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Oh hey, a thread I can really contribute to! I used to be an advocate for SSD/SSI/etc claims, until some E/N poo poo resulted in me moving halfway across the country less than a month before I was to sit the exam to get direct-fee approved by the government. (With Disability law you do not need to be an attorney to represent someone, you only need to be: 1-of good ethical and moral character, 2-not banned from appearing before an ALJ, and 3-able to help the client with their disability claim. However, if you're not a licensed/barred attorney you cannot automatically collect your fee even with a fee agreement in place, you have to present your fee agreement to an ALJ after the client wins their benefits and the ALJ has to approve it and give you your cut. The government had a pilot program going (dunno if it still is, this was ~18 months ago) where a bunch of advocates would sit a test proving they knew the CFR, blue book, etc and it would allow them to be direct-fee approved so we wouldn't be tying up the ALJ's time with piddly poo poo like approving fee agreements.) The biggest problem with the current disability regs is that they require proof that you are doing everything that you can to treat your medical conditions and even with treatment you are still unable to work. (especially for things like mental illness - you need to prove that with meds and therapy you are still unable to work even a menial job that doesn't require focus for long periods of time like QA at a factory pulling obviously lovely items off the line - something that the VE's like to pull out where I was as a job that was sit down and didn't require the ability to focus). The problem with that is when you're not working, and you can't get on medicaid because in PA (where the bulk of our clients were) you can't get on medicaid unless you have kids pretty much, how the hell are you supposed to be seeing a doctor at least once a month. I left before the ACA was put into place, so I don't know how it changed things, but I know before in order to get on medicaid without any dependents you had to be found disabled...to be found disabled you had to be seeing a doctor, and to see a doctor you needed to be on medicaid.... And in terms of attorneys - we'd take literally anything that came up so long as it had a snowballs chance in hell (IE, wasn't a 25 year old with just stand/lift limits, or wasn't a mental case with substance abuse issues, etc), with the intent of dropping lovely cases once we got the E-File (the nice little electronic records of everything to do with your claim, including any past applications, C/Es, what your doctors have submitted, etc) because there's so little work we do at the initial/recon level that the 10 seconds of work to file an appeal after the initial gets denied is worth it for the chance that they get approved and we get our check anyway. If you are capable of dealing with little bits of paperwork yourself, I highly recommend not hiring an attorney/advocate until you file an appeal for a hearing. You definitely want rep before an ALJ, but prior to that, there's really not a whole lot we would do beyond checking in to make sure you were going to your doctors appointments, etc. If you had a decent case, we'd work with you to find medical providers that were sliding scale, etc in your area, but there were some times where we literally couldn't do anything, because there was just no help available.
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Sep 15, 2014 17:28
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 21:48 |
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