SSA needs more workers to deal with backlog | READER COMMENTARY

Recently, The Baltimore Sun published a commentary by Mark J. Warshawsky that targeted Martin O’Malley, the newly appointed commissioner of the Social Security Administration, for seeking a small increase in SSA’s administrative budget to put it in line with historic norms (“Martin O’Malley is off to a bad start at Social Security,” April 12). As deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy at the SSA from 2017 to 2021, the writer advocated for policies that would have reduced access to disability benefits for claimants if implemented.

I would like to present another side. I am a licensed clinical social worker who has worked for the past 30 years with adults who don’t have a place to live and who have diagnoses of serious mental health problems. As the people I serve experienced firsthand, the closing of the SSA offices for almost two years contributed to a decline in applications for benefits, especially for people without solid internet and phone access. SSA’s phone system performed poorly during this time, dropping calls and more. The reduction in applicants was primarily due to these pandemic service issues.

Now that SSA offices have reopened and people are able to access SSA’s application systems, time frames for disability application processing and adjudication have increased enormously. Currently, the wait time for an initial decision for a disability claim is 228 days nationally, roughly seven months, compared to historic wait times of 120 days. This is a huge difference for those in desperate need of this assistance. From SSA’s data, 30,000 people died last year while waiting for their claims to be decided.

What I know as a person on the ground serving people is that the assistance SSA can provide needs to happen as quickly as humanly possible. And SSA needs humans to do this. Sure, more needs to happen: The vocational information used clearly needs a major revision. SSA’s IT systems also need updating. But, at the end of the day, people process claims. And SSA needs more people.

Those whom I serve need better services and shorter timeframes. For them, this may mean the difference between surviving or not.

— Yvonne M. Perret,  Cumberland

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