After one of her constituents reached out to her, U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, R-Arizona, looked into the current wait times that disability claimants across the country are facing after requesting a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge. McSally called the wait times “ridiculous.”
This is nothing new; wait times for hearings have been “ridiculous” for quite a while and have only gotten worse within the last year. In a recent story published by News4 Tucson, McSally expressed her frustration that constituents have to wait at least 18 months before they can even get before an ALJ to make a disability decision.
“If you have no income there’s not a lot of people that can go 18 months without having anything to pay rent and food and medicine,” McSally is quoted in the story.
Many times claimants will request help from their members of congress or U.S. Senators to inquire about how the long the disability process lasts, but even these powerful members of the country’s legislative branch are unable to do much about it.
Claimants who request a hearing before an ALJ have to be prepared to wait a long time before their hearing is scheduled no matter what part of the country they live in. It basically comes down to resources. The number of people who are waiting for a hearing on a disability case has reached more than 1.1 million. There are not enough judges to hear cases and not enough resources Social Security has to reduce the waiting period.
The response to McSally’s inquiry came in the form of a written statement from Social Security’s Regional Communications Director Patricia Raymond.
“Due to limited resources we are challenged in our ability to hear disability cases as quickly as we would like. Reducing the wait time for a hearing decision remains one of the top priorities of our agency,” Raymond wrote.
Unfortunately without additional resources, the chances of Social Security being able to reduce the hearing backlog remains a log shot and there is a better change the backlog will continue to grow and wait times will even get worse.
