New Rules Aim to Speed AIDS Disability Pay

The Social Security Administration announced new rules Tuesday that it said will speed payment of disability benefits to people with AIDS-related medical conditions.

But AIDS organizations criticized the new regulations, saying that they do not go far enough and continue to exclude numerous AIDS-related conditions, particularly those affecting women and intravenous drug users.

The waiting time to collect disability benefits will be reduced substantially, several weeks in some cases and several months in others, depending on the applicant, according to Social Security officials.

The speed-up is possible because the Social Security Administration is expanding the list of ailments that will result in the automatic payment of disability benefits without a further test of a person’s ability to work.

The government now pays disability benefits to 52,000 people unable to work because of AIDS or AIDS-related conditions.

An estimated 5,000 people with AIDS-related conditions “will get paid from the first day they come into the office,” rather than waiting for several months, according to Social Security spokesman Phil Gambino.

An individual with a severe impairment making it impossible to work for at least a year is eligible for disability payments. The program makes payments to disabled workers, regardless of their income. A special program, Supplemental Security Income, makes payments to disabled children and adults who are poor, usually with income below $400 a month.

The average processing time for a disability application now is 90 days from the time application is made until the Social Security Administration decides whether to approve payments. A special program for applicants who claim to have terminal diseases has had an average 60-day processing time.

Social Security has issued a new list of “opportunistic and indicator diseases,” such as wasting syndrome and herpes, that provide automatic eligibility for benefits. Victims of diseases on the list no longer will be subject to lengthy evaluation to determine whether they are healthy enough to work.

Under the new regulations, the agency also decided that infected individuals also would be eligible for benefits if they are substantially impaired to the point where they no longer can work or care for themselves, even if they have not developed classic symptoms of the disease.

Social Security Commissioner Gwendolyn S. King said that her agency “may not have the power to eliminate AIDS, but by providing compassionate and responsive service, we are able to bring greater comfort and dignity to the lives of those affected by this tragic disease.”

However, key members of the AIDS support community were sharply critical of King’s claims.

“We want to take a closer look and study this more--but our initial reading is that it is not as expansive as we hoped it would be,” said Carisa Cunningham, spokeswoman for AIDS Action Council, a Washington-based lobbying organization representing hundreds of community-based groups. “It seems to create more hoops for women, children and drug users to jump through before they qualify for disability because the functional capacities that the regulations describe, to my reading, are those of a person in end-stage illness,” she said.

“This doesn’t help women, children, and drug users who still, according to these regulations, must become very, very ill before they will qualify for Social Security disability,” Cunningham said.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) called the new rules “one small step for Social Security and nothing else. Some people will qualify for help more quickly as ‘disabled’ but many more are altogether ignored.”

He noted that the government’s new definition of AIDS from the Centers for Disease Control will classify an additional 160,000 Americans as having AIDS, compared with an expansion of just 5,000 in the number of persons getting automatic eligibility qualification from the change in Social Security regulations.

“Under both the old and the new policy, people with AIDS will die before Social Security finds them to be disabled,” Waxman said. “You can’t be more disabled than dead.”

“The proposed revisions give us something with one hand and take it away with the other,” said Ruth Finkelstein, director of policy for the New York-based Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a major service organization for people with AIDS.

“The listing has in fact been expanded to include some, but not all, of the omitted conditions,” she said.