Social Security Chief Martin O'Malley Decides To Get Agency Out Of The Life-Ruining Business
When the agency overpays people benefits, it doesn't have to act like a Dickensian landlord.
We have argued before that one of the Biden administration’s missions is to disprove once and for all the old Ronald Reagan line that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.’” Here, have another case in point: Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who was sworn in in December as the new head of the Social Security Administration, pledged this week that he will put an end to the agency’s practice of trying to “claw back” money that it says was incorrectly sent to beneficiaries (sometimes because of SSA’s errors), because it “just doesn’t seem right or fair.”
That system — which often involves suddenly cutting off benefits to elderly, chronically ill or disabled recipients with little or no warning, along with demanding tens of thousands of dollars back for supposed overpayments — has driven many people into poverty and even into homelessness, as covered in a series of reports last fall by KFF Health News and Cox Media Group. One disability advocate, Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health care policy at the Arc, described trying to resolve an overpayment as a “Kafkaesque minefield.”
Since it’s an agency whose job is to provide security to people in this society, O’Malley told KFF Health News that one of his top priorities will be
“addressing the injustice we do to too many Americans because of overpayments, the rather cruel-hearted and mindless way that we recover those overpayments.”
He said he has concrete steps in mind, such as establishing a statute of limitations, shifting the burden of proof to the agency, and imposing a 10% cap on clawbacks for some beneficiaries.
“We do have the ability and we do have the authority to address many of these injustices,” he said, suggesting that the SSA won’t have to wait for congressional action.
Kind of makes me proud to be a Democrat, it does. We already have one party that seems delighted by the prospect of punishing people for being poor and vulnerable, thanks.
The clawback actions sometimes seemed to come out of the blue, when the agency discovered an overpayment error from years before and demanded repayment of thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars from folks who simply didn’t have it and had no chance of ever getting it. The overpayment notices went to more than two million people a year.
As KFF Health News explains,
Most overpayments are linked to the Supplemental Security Income program, which provides money to people with little or no income, who are disabled, blind, or at least age 65. Others are connected to the Social Security Disability Insurance program, which aids disabled workers and their dependents.
For starters, O’Malley said, the agency will drop efforts to claw back overpayments that are from years ago, and to immediately stop terminating benefits for people with disabilities who fail to respond to notices either because they never got them or couldn’t understand them. He noted that the notices can be in very technical language, so that the only thing that’s immediately clear to a reader is that there’s an 800 number to call — which may or may not get picked up or leave the caller on hold for a long time, another part of the agency’s troubles that he’s working on.
“We’re not fulfilling congressional intent by putting seniors out of their homes and having them live under a bridge when they didn’t understand our notice,” O’Malley said.
Here’s one example of the kind of thing that O’Malley is going to put the brakes on, immediately; I’ll caution you that it is depressing as fuck:
Denise Woods lives in her Chevy, seeking a safe place to sleep each night at strip malls or truck stops around Savannah, Georgia. Woods said she became homeless in 2022 after the SSA — without explanation — determined it had overpaid her and demanded she send back roughly $58,000. Woods didn’t have that amount on hand, so the agency cut off her monthly disability benefits to recoup the debt.
The agency later restored some of her benefit allowance: She gets $616 a month. That’s not enough to cover rent in Savannah, where even modest studio apartments can run $1,000 a month.
In January, she fell ill and landed in intensive care with pneumonia. “I signed a [Do Not Resuscitate form] and a nurse asked, ‘Do you know what this means?'” Woods said. “I told her there was no reason to revive me if my heart stops. They have already ruined my life. I’m beyond exhausted.”
That’s not the country we should be, and the investigative series, called “Overpayment Outrage,” got the attention of key Democrats in Congress, who demanded changes. And by Crom, O’Malley is committed to address the problem, not just by fixing the clawback process, but by making sure the agency isn’t causing overpayments in the first place.
The agency recovered $4.9 billion of overpayments during the 2023 fiscal year, with an additional $23 billion in overpayments still uncollected, according to its latest annual financial report.
So yes, that’s a lot of costly errors, but if vulnerable people are being thrown out on the streets in the effort to get the money back, we say the hell with it. Do partial payments, or just write the overpayments off and cover it by eliminating oil subsidies.
It’s a big mess, but for once, it really seems like we have people in government who are genuinely committed to help. How about we keep them around another four years and see what else they accomplish?
PREVIOUSLY!
[KFF Health News / Photo: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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When I tweeted the story a minute ago, I replaced "government really can help people" with "Ronald Reagan can eat a dick," and I believe that's a better summation of the Biden Administration's outlook on governing.
This is the good, solid, boring work of government that OHJB's administration is so good at. And that I FUCKING LOVE. Real help for real people.
So anyone who's on the Purity Pony Concern Troll Train can fuck right off into the sun.