Frustration over hearing wait times for Social Security disability hearings is nothing new, but now there is a group that is actually taking action against the Social Security Administration in the form of a federal lawsuit.
Attorneys with Miami’s Health Rights Clinic, last year, filed a federal lawsuit against Social Security on behalf of 12 indigent and disabled clients who have been waiting more than two years for a disability hearing before an Administrative Law Judge.
The lawsuit asks the government to compel Social Security to “promptly schedule, hearing and adjudicate” the 12 cases addressed in the lawsuit. These cases deal with very poor applicants who have faced extreme financial hardship due to their circumstances, something that defeats the general purpose of Social Security disability benefits according to Health Rights Clinic director JoNel Newman.
“The delay defeats the Social Security’s purpose of helping to keep people from poverty, and, in the case of our clients, has the harshest impact on the poorest population. Miami has one of the highest poverty rates in the country, which makes the extreme delay in Miami that much more unfair.”
Wait times for Social Security disability hearings vary across the county. Some hearing sites have wait times that are only about 8 months or so, but the national average is closer to about 15 months. Wait times for disability hearings is not a new phenomenon. There have consistently been long wait times when an applicant files a request for hearing before an ALJ. There are typically about 8,000 people waiting for hearings at your average hearings office and the ALJs can only hear so many cases. If Social Security had a budget to hire more ALJs then the wait times might reduce, but that is the main culprit right now, a lack of resources.
This is not the first time Social Security has been taken to federal court to make them issue decisions in a more timely manner. In 1984 in Heckler v. Day the issue got all the way to the Supreme Court. After the federal district court and U.S. Court of Appeals agreed that hearings should be granted within 90 days of a request and if a claimant has not yet received a hearing within this amount of time interim benefits would be paid if the hearing request was not granted within 180s.
Considering how understaffed and how backlogged Social Security has become over the last 10 years it would have been a miracle if Social Security could’ve met these requirements, but Social Security never had to try because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory deadlines are inconsistent with Social Security’s responsibility to make accurate rulings in the face of heavy workloads and limited agency resources. Since the number of people filing for disability has only grown since this ruling it will be interesting to see where this lawsuit goes considering the Supreme Court already seemed to rule on the issue.
We consistently get questions from clients about making Social Security act on claims within a certain amount of time. We have to inform that it is out of our control and there are not rules in place that state Social Security has to make a decision within a specific amount of time as determined by the Supreme Court.
To take a closer look at the Supreme Court’s decision regarding this matter click here.
