For those who love the USKanchan Disabled, and Waiting for Justice - New York Times The New York Times
December 11, 2007 Editorial Disabled, and Waiting for Justice We know what is behind President Bush's sudden enthusiasm for fiscal discipline after years of running up deficits and debt: political posturing, just in time for the 2008 election. But one should not forget the damage that his administration has also inflicted by shortchanging important domestic programs in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy and his never-ending Iraq war. A case in point is the worsening bureaucratic delays at the chronically underfunded Social Security Administration that have kept hundreds of thousands of disabled Americans from timely receipt of their Social Security disability benefits. As laid out by Erik Eckholm in The Times on Monday, the backlog of applicants who are awaiting a decision after appealing an initial rejection has soared to 755,000 from 311,000 in 2000. The average wait for an appeals hearing now exceeds 500 days, twice as long as applicants had to wait in 2000. Typically two-thirds of those who appeal eventually win their cases. But during the long wait, their conditions may worsen and their lives often fall apart. More and more people have lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or even died while awaiting an appeals hearing. In one poignant case described by Mr. Eckholm, a North Carolina woman who is tethered to an oxygen tank 24 hours a day has been waiting three years for a decision. She finally got a hearing last month and is awaiting a final verdict, but, meanwhile, she has lost her apartment and alternates sleeping at her daughter's crowded house and a friend's place. The cause of the bottlenecks is well known. There are simply too few administrative law judges - 1,025 at present - to keep up with the workload. The Social Security Administration is adopting automated tools and more efficient administrative practices, but virtually everyone agrees that no real dent will be made in the backlog until the agency can hire more judges and support staff. The blame for this debacle lies mostly with the Republicans. For most of this decade, the administration has held the agency's budget requests down and Republican-dominated Congresses have appropriated less than the administration requested. Now the Democratic-led Congress wants to increase funding to the Social Security Administration, and the White House is resisting. Last month, Congress passed a $151 billion health, education and labor spending bill that would have given the Social Security Administration $275 million more than the president requested, enough to hire a lot more judges and provide other vital services. But Mr. Bush vetoed that bill as profligate. Democrats in Congress are working on a compromise to meet Mr. Bush half way on the whole range of domestic spending bills. The White House is not interested in compromise. If the president remains intransigent, federal agencies may have to limp along under continuing resolutions that maintain last year's spending levels. That would likely, among many other domestic problems, crimp any new hiring at the Social Security Administration and might require furloughs, leading to even longer waits. Mr. Bush should back down from his veto threat and accept a reasonable compromise. Both sides should ensure that real efforts are made to reduce these intolerable backlogs. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
