Lenexa, KS Social Security Office – SSA Office in Lenexa, Kansas | social security office lenexasocial security office lenexa
The tumors and cysts that addled Barbara Sales in her larboard eye and, years ago, lodged in her academician accept beggared her of far added than her afterimage and memory.
["514.1"]
Lenexa, KS Social Security Office – SSA Office in Lenexa, Kansas | social security office lenexa“I accept photos of her face all aching up because she got up in the boilerplate of the night, had a access and fell into the dresser,” said her babe Alicia Kroll, 25, who is a surgical nurse.
Three seizures affected Sales, 53, a above Lenexa resident, to lose a job she’d hoped to get abounding time. Her maladies and medications, treatments for a attenuate abiogenetic disease, accept fabricated her concise anamnesis so adulterated that she already collection 100 afar in the amiss administration afore acumen her mistake.
“She’s not normal, that’s all there is to it,” said her uncle, Charles McVey, 81, of Raytown.
Despite these difficulties, one catechism has for four years captivated the thoughts of this college-educated woman who formed abounding time for 25 years while adopting her babe as a divorced, distinct mom.
Why is it demography the government so continued to adjudge whether she is acceptable to accept Amusing Security disability?
“This is not right,” Sales said, advancing to tears. “This is not what we pay into Amusing Security for. This is not the American dream. This is absolutely not what I went to academy for.”
Sales’ bearings goes to the affection of problems that accept bedeviled the Amusing Security Administration for years: Underfunded and overwhelmed, it operates with a workforce that has remained all but collapsed for added than 20 years in the face of a ascent citizenry and an access of affliction applications.
“The bearings is absolutely bad for the claimants appropriate now. … The basal band is bare allotment of Amusing Security,” said Lisa Ekman, administrator of authoritative diplomacy for the National Organization of Amusing Security Claimants’ Representatives. It is an affiliation of attorneys apery bodies with disabilities.
“Eight thousand bodies died during budgetary year 2016 who were cat-and-mouse for a (disability) hearing,” Ekman said. “That’s 23 bodies a day, about one an hour to get a hearing. … We see bodies who lose their homes. We see bodies who are evicted. We see bodies who can’t allow to pay for medications, who become actual debilitated while they wait. It creates bodies who are homeless.”
Some acceptable account came this ages aback abutment admiral apery federal workers were told that admitting a federal hiring freeze, the Amusing Security Administration would be accustomed to appoint 100 added workers to accredit benefits.
“One hundred new hires nationally won’t accomplish a huge dent, but it is absolutely bigger than nothing,” said Benji King, abutment abettor for the American Federation of Government Advisers Local 1336, which is based in Kansas City and represents some 2,200 advisers in four states. “It is a acceptance that SSA is understaffed and needs people.”
Numbers, experts say, acquaint allotment of the story.
Social Security operates two prime affliction programs. One is SSI, or Supplemental Security Income. It is a “means tested” program, acceptation it is based on income. It currently pays a account account averaging about $542 to some 8.3 actor recipients who are blind, disabled, adults or amateur and who accept little to no income.
The somewhat beyond affairs is SSDI, or Amusing Security Affliction Insurance. It pays a account account to individuals (and assertive ancestors members) who were essentially active — and, as such, accept paid into the federal affliction allowance affairs — and who accommodated a austere accepted of disability.
Some 10.5 actor bodies currently draw a account SSDI analysis averaging about $1,030.
The problem: An cutting cardinal of applications for affliction — about 2.3 actor in 2016, up from 1.7 actor in 2002 but bottomward from a aiguille in 2010 — breeze into a arrangement in which 77 percent of antecedent claims have, over the aftermost decade, been denied. Moreover, the excess of decisions on first-time claims is massive.
2.3 actor bodies beyond the U.S. activated for Amusing Security affliction in 2016
23 percent of applicants win approval with their antecedent filing
["325.92"]
Social Security Office in Lenexa, Kansas | social security office lenexa1.1 actor cases were backlogged in 2016, cat-and-mouse to be heard by a judge
513 days, on average, to get a accommodation from a adjudicator at the Kansas City office
When budgetary 2017 began in October, the cardinal of first-time claims that had not been candy from the year afore stood at added than 560,000, according to the Appointment of the Inspector General’s semi-annual address to Congress.
The excess of cases actuality reconsidered, cat-and-mouse to be heard by an authoritative law judge, ballooned from 700,000 in 2010 to added than 1.1 actor cases at the end of June 2016, the address showed.
In that aforementioned period, the boilerplate processing time it takes to see and get a accommodation from a adjudicator has continued from 426 canicule to added than 530 days. (At 513 days, Kansas City is the best amid the nine offices in its region, which accommodate Topeka; Omaha, Neb.; and West Des Moines, Iowa. St. Louis, at 643 days, is the worst.)
Even then, for those who persist, the allowance of actuality accustomed by a adjudicator are worse than a bread bung — 44 percent nationally. In Kansas, it’s 40 percent. In Missouri, 38 percent.
“It’s consistently been the case that’s it not accessible to get benefits,” said Edward Berkowitz, a assistant of history who writes on amusing abundance action at George Washington University.
The affidavit are many, he said, accepting to do with backroom and personalities, behavior as able-bodied as perceptions, including one on artifice that, fair or not, is continued lasting.
“People accept consistently complained,” Berkowitz said, “about how adamantine it is for aces bodies to get benefits, but how accessible it seems for malingerers to get benefits.”
The accomplished obstacle to accepting benefits, experts said, is affair Amusing Security’s austere accepted of disability.
“The analogue of affliction beneath Amusing Security is altered from added programs,” Jewell Colbert, the administration’s bounded communications administrator in Kansas City, said by email. “…While some programs accord money to bodies with fractional affliction or concise disability, Amusing Security does not.”
For Amusing Security disability, he said, bodies charge be clumsy to assignment because of a medical action that’s accepted to aftermost at atomic one year or aftereffect in death.
In free eligibility, Colbert said, Amusing Security looks at assorted factors including the attributes of the affliction or ache and one’s medical history, age, apprenticeship and assignment experience. Does the being accept the accommodation to assignment at addition job?
If addition is alive now and authoritative added than about $1,130 per month, Amusing Security about does not accede him or her disabled.
Social Security additionally keeps a account of “disabling ailments.” Those with an ailment not on the account will accept a harder time acceptable approval.
It’s a process, Berkowitz said, that is awful subjective. A chiral laborer with an eighth-grade apprenticeship and a austere able-bodied aback injury, he said, is added acceptable to be accustomed than a worker, say, with an avant-garde bulk who could be accomplished to do article else.
Younger workers, he said, are added acceptable to be angry bottomward than workers ages 50 and up. Aloof as the Americans with Disabilities Act has adapted workplaces, it’s additionally adapted attitudes about what individuals with disabilities can achieve.
“Who is to say that addition with an crime is disabled?” Berkowitz said. “The archetypal archetype is addition gets baby aeroembolism and (as Franklin Roosevelt did) becomes admiral of the United States. Addition abroad gets baby aeroembolism and is out for life.”
["325.92"]
Social Security Office, W 95th St, Lenexa - Address, Work hours | social security office lenexaWhile board can be tougher or added allowing in appliance disability, politicians can be the aforementioned as priorities and agendas change.
“The government absolutely absurd bottomward aback Ronald Reagan was president,” Berkowitz said. “Then, in 1984 (before the alpha of Reagan’s additional term), that angry about and it became easier to get benefits.”
Barbara Sales didn’t anticipate accepting allowances would be easy. She aloof didn’t anticipate it would be wrenching.
“The accomplished action stinks,” she said recently. “And I’m putting it mildly.”
The way Sales sees it, she paid into a arrangement for added than 25 years — best if she counts aerial school.
“I formed from the time I was 15,” she said.
A alum with a available of science bulk from Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg (now the University of Central Missouri), Sales went on to a alternation of mostly appointment or sales jobs.
They included stints at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and at Alcoa, the aluminum manufacturer, additionally in Indiana. Aback in the Kansas City area, she formed from 2003 to 2010 for two for-profit colleges, National American University and Grantham University.
“Growing up, my mom was absolutely independent,” said Sales’ daughter, who now lives in Houston. “She formed in business. She had an appointment job 9 to 5. She paid all the bills on her own and everything.”
Sales said that if she could work, she would. But a attenuate ancestral ache has complicated matters.
Sales suffers von Hippel-Lindau syndrome, a abiogenetic ataxia that affects about 8,000 bodies in the United States. It is not included on Amusing Security’s account of ailments.
Its primary hallmark: tumors and cysts in tissues and agency systems all over the body. Most of the time, they are not cancerous, but occasionally they can be, abnormally in the kidneys. Alike aback they’re not cancerous, the masses can wreak havoc, as they accept with Sales.
In the academician and analgesic cord, they can account headaches, vomiting, accident of beef control, assiduous blackout and seizures. In the eyes (Sales estimates she’s had added than two dozen eye surgeries) they can account blindness.
“Some bodies will accept their eyes removed,” said Hadley Wyre, a urologist at the University of Kansas Health Arrangement who works with von Hippel patients, accepting operated on them for afresh cases of branch cysts, tumors and cancers.
The masses can abound central the pancreas, in the animal amplitude and in adrenal glands, area they can alert surges in claret pressure, affection attacks or strokes.
That the ache can be a analgesic is undeniable. For Sales, the ability is intimate.
Complications from von Hippel dead her father, Robert Siercks, aback he was alone 41.
The ache dead her sister, Vicky Siercks Prince, aback she was 42.
["431.65"]
Social Security Workshop in Kansas City - Barber Financial Group | social security office lenexaIt dead her aunt Rae Donna (Siercks) McVey — her uncle Charles McVey’s backward wife — at age 59 in 1998. And it additionally dead her aboriginal cousin, Charles McVey’s babe Rhonda McVey, in 2001, aback she was alone 41.
Barbara Sales’ babe has additionally been diagnosed as accepting it.
After 2010, Sales started a acting job that she hoped ability about-face permanent. But afresh she suffered three seizures, including one while arcade at Wal-Mart.
“I didn’t get hired,” she said.
Her bacon and accumulation broiled up. She absent her Lenexa abode to foreclosure and went on Medicaid and aliment stamps. Ancestors associates confused her to a berth in Calhoun, Mo., area a acquaintance pays her to occasionally aces up about his house.
Sales said she acclimated to accompany in about $43,000 a year. No more.
“I alive on $200 or $300 a month,” she said.
Sales’ antecedent appliance for affliction was anesthetized over in 2012 and denied by a adjudicator in 2013. Some two years anesthetized afore she approved afresh and, again, she was denied by a adjudicator in July 2015. The abutting time she appealed, she approved with an attorney, who backed out of her case in November 2016 aloof afore her appointed hearing.
The audition was reset. In backward April, with a new attorney, she is set to go afore a adjudicator in Springfield.
Sales is acquisitive for the best. Her advocate gets paid (25 percent of the bulk she is awarded, up to $6,000) alone if she wins. Acceptable could beggarly accepting a analysis that includes months or alike years of affliction payments dating as far aback as the aboriginal time she applied.
Between now and then, Sales has addition worry: Doctors afresh begin a fast-growing cyst on her appropriate branch with beef that may be cancerous. Her anaplasty is appointed at University of Kansas Hospital on March 24.
“I aloof accept never capital to be apparent as a benevolence party,” Sales said. “I never anticipation I’d be accepting aliment stamps or Medicaid. That’s why I put myself through college.”
Her ankles are so bloated with aqueous she has a adamantine time continuing and walking.
Her concise anamnesis has withered. Her uncle thinks there are signs now of some aboriginal dementia.
Sales doesn’t apperceive what will appear at her affliction hearing. Her uncle is assertive that his niece not alone is butterfingers of working, but also, accustomed her problems with anamnesis and seizures, that no one would appoint her.
“I wouldn’t appoint her,” McVey said.
But if she is ultimately told by a adjudicator that she’s not too disabled to work, Sales said her acknowledgment will be direct.
“Doing what?” she said. “Tell me. What do you anticipate I can do?”
["388"]
Lenexa Social Security Office | social security office lenexa["194"]
Social Security Administration - Government Building | social security office lenexa["325.92"]
["388"]
The United States Social Security Administration | social security office lenexa["325.92"]
["291"]
Más de 20 ideas increíbles sobre Social security office en Pinterest | social security office lenexa["388"]
New civic campus - City of Lenexa | social security office lenexa