There are hundreds of thousands of people with a disability and who are entitled to extra assistance from the government. In order to obtain that financial assistance, you have to go through a disability hearing where the Social Security Administration (SSA) will determine the extent of your disability and the appropriate benefits to grant you. Disability hearings can be very stressful and difficult experiences and can leave many people feeling very overwhelmed. There is a five-step process that the SSA goes through to decide the status of your disability, whether they deem you fit to work and what benefits, if any, you are entitled to. These steps can be very confusing, so to help anyone who is seeking assistance, we will explain what the process of disability hearings looks like.
The SSA Checks Your Current Employment Status
The first thing that the SSA does is simply check your current employment status. If you are currently working and you are earning more than the SSA limit ($1,260 a month in 2020), your application will receive an automatic no. Even if you earned that amount of money one day a month and spent the rest of the month on a dialysis machine, you would still be found to be not disabled because that amount of money per month pre taxes is considered substantial gainful cb daily activity. It is very unusual however, for applicants to be rejected based on their current employment status because people in work rarely apply for disability benefits.
Your Disability is Assessed
Next, the SSA will assess your disability to see whether it stops you from doing basic tasks or activities which are required at work. Similarly to the evaluation in step one, very few people ever fail at this stage. In most cases, if you have a simple report of your BAC evaluation from a chiropractor, let alone full-blown hospital surgery records for your shoulder surgery or back surgery, you are usually going to sail through this step. Despite this, you should never be complacent about any stage of the disability hearing process. In the last couple of years, especially, rejections have been increasing based on inconsistent and relatively arbitrary things. Make sure all of your paperwork is in order, and you will not give the SSA any reason to reject your application.
Your Disability is Compared to the Blue Book Impairments
The third thing that the person examining your claim will do is to check your disability in their official list of impairments, often known as the Blue Book. The Blue Book contains over one hundred physical and mental impairments that will automatically qualify you for disability benefits. It may be that your particular disability is not in the Blue Book, but if it is equally debilitating as another condition on the list, your claim will be accepted. If, however, your impairment is not in the Blue Book or is deemed to not fulfill the requisite criteria, further assessment will be done.
Your Past Employment is Assessed
If you were not automatically accepted after your disability is assessed, the next thing that SSA will do is look at your past employment. What they are trying to determine is why your disability restricts you from doing a job you were capable of doing before. They will look at the specific requirements of the job and the limitations of your disability and judge accordingly. The question of how long you need to wait has various factors to do with the specifics of your case and the judge and jurisdiction involved. There is a range of reasons why you may be rejected at this stage, but they often come down to the duration of time you have been impaired and whether SSA thinks you can recover to be fully capable of taking up your previous type of employment again in the future.
Your Fitness for Alternative Work is Assessed
If the SSA finds that you are unable to do your previous job, they will then assess whether there is any kind of work at all you can do. They may say that whilst you return to any of your past work, there are jobs that exist in significant numbers in the national economy that they think you are able to perform. This is where the majority of rejections come and where you most need expert legal advice or representation. Whilst there may be jobs that they deem fit, you may judge yourself incapable or ineligible, so you will need to seek appeal options.
Applying for disability benefits can be such an emotional undertaking because the outcome can have such a huge impact on your life. A large part of the stress comes from not knowing, so it can be a relief to have the process broken down, so you know what to expect. If you are planning to apply for a disability hearing or are waiting for your hearing to begin, read this article, which will help you prepare.
I’m a 20-something stay-at-home mother and wife. I have an amazing husband, a beautiful daughter, two loving dogs, and a lazy cat. I wouldn’t change my life for anything! I love to read, listen to music, cook and blog!
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