I'm a lawyer. Since 1997 I've concentrated on representing disabled people who are trying to get approved for Social Security disability benefits. For about 8 years now I've been concentrating on just the higher-level appeals.
Here's the timeline of the appeal I started working on this week:
Claim filed April 2011, alleging inability to work since May 2010.
First denial April 2012.
First appeal (on-paper review) denied June 2012.
Hearing before SSA judge September 2013. (This is a little slower than average, but not unusual.)
SSA judge issues denial January 2014—rejecting opinions of three doctors and one psychologist supporting the claimant's disability.
SSA Appeals Council denies review June 2014. (This is unusually fast.)
My firm was asked to review case for possible further appeal fall 2014; we requested copy of the file October 2014. After several back-and-forths with SSA, we now have a copy of the file. (This is unusually slow, canceling time savings at previous stage.)
Now I can BEGIN to figure out if there's a chance of winning on further appeal to U.S. District Court.
If we win in District Court, the court will likely NOT order SSA to start paying benefits—instead when the court finds SSA error, it usually sends the case back to SSA with an order to hold a new hearing before an SSA judge. The earliest we might realistically get such an order from the District Court is summer 2016, meaning new SSA hearing probably early 2017, new decision from SSA judge maybe fall 2017.
On first remand from U.S. District Court, disability claims are assigned to the same SSA judge as first time around. Knowing this SSA judge's track record, the odds are extremely high that he will deny the claim again, regardless of little things like the law and the evidence.
This is not unusual. There are some very good SSA judges, but there is also a distressingly high percentage of terrible SSA judges.
Once this SSA judge denies the case again, we go back to the SSA Appeals Council, which denies (last time I looked) 73% of appeals, and will likely deny this one around mid-2018. Then perhaps a second trip to U.S. District Court, perhaps ending in another remand order to SSA, issued around early-mid 2019. If the U.S. District Court remands the case a second time, SSA will assign it to a different SSA judge for the third SSA hearing, maybe late 2019, or sometime in 2020.
Meanwhile the claimant has no income, no Medicare, no Medicaid. (This is Georgia, which has not expanded Medicaid.) If he is alive and sleeping indoors at the conclusion of all this, it will be only by the grace of God or good friends or relatives.
This timeline is not unusual.
The people who say it's too easy to get SSA disability have no damn clue … or they are pandering to people with no damn clue, fostering their malignant ignorance.