Social Security Holds Compassionate Allowances Hearing on Early-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease
Michael J. Astrue, Commissioner of Social Security, today hosted the agency’s fourth public hearing on Compassionate Allowances. Commissioner Astrue was joined by Marie A. Bernard, M.D., Deputy Director of the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health, and other Social Security officials. They heard testimony from some of the nation’s leading experts on early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias about possible methods for identifying and implementing Compassionate Allowances for people with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
“This year, through Compassionate Allowances and our Quick Disability Determination process, over 100,000 Americans with severe disabilities will be approved for Social Security disability benefits in a matter of days rather than the months and years it can sometimes take,” said Commissioner Astrue. “We are now looking to add more diseases and impairments to these expedited processes. With today’s hearing, we are expanding our focus from specific rare diseases and cancers to look at subgroups of much broader conditions. Early-onset Alzheimer’s disease is a rapidly progressive and debilitating disease of the brain that affects individuals between the ages of 50 and 65 and clearly deserves our consideration.”
In October 2008, Social Security launched Compassionate Allowances to expedite the processing of disability claims for applicants with medical conditions so severe that their conditions by definition meet Social Security’s standards. To learn more and to view a web cast and pdf testimonies of today’s hearing, go to http://www.socialsecurity.gov/compassionateallowances/hearings0729alt.htm.
“With the aging of the baby-boomers, we are beginning to see more, younger working Americans diagnosed with this devastating disease,” Commissioner Astrue said. “I want to thank the Alzheimer’s Association and their staff, particularly Harry Johns, President and CEO. Their help has been invaluable and many of the witnesses are here at their suggestion. Together, we hope to identify the most severe cases that can be included in our Compassionate Allowances process.”
Social Security and Medicare as Pyramid Schemes
Dr. Peter Holmes: And good morning and welcome. I’m Dr. Peter Holmes, an orthopedic surgeon and host of your program, Ask the Doctor. My guest this morning is Dr. Byron Limmer. Dr. Limmer is a dermatologist. If you have any question for Byron in the future and my other guest, two ways to reach us, it’s through the foundation and it’s www.kneedfoundation.org or fax, 696-9012.
I’d like to talk about pyramid schemes and your health. Recently, we heard on the news is a gentleman named Madoff who made the news because he bilked some $50 billion off of investors and he did it through what they call a pyramid scheme.
Now, folks, what a pyramid scheme is it’s just that, it’s shaped like a pyramid. You get one person to put money in and he gets notice that his portfolio is worth something and then you get other people to put money in later and you pass some of their money off to the first investor, but for the most part, you spend everybody’s money.
So the person on top is getting a little bit of money, but the key is you have to keep bringing in more and more investors and the pyramid gets wider and wider at the bottom, that’s why it’s called a pyramid.
The money is all gone; it’s just on paper. So the net result is this: you now have this vast fortune of zero. In other words, there’s no money. It’s worth nothing, yet everybody thinks it’s worth something. Any money again going to the top is strictly transferred from new money coming in the bottom.
It sounds pretty ludicrous, doesn’t it? Well, guess what? We have a pyramid scheme in this country and most of you are part of it. It’s called Social Security and Medicare. There is absolutely no difference. You pay your Social Security and Medicare taxes in. That money is being spent in the general budget. It is then put down in the ledger, much like Mr. Madoff, that says “I owe you” (IOU). In other words, the trust fund is owed money by future taxpayers.
So what we have here basically is the money is spent. We have the people retiring now, on Medicare now, and new people coming in the bottom paying to the top. In other words, it is a generation to generation direct transfer of tax revenue. There are zero funds in this trust fund. It’s zero, same as Mr. Madoff’s, nothing.
All we have in the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are IOUs. Now, the problem with this pyramid scheme is that it’s really not a pyramid. What’s happening with the ageing babyboomers as we get older and there are fewer workers below, the pyramid is beginning to look more like a diamond, which is unsupportable in any sort of pyramid scheme.
Your healthcare and your Social Security depends now on a pyramid scheme and they’re both going to collapse. These are my opinions. If you have any comments, two ways to reach me, go to the foundation at www.kneedfoundation.org or fax 696-9012 to Ask the Doctor.
President Obama: After Health Care, I May Address Social Security
In an interview with the Washington Post, President Barack Obama suggested today that, once the health care reform is behind him, he might tackle Social Security reform:
Barack Obama: “I think we’re in a position to be able to, either at the end of this year or early next year, start laying out a broader picture about how we are going to handle entitlements in a serious way. It may start with Social Security because that’s, frankly, the easier one.”
The Future of Social Security
Lady Narrator: On the next Destination Casa Blanca, a large number of Latinos admit not to know anything about retirement saving plans and most of them expect to retire solely on the Social Security funds. But will this money be enough?
Male Speaker: Social Security from the very beginning was not meant to be your retirement plan.
Steve Guss: Exactly. Social Security was intended to provide sometimes referred to as fore-protection upon which people were expected to be building.
Michael Tanner: Every dollar that the government consumes is a dollar that’s not available in the private sector to increase economic growth, to hire people, to make businesses grow, for people to save and invest on their own. There is a cost to doing that.
Lady Narrator: What’s more? Will it even exist?
Male Speaker 2: There is not a long-term Social Security crisis, but there very much is a long-term healthcare crisis.
Michael Tanner: Cutting Social Security benefits angers seniors who are the most powerful voting block there is. Raising taxes on top of all the tax increases we’ve got coming is not good for the economy.
Lady Narrator: Join us for this new edition of Destination Casa Blanca, Thursday, July 2nd, 9 PM, Eastern Time and 6 PM, Pacific Time with an encore at 12 midnight Eastern Time, Pacific Time. Only on HITN educates and entertain.
Do you believe Social Security will be there for you when you retire?
Loading ...The Need for Social Security
Lady Narrator: While the economy worsens, the future of Social Security remains uncertain. As many baby boomers approach retirement age, the funds are shrinking and expected to vanish. At the Covello Senior Center, many retirees share their concerns about this problem.
Milagros Ruiz: You know, we need that check. What are we going to live for? I will be in the street because how would I afford gas, electricity and other bills. How else would I be if not for that? Maybe I will have to live in a shelter.
Lady Narrator: Some economists say the future problems Social Security faces are due to the spending and lending of the $1.5 billion in surplus it had into the less people paying taxes after all baby boomers retire. Those who depend on that monthly check talk about what it would be like without it.
Maria Rivera: It will be very difficult for me to survive without those benefits because it helps you, you know. It’s part of all the years in the labor force. It’s money that we have worked for and the help we receive here is very important and very essential because without it, life would be even more difficult for us.
Lady Narrator: Keeping in mind the not too positive future the next generations will face when they retire, some of these seniors made a recommendations based on their own experiences.
Jorge Rivera: I wish I would have had a better job when it was time to retire. If I had known, I would have prepared to have a better job and to save money, so that I would have had something set aside for my golden years.
Milagros Ruiz: There are many people who didn’t think and spent all their money instead of saving it for their retirement. They just spent it all, but you should save. That’s why people no longer went to retirement early because they don’t have enough money and they would get less benefits, so they rather work until the last days, but the sad thing is, that those who work the longest, usually die the soonest.
Will Social Security Survive?
Lady Narrator: By the year 2016, Social Security will spend more than it collects in taxes. This gloomy forecast has many wondering if they will get any money once they retire. Although Andres Vido is only a few years away from retiring, he shares this concern.
Andres Vido: In this situation, I would have to continue working. One comes to this country to work and progress to find a better way of life. We hope this new president will take care of this. God help him, so he could be able to defend us. If not him, who will?
Lady Narrator: He is among the 78 million baby boomers eligible for early retirement benefits at the age of 62. Although he still has three years left, he is afraid to lose his job before then.
Andres Vido: In my job, they have let go of 80 percent of the workers. They have been laid off and right now, we are only working four days.
Lady Narrator: The good news, he says, is that he has done enough not to depend solely on pension benefits.
Andres Vido: I have been working my way up to save money, here and there, with the goal that I don’t face any problems in the future.
Lady Narrator: And thinking about the future is what he says he has done since he came to this country from the Dominican Republic.
Andres Vido: Since I came to this country 15 years ago, I had bought one of my lots 9 months after I got here. I bought a house through the bank and the other ones I had to work so hard for to build them.
Lady Narrator: But not every future retiree is as prepared as Vido, that’s why there was a push for a reform and the options being weighed into saving Social Security include raising the full retirement age from 65 to 67 and raising the cap on wages, so the higher-earning workers pay more. Even though experts say baby boomers have their money secure, only time will tell if Social Security benefits will last for generations to come.
Researchers claim they can guess your Social Security Number!
Lady Speaker: All right, Brian. Thank you. Do you think your Social Security number is safe? Well, you might want to think again. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found a way to correctly guess your Social Security number just by knowing your state and your date of birth.
Male Speaker: That is frightening. Alessandro Acquisti co-authored a study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Good morning to you, Alessandro. This is frightening stuff for the people out there.
Alessandro Acquisti: Good morning.
Male Speaker: Because we thought this was somewhat random and people could not predict them. You found otherwise. Tell us how easy this is, to find out someone’s Social Security number.
Alessandro Acquisti: Well, it’s quite easy. It’s too easy in a way. The accuracy of the prediction changes with the state of birth and the year of birth of the person you want to predict. It can go from very low to very high. For instance in certain cases, we can predict first five digits with 90 percent accuracy, meaning 90 percent of the SSN issued in a certain year and state can be predicted with just one attempt. As you can see on the last…
Lady Speaker: All right. Let’s look at one of those examples, Alessandro, so that people get a sense of what you’re talking about.
Alessandro Acquisti: Yes.
Lady Speaker: So if you were born July 8th in Wyoming in 1993, then the first five digits you would automatically know?
Alessandro Acquisti: Then you are not very lucky… yeah.
Lady Speaker: So how do you know automatically the first five digits are 52031?
Alessandro Acquisti: Well, because you… what we discovered is that you can combine information which is publicly available about the assignment scheme, together with other information, also publicly available from the so-called Death Master File, which is the database with the SSN of people who are dead, and you can find patterns of issuance, which allow you to estimate also the SSN of people who are still alive. So by using statistics and data mining, you can predict these digits. So the state and year you were mentioning has a very high accuracy of prediction.
Male Speaker: Alessandro, you say that if it’s a small state or if you’re born after 1988, it’s particularly easy. Why is that?
Alessandro Acquisti: That’s correct. There are two reasons for that. A smaller state has a lower population. Lower population implies fewer births in a given day. Fewer births imply slower transition for the assignment scheme and a slower transition means it’s easier to predict and it’s easier to follow. The other reason is the year. What happened was that for the 1980s and in particular at the end of the 1980s, there were some initiatives which made it more likely that the SSN would be applied for a birth. Once upon a time, you could apply for the SSN at any time of your life.
Lady Speaker: Right. Right.
Alessandro Acquisti: Usually when you start working. After 1987 and 1989, because of the process called EAB, Enumeration at Birth, most of the newborns in the US get their SSN at birth because the parents applied for them. Ironically, these initiatives were intended to decrease identity theft, to avoid fraud.
Lady Speaker: Interesting.
Alessandro Acquisti: These are non-intended consequences, which are creating irregularity, which can be exploited for the kind of reference we showed to be possible.
Lady Speaker: Yeah, well, hopefully, there aren’t many scientists out there as smart as you to figure this system out because otherwise, we’re all in trouble for identity theft.
Male Speaker: Yeah. Yeah.
Lady Speaker: But if you’re born in New York, Dave. You have an advantage because there’s so…
Male Speaker: We have a little more an advantage, but it’s still frightening. Hopefully, we do something about this, Alessandro. We appreciate your time this morning.
The Problem with Social Security
David John, a Senior research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explains his position on Social Security as it relates to taxes and health care. He suggests it would be a good solution for the government to raise the age of retirement.
David John: The problem is that while I agree that these are “full faith and credits” securities and we haven’t defaulted since sometime in the 1770s or so and we have no plans to do so now, what is actually there is paper and it is a first call on tax revenues. Now, those are tax revenues that are going to come in from income taxes and various other things and, yes, it will all go to the Social Security system.
But at the same time, we still have a problem with healthcare and healthcare is running massive deficits as Mike mentioned, and we have problems with the economic measures we’ve taken in the last six months or so that deal with the economy and unfortunately, we have a lot more demand coming for that tax money than we’re going to have tax money coming in.
Ray Suarez: So when you say “first call on tax money,” after those two trends pass each other and we’re paying out more than we’re taking in.
David John: Right. Right.
Ray Suarez: The Social Security recipients in the 2020s of which I hope to be one, I think.
David John: Me, too.
Ray Suarez: As I hope to be… I mean, in that number, too.
David John: Right.
Ray Suarez: We will also be taking money, not only from people paying Social Security tax or working, but from the general tax revenues of the United States.
David John: Absolutely. And the fact is that we keep taxes to the same level historically, about 18 percent of the economy, the three programs that Mike mentioned, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, are going to suck up every single dollar of that tax revenue starting around 2050 or so and unfortunately, if we could put healthcare issues off to the side and say, “We’ll deal with you later,” Social Security probably would be fairly a simple problem to fix, but we can’t. It’s all coming in together.
Ray Suarez: Well, the same people who are going to want that Social Security check are also going to want the healthcare.
David John: Exactly.
Ray Suarez: Again, all of us getting old and sitting around this table this morning.
David John: Right.
Ray Suarez: So what’s the solution in simple terms? I mean, obviously, you either got to increase the money you collect or say to the people who are hoping to get Social Security checks, “You’re going to get less.”
David John: That’s it.
Ray Suarez: Those are you choices, right?
David John: That’s the bottom line with it when it comes down to it. You can try to make your money work harder by increasing private savings and things like that and the Obama administration is working on that in increasing opportunities for retirement savings and that’s a very crucial element of this whole thing.
We really can’t look at Social Security separately from overall retirement income. But as far as Social Security goes, either we raise taxes and there are costs to that because it makes hiring somebody more expensive and that’s especially true with younger people and lower-skilled workers, or we’re going to have to go through, which is what I think is going to happen is to change benefits. We’re probably going to have raise the retirement age, probably up to 68, 69, something like that, and we’re going to have to focus the money that we got coming in to Social Security even more than we do now on those who need it most.
The Biggest Misconceptions about Social Security Disability
The biggest misconceptions I hear about Social Security cases are:
“If my doctor agrees I can’t work, surely I will receive benefits”, or “I’m disabled because I can’t return to my old job”, or “It shouldn’t take long to find out if I qualify for disability”.
The truth is that that it doesn’t really matter what your doctor thinks; it’s what he can prove. You must be unable to do any work, not just your old jobs. And it’s going to take up to 2 years if you have to go before a judge.
I believe the biggest mistake made by people applying for disability is that they fail to go to a doctor to obtain the proof they need. The problem is that most people who are disabled can’t afford ongoing medical care.
Because of these mistakes and misconceptions, I have written the book, ‘The Truth About Your Social Security Disability Claim’. This book gives guidance from the first application to the final decision. The book can be downloaded from our home page, or they can call our 1-800 hotline number and request a hard copy. Both of these are free.
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