(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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10,000 people died waiting for a disability decision in the past year [1]
['Story By', 'Photos By', 'Graphics By', 'Video By']
Date: 2017-11-20
Joe Stewart, who has nerve pain and muscle spasms caused by many years spent installing vinyl siding, laid a ramp outside his mobile home when stairs became too much for him to navigate.
Five-hundred and ninety-seven days.
One-hundred and sixty-nine pages of medical evidence.
One hearing.
How to condense so many years of physical deterioration, so many days of waiting, into one hearing? How to convince someone of pain, when no one can see it? How to remember to say everything that needed saying — the pills taken, the number of pounds that can be lifted, the distance that can be walked, the falls, the different doctors and their names?
So Stewart did his best to follow Gibson’s directions. He carried his back pillow into the courtroom. He stood when he felt pain. He was specific. He said, “burning in the chest.” He said, “I went to see my chiropractor, but they wanted $60, so I haven’t been back.” He said, “My mother, she’s tired of driving me around; she has other things to do.”
And he tried to look at the judge, to express with his eyes what he couldn’t with words, but the judge wasn’t in the room at all. He was sitting in front of a camera in another courtroom 65 miles away in another Social Security Administration building in Tupelo, part of a government policy to work down the backlog by holding some disability hearings by videoconference. Stewart heard the disembodied voice of someone whom Gibson called a “vocational expert,” whose role it was to use, among other sources, the government’s list of possible jobs, the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, last updated in 1991, to discern whether there was any work someone like him could do anywhere in the United States, regardless of pay, distance from his house, or whether he would be hired.
And then an hour had passed, and the hearing was over, and Gibson was saying, “Thank you, your honor.” Stewart, feeling dazed and unsure whether that was really it, sat for a moment, until he saw everyone else was standing. He got up. He collected his crutches and walked outside with Gibson, who was going on and on about the judge.
“One lawyer — a good lawyer — they had 13 cases with him, and they didn’t win a one,” he said. “Not a one.”
“Whether or not he’s going to pay you, I do not know,” he said.
“So we’ll wait and see. . . . You might not get a decision until February.” And: “It may be six months.”
Gibson said something about errands he had to run, shook Stewart’s hand and got into his bright red truck. And Stewart, now caught in another backlog of people awaiting a disposition after the hearing — which has doubled in the last year, from 35,000 claimants to 70,000 — watched him drive off, then saw his mother. She was in her car, waving at him to move it, so he climbed in and reclined the seat until he was nearly supine.
“Can I ask you a question?” said his mother, who had sat outside the courtroom but overheard something about a videoconference. “Was he in there?”
“Who?” Stewart asked.
“The judge.”
“No, he was on TV,” he said, and she looked confused.
“Well, I’m relieved it’s over,” she finally said.
“It ain’t over,” he responded, and there was nothing else to say, so on they went to Webster County, through the endless rows of tall pines, past the houses Stewart had once worked on, stopping at his trailer. “There’s another day,” his mother said and pulled away, and he was alone again. The trailer was dark inside. He took his afternoon medication. He sat in his Ab Lounge. The television came on. The pills started to do their work. The 597th day was over, and the only thing left to do was to wait for the 598th to begin.
Dan Keating contributed to this report.
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2017/11/20/10000-people-died-waiting-for-a-disability-decision-in-the-past-year-will-he-be-next/
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