The peanut butter and jelly sandwiches served at my high school were epic. Using THREE slices of white bread with peanut butter spread on both the top and bottom, it was like a little slice of heaven at 11:30am. Looking back, it’s a marvel that I made it out of there alive.
Commissioner of Social Security, today announced that the agency is adding 38 more conditions to its list of Compassionate Allowances. This is the first expansion since the original list of 50 conditions – 25 rare diseases and 25 cancers – was announced in October 2008. The new conditions range from adult brain disorders to rare diseases that primarily affect children. The complete list of the new Compassionate Allowance conditions is attached.
Commissioner of Social Security, today announced that the agency’s first Extended Service Team (EST) is open for business in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Little Rock EST will make disability decisions for state Disability Determinations Services (DDSs) that are most adversely affected by the flood of new initial disability claims resulting from the economic downturn and from counterproductive furloughs of employees at the state level. Later this year, Social Security will open additional ESTs in Madison, Mississippi; Roanoke, Virginia; and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The ESTs are in states that have a history of high quality and productivity, as well as the capacity to hire and train significant numbers of additional employees.
“The strategy behind ESTs builds on our success with National Hearing Centers, where cases are handled electronically from all over the country,” Commissioner Astrue said. “These centralized units have reduced the hearings backlog and improved processing times at some of the hardest-hit hearing offices. This approach clearly works and extending it in this way can help us meet the challenge of unprecedented growth in our disability workloads.”
Social Security expects to receive more than 3.3 million applications for disability benefits this fiscal year (FY), about 700,000 more than in FY 2008. In addition, more than a dozen states are furloughing federally-funded state workers who make disability decisions for Social Security. The combination of increased workloads and state furloughs has resulted in a growing backlog of initial disability applications in state DDSs.
“More Americans than ever are turning to us for help,” said Commissioner Astrue. “I am grateful that Governor Beebe bucked the trend and recognized the value of more of our federally-funded jobs in his state. The opening of the Arkansas EST and our other planned expansions in Mississippi, Virginia, and Oklahoma will significantly benefit disabled workers and their families as well as create new job opportunities to these states during difficult economic times.”
There are an estimated 40 million people with disabilities in our country. The rest of us are temporarily abled, as they say. It’s only a matter of time until we have an injury or illness that will cause us to experience some sort of disability.
Commissioner of Social Security, today joined award-winning actress Patty Duke and the cast of her hit 1960s sitcom, The Patty Duke Show, to unveil Social Security’s newest online service – an application for Medicare benefits. This new online application, which takes less than 10 minutes to complete, is for people reaching the Medicare eligibility age of 65 who want to delay filing for Social Security retirement benefits. Currently about a half million Americans enroll in Medicare each year without applying for monthly benefits.
After more than two and half years of sharing all sorts of government information with you, I’m sorry to say that this will be GovGab’s last post. We’re all going to be sad to see GovGab go, but we hope you’ll continue to find all the government information you need through our websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.
If you are a parent of a college-bound senior, your life is probably consumed these days with talk of college. First, there is the drama of your child deciding on which college(s) to apply to for admission.
Thousands of Americans with disabilities will have housing assistance specifically targeted to meet their needs, according to the departments of Health & Human Services (HHS) and Housing & Urban Development (HUD).
Multiflexdental.com announced today that their dental insurance indemnity plans were now available in 45 states. Indemnity dental insurance is true insurance and not a discount dental plan that is offered by most of the dental web sites on the internet.
A new study found that models for assessing breast cancer risk perform only slightly better when they include common inherited genetic variants recently linked to the disease. For now, recommendations for breast cancer screening or treatments that are based on such models will remain unchanged for most women.
People who scored high on a test that measures impulsive and antisocial traits had exaggerated brain responses to certain “rewards,” like winning money or taking stimulant drugs. The new study provides evidence that a dysfunctional brain reward system may underlie vulnerability to a personality disorder known as psychopathy.
Some of the same brain mechanisms that fuel drug addiction in humans accompany the emergence of compulsive eating behaviors and the development of obesity in animals, according to research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a component of the National Institutes of Health.
When you think of Washington, DC, does your mind summon images of politicians debating in senate/house chambers, judges ruling on national legal matters, or the president going about the business of running our country?
There has been a lot in the news in the last several months about food recalls and the resulting illnesses from eating those foods. By paying attention to the news or signing up for recall alerts, we can make sure we’re all aware of what products we should avoid.
I know it’s officially spring, but I wanted to remind you that H1N1 flu (also known as swine flu) is still a risk and you should take steps to stay healthy. Even though the H1N1 outbreak in the U.S. was mild over the winter, the World Health Organization still considers H1N1 a pandemic. Luckily for us, … Read more
“Who would want to be 100 years old?” “Anyone who is 99,” goes the joke. I can’t tell you how happy I’ll be in a few weeks. My family and I will gather in Chicago to celebrate my second cousin’s 100th birthday. Hattie is going strong—doesn’t take any medication and can still belt out a hymn like nobody’s business.
A sad story appeared in my inbox last week. It was an email from a woman, let’s call her Rosemary, who met an attractive and attentive widower, let’s call him Albert, on a popular online dating site. Here’s how the story goes.