Judge Dredd is an example of the kind of judge who is too severe rather than too lenient.
The Wall Street Journal is soon to run a piece on improper denials of disability claims.
That’s inevitable, since any fair-minded newspaper that ran a column on improper approvals would surely want to balance it out.
For those who missed it, the Wall Street Journal had a column by George Mason economist Mark Warshawsky and his grad student Ross Marchand, complaining about a limited number of administrative-law judges who approve disability appeals at a very high rate.
The piece referred back to data from 2008, which showed that 9 percent of Social Security administrative law judges had approval rates of more than 90 percent, in a year when the overall approval rate was 70 percent. They conclude that these judges cost the disability program more than $23 billion due to wrongly approved claims.
Clearly there are judges who are too lenient and accept claims that probably should be denied; however, there are also judges who are too harsh and reject claims that should probably be approved. In these cases, workers are being denied the insurance benefits for which they have paid.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) analyzed the approval patterns of 12 low-allowance judges over the period from 2010-2013. It found their approval rate increased from 21 to 24 percent over this four-year period. During this period, the overall approval rate had fallen from 67 to 56 percent, implying gaps of between 32 percentage points and 56 percentage points. Note that the gaps between the overall approval rate and the approval rate of the low-allowance judges is considerably larger than the gap between overall approval rate and the approval rate of the high-allowance judges highlighted in the Wall Street Journal column.
The takeaway is that there are clearly judges who error on the reject side as well as the approval side. It appears that SSA has taken steps to limit unwarranted approvals. It is not clear that measures have been taken to address the problem of judges wrongly denying appeals. We should not want to waste money on undeserving claims, but we also should not want to see workers who are genuinely disabled being denied the benefits for which they have paid. It is far from clear that at present the program errs more in awarding undeserving claims than in denying deserving ones.
Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (3/9/15).
With an estimated 2 trillion dollars in US off-shore sheltered corporate funds, it seems rather mean spirited to take issue with the amount paid to a multitude of work-disabled people. Still, reasonable people can and will differ in their assessment of a claimant’s pain and physical incapacity, or, at times, even whether s/he is morally entitled to such benefits.
Notwithstanding the fact that there are a multitude of benighted capitalist cheerleaders who ardently believe that “tort reform” is something that will benefit the general population, that workers compensation is a haven for loafers, and that SSI is simply the federal version of the state give-away programs, others see things differently. As reasonable people who differ, we might not see a further extenuation of austerity to those in great need as a good thing, and that there does not seem to be any justification for a further race to the bottom in this area of our society and economy.
If someone is taking bribes, kickbacks or committing other criminal acts, please identify, charge and try such suspects. By calling someone, in effect, a “bleeding heart” is hardly worth the effort and expense of this crack team’s investigative efforts.
I wonder who funded the study?