Blog posts

The Social Security Administration (SSA) has been dealing with a significant bottleneck in the hearing process for disability cases for the majority of the last decade. The greatest apparent culprit is the economy, with fewer available dollars translating to reduced staffing and budget cuts.
Each year for nearly a decade, the President’s Budget has fallen dramatically short of what has been requested by the commissioner of the SSA. During most of the same period, the number of pending disability cases has soared to more than three-quarters of a million per year.

June has been named the official ALS Awareness Month by the ALS Association. ALS stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but is better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. The more familiar term was coined after Major League Baseball player Lou Gehrig’s very public battle with the disease. Gehrig contracted the disease at the age of 36, which ended his career in the Major Leagues and ultimately took his life two years later.

It’s not every day someone is convicted of committing fraud against two major government programs at the same time. In Fort Smith, Arkansas, a woman named Carolyn Faye Summerhill pled guilty and was convicted of fraud against both the Social Security Administration and the Food and Drug Administration’s WIC program. She will be sentenced at a later date, but will face up to 10 years in prison in addition to being forced to pay back over $200,000 to the SSA, the WIC program, as well as several banks.

Long waits are not uncommon to veterans waiting for their cases to be reviewed by Veterans Administration offices across the country. There is a typically heavy load of cases in every office, but in the state of Maine, some veterans are being told they may have to wait up to 2 years for their cases to be seen. The root cause for this is the recent ruling in favor of Agent Orange disability claims.

Illinois’s Republican Representative Judy Biggert is making an effort to keep veterans in her state informed about benefits and medical information that affect them. Last week she, along with a VA Hospital Director, Sharon Helman, and the VA Regional Director Duane Honeycutt, met with about 50 local veterans at the Bolingbrook Municipal Building for a forum on veterans’ concerns.