘grid’ of SS rules disagrees.

I had always been honest and ‘come clean’ with all the real facts, as best as I could possibly have been able to recall them, and it hadn’t paid off.  And as I dug in in 2014, I really had no reason to expect it to.

During that stretch of time was when I came upon my next favorite SS find online—the Newsroom/News Releases tab on the actual site of the Office of the Inspector General of Social Security (oig.ssa.gov).  Wow.  The OIG’s office seemed to enjoy ‘sharing the word’ when it comes to the world of SS conspiracy, fraud and waste.  The giant list of news links posted there was (and still is) pure gold… (if you’re into that kind of thing).

For me, this list always seemed to expand my dark SS horizons.

One of the first links I clicked on after reading that article on disabilitysecrets.com was from April, 2015:  Lack of English Meant Puerto Ricans Got Disability Benefits.  Just as I had thought it might, it verified that my ability to speak English was not helpful to proving my disability claim.  The link led to Associated Press coverage of an OIG audit on the disability claims processes and guidelines, and it verified what I’d been reading.  I was less disabled than someone else with the same physical issues because I spoke what I was taught in the public-school system, right here in the good ol’ US of A.

Another fine link there brought me to a story that had come out in January, 2014:  “More than 100 NYC Police and Firefighters Indicted in PTSD Scam”.  This brought me to CNN coverage (with video) of a large-scale OIG disability fraud investigation in New York City.

Apparently, nobody at the ol’ SS had noticed for quite a long time as a whopper ‘decades long’ racket ran along until it was finally unearthed and reported on.  In this one, veteran cops and firefighters had worked with a lawyer and a consultant in an “orchestrated scheme” that led to “the biggest case of its kind in the history of the Social Security Administration”, which the Manhattan district attorney estimated cost our government “about $400 million” in non-legit payments.

Maybe everyone at SS was just a little too busy printing up all those ‘paperwork reduction’ notices to notice.

Another link brought me to one of my ongoing personal favorites.  This story was tinged with delightful irony for me, because it meant my already-habitual use of that ‘SS’ abbreviation had a dual meaning.  I’d used the abbreviation for quite a while when typing, just because I’d gotten so tired of typing out S-o-c-i-a-l-space-S-e-c-u-r-i-t-y so many times, but now my use of SS was doubly-justified.

See, in May 2015, this link was posted at the oig.ssa.gov site :  Watchdog Says Ex-Nazis Got $20 Million in Social Security.  Clicking that bait brought me to Associated Press coverage of an OIG review of Social Security payments to people who might have participated in Nazi persecution.

It was like a disgusting, yet wonderful red-dyed cherry that had fallen from the sky, and landed right on top of my SS-sundae.  I couldn’t help myself—when I read the news, I laughed out loud like a bitter old man (though not yet old enough to get any benefits, of course).  Clearly, I’d been using the right letters to describe an incredible, hideous double-standard.

A number of major news sources had reported that the top ‘watchdog’ at the Social Security Administration had found that the agency had paid something like 20.2 MILLION DOLLARS to more than 130 suspected Nazi war criminals.  According to AP News:

“…133 suspected Nazi war criminals, SS guards, and others that may have participated in the Third Reich’s atrocities… received $20.2 million in Social Security benefits, according to a report to be released later this week by the inspector general of the Social Security Administration.”

Supposedly, a number of our former-enemies managed to migrate to the US after World War II—by some estimates as many as 10,000.  Many had apparently lied about their Nazi pasts to get into the US, and some even became American citizens.  A number of them held jobs and didn’t exactly ‘announce’ whatever they had done during the war.  Naturally, some had “worked actively” to conceal their identities.  The same AP story stated that further:

“AP found that the Justice Department used a legal loophole to persuade Nazi suspects to leave the U.S. in exchange for Social Security benefits.”

So, it would appear that US’s SS may have even knowingly paid off some of the real SS… outside of the US.

Ahh… so maybe SS would finally admit I really was disabled, had I just been a Nazi.  Seriously.

An even more crazy Social Security/Disability chunk of news hit just a few days after the Nazi thing, in June of 2015.  I clicked on a link at oig.ssa.gov entitled Report: Social Security Overpaid Nearly Half on Disability which was followed by a summary that read: “Associated Press coverage of OIG review of overpayments in Social Security’s disability programs”.

That link took me to the same news source (ABC/Associated Press), which had run the headline “Report: Social Security Overpaid Disability Benefits by 17B” (meaning, 17 billion dollars).

Included in the article: 

“Social Security overpaid disability beneficiaries by nearly $17 billion over the past decade, a government watchdog said Friday, raising alarms about the massive program just as it approaches the brink of insolvency… In all, nearly half of the 9 million people receiving disability payments were overpaid, according to the results of a 10-year study by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general.”

 Wow.  So apparently, they actually overpaid some people, huh?  Not me, that’s for sure.

That dollar-figure sounded so big, and spanned such a broad time frame, that I was instantly curious how SS might have already ‘officially’ addressed the ‘margin-of-error’ issue.  I went to their site, where I found the statement of Sean Brune, who was then the Senior Advisor to the Deputy Commissioner, Office of Budget, Finance, Quality and Management of the Social Security Administration. Before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs on March 16 of 2015, he had stated that the SS administration were “effective stewards of program dollars”, and that for fiscal year 2013 they had estimated that:

 “…approximately 99.8 percent of all (…) payments were free of overpayment, and nearly 99.9 percent were free of underpayment.”

More wow.  Either some major improvements had already happened by 2013 or 17 billion freaking dollars somehow must have fallen within a very large ‘margin of error’.

I was curious about some of the ‘hard data’ that the site might offer.  I found a related annual statistical report page on Social Security’s site that included ‘Table 59—Outcomes at all adjudicative levels, by year of application, 1992-2010’.

That table featured lots of numbers that pointed pretty clearly to how the trend in award-rates had gone in recent years.  According to SS’s own chart, in 1992, workers that applied for disability had an “award rate” of 52.6%.  In 2010 that “award rate” was down to 33.2%.

So, they clearly clamped down on the disability approvals overall over the past couple decades, and the numbers I saw on Table 59 showed that trend clearly.

SS had definitely made strides in an effort to make more disapprovals.  Pressures of some kind or other had clearly ‘inspired’ them to do so.

Ongoing pressures were, and still are, very much on the entire SS system anyways, because everyone knows it can’t self-sustain now that the ‘baby-boom’ generation is retiring—a large number of people who are also living longer all the time.  Now, this larger population of retirees is being paid for by today’s smaller workforce of contributors; some panic-estimates were claiming back in 2015 that it was all set to go bust somewhere during the following year.  So naturally, any amount of error was (and still is) going to be exploited by whatever press and politicians for political reasons.  Especially when it’s a real big-sounding number like 17 billion dollars, for example.

But alas, progress within such a large system can’t be expected to happen quickly.

Good thing so many Americans live to such a ripe old age… maybe even old enough to see some fixes.

One of my final favorite links on that good ol’ Newsroom/News Releases tab on oig.ssa.gov that was posted back in March, 2015 had brought me yet another sweet combo of bitterness and belly-laughing.  It was entitled “Flawed Social Security Data Say 6.5 Million in U.S. Reach Age 112” and it was summarized as “Associated Press coverage of OIG audit of SSA’s Death Master File”.  Oh, I just had to click that one…

The news it led me to was pretty much wrapped up by the link’s title; somehow everyone was just so busy there at SS (again, probably reducing paperwork) that nobody had noticed either of those crazy numbers (not just that record-breaking age of 112 years but times 6.5 MILLION persons getting there) until it leaked out of that ‘Death Master File’ into the news.

I didn’t know what to be more amused by, the nutso-numbers, or the fact that SS really has a thing called the Death Master File.  The file name does make sense, I guess, and I’m sure plenty of SS employees say its name often, but to me it sounded like a good name for a metal album or maybe even for a band… hear that out there, any of you headbangers?  DEATH MASTER FILE (make sure to say it with a low and rough voice).  Who knows, maybe you can even make an album that sells 6.5 million copies and live to age 112—then you won’t need to worry about how you’re gonna pay your bills in your retirement years without the support the doomed SS system.

Anyways, it’s clearly a very complex batch of problems and I’m not offering any complete solutions here.

I realized, as I squirmed through my own SS claims for a second time, that the only solution I could logically hope to be able to pull off for myself with whatever I end up having left to work with would be to figure out how to not plan on any SS money ever showing up in my account or mailbox, in either the near, or distant future.

And sorry to say, that is what I would recommend for any other US citizen to be planning on.  Regardless of whatever slice has been taken out of your paycheck in the United States for however long, there really is no ‘net’; it’s just you and the high-wire, so keep that in mind as you balance and walk on that thin timeline of your ‘free’ life.  That’s what I’m doing, anyways.

I’m just an American-born citizen that graduated high school, has transferable skills of some kind or other and speaks English, but I’m not a Nazi.  And at this point I can still count up to seven and back down while I match up a block to a shape on a page, without participating in genocide, so I don’t expect much–if anything–to come my way from out of my forced investment into the United States SS system.  If it ever does pay me anything, great, but if not, my wife and I have got to keep finding a way to survive with whatever primitive means we may have to resort to–or we may still end up in line with the homeless I used to get paid to feed, back when I could still work.

But as for now, at this moment right here, I can still write, and I can still vote.  And I will use whatever skills I still have to do my little part in helping roll the whole fat, bloated, mismanaged SS system up in its own paper-waste and smoke it into the realm of past ‘nice ideas’ that America has had to realize after a while are just not working out.

Writing about SS back in Santa Cruz in 2015 was, and still is, very unlikely to ever bring me a dime–but at least doing so made me feel better.  And at least SS hasn’t taken a cut out of whatever I haven’t been paid for venting into my keyboard… at least not yet.