Plan to Revise Social Security Appeals Is Killed

Social Security Commissioner Dorcas R. Hardy said Saturday that she has rejected a controversial proposal for reviewing disability cases and called for major reforms to speed up the complex two-year appeals process for disputed disability claims.

Hardy said the draft proposal “generated inaccurate information and caused undue alarm to the American public.”

The preliminary plan, which had been prepared for discussion by the appeals office in the Social Security Administration, drew a firestorm of criticism when it was first publicized last month.

Closed Record

It would have closed the hearing record early in disability appeals cases, possibly preventing applicants and their lawyers from submitting new medical evidence.

Responding to the political outcry, Hardy said that she had removed the draft proposal from the routine bureaucratic process--it would have gone first to the deputy commissioner and then to her desk--and had personally reviewed it. “I believe the Social Security Administration can do better, and have, therefore, rejected it,” she said in a prepared statement.

Meanwhile, Hardy also was the subject of an attack Saturday when the chairman of a key congressional oversight subcommittee charged in a report that the Social Security Administration is failing in its legal obligation to deliver benefits to thousands of disabled homeless people.

“(The) commissioner . . . simply did not want to implement the program” of awarding grants to the states to develop delivery systems assuring that homeless people who are mentally or physically disabled receive their Social Security checks, said Rep. Ted Weiss (D-N.Y.), chairman of a House Government Operations subcommittee. In response, Social Security officials said Congress had not appropriated any funds to carry out the task.

Torrent of Criticism

Hardy is hoping that her personal intervention to scrap the controversial disability rule change will defuse the torrent of political criticism at a delicate time, when she is being mentioned as a possible secretary of health and human services. “A lot of people were upset, elderly and disabled people were frightened and Congress got angry, and it was about a draft proposal that never even made it to the commissioner’s office,” one of her aides said.

Sees Discrediting Attempt

Hardy and her supporters are convinced that the leak last month of the draft proposal before she had a chance to see it, and the timing of the critical Weiss subcommittee report, are aimed at discrediting her as a possible Cabinet officer.

Both controversies deal with the handling of disability cases by Hardy’s agency.

Social Security has 300,000 requests for hearings each year by people who have been denied disability benefits. The complex process for handling a rejected claim takes an average of 696 days from the original filing of the claim through successive appeals before a state disability agency, a special Social Security judge, a Social Security appeals council, and finally, a federal court.

Most beneficiaries are represented by lawyers whose fees are based on a percentage of the benefits.

“There is nearly unanimous agreement that the current hearings and appeals process needs reform,” Hardy said. Referring to the draft plan, Hardy said her staff had “made such an attempt” but she rejected their proposal as failing to protect claimants’ rights.

“In addition to our own concerns, a vast amount of criticism has come from frustrated claimants, attorneys, the courts and the Congress,” she said.

Calls Special Meeting

Hardy called for a broader approach to reform, saying “we must again bring into the process all parties from the claimant to the attorney to the judge to the Congress.” She has asked for a special meeting of the agency’s Disability Advisory Council to review the hearings process.

The House Social Security subcommittee, responding to the controversy generated by the draft proposal, will examine the disability issue at a special hearing Monday.

Saturday’s criticism by Weiss had to do with legislation passed in 1987, which ordered the Social Security Administration to help states ensure that mentally and physically disabled homeless people get their benefits, in particular Supplemental Security Income (SSI). A disabled person with no other income receives a maximum SSI benefit of $354 a month.

In his report, Weiss accused Hardy of failing to carry out the law.

Congress authorized spending $1.25 million in fiscal 1988 for grants, and $2.5 million in fiscal 1989. However, it did not appropriate new money for the agency to implement the program, saying that available funds should be used.

Frank Battistelli, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration, said that “without the appropriation to fund the program, it makes it impossible for us to do it.” Further, he said, “Congress also cut our budget by $155 million in fiscal 1989.”

‘Do the Best We Can’

Battistelli insisted that the agency was already involved in trying to reach the homeless. He said personnel frequently are sent to shelters, soup kitchens and other locations in an attempt to get benefits to the homeless. These individuals often are “very leery of interacting with the government and dealing with an institutional environment,” he said. “We try to make it less threatening to them,” Battistelli said. “It’s certainly a tough problem, but we haven’t ignored it. We do the best we can.”

However, Weiss said the agency had enough money to do the job but that Hardy “chose instead to use those funds for other purposes, such as designing decorative certificates and traveling around the world for meetings with extremely limited policy importance.”

Battistelli said the decorative certificates “was just an idea--not something we are doing. It hasn’t been implemented. We don’t have the money to do it, obviously.”

‘Able Ambassador’

He called Hardy’s trips “one function to try to educate the public” and “very appropriate,” adding, “She may, in fact, be the most able ambassador that we have for the programs we administer.”

Weiss further criticized Hardy for suggesting, in a memo last March to Health and Human Services Secretary Otis R. Bowen, that the department seek to repeal the law or find another agency to implement it. Steven A. Grossman, an official in the office of Assistant Secretary for Health Robert Windom, rejected Hardy’s suggestion that the department seek to repeal the law, writing in an April memo: “ . . . the Administration risks being portrayed as uncaring for the homeless.”