Social Security Claimants with Developmental Disabilities: Problems of Policy and Practice

Abstract

This article, which is a contribution to a symposium in the Kansas Law Review on Developmental Disabilities and the Law, argues that broad policy changes within the Social Security Administration (SSA) have exacerbated the inherent practical difficulties confronted by claimants with developmental disabilities when dealing with the Social Security Bureaucracy. In particular, the SSA has come increasingly to emphasize its limited resources and responsibility for conserving those resources, resulting in a tightening of standards, insistence on objective evidence of disabilities and their impact on a claimant’s ability to work, and pressure on decisionmakers throughout the administrative hierarchy to deny benefits in doubtful cases. While these forces have adversely affected claimants in general, claimants with developmental disabilities are especially vulnerable. The article argues that while the resource problems plaguing disability programs are real, a bureaucratically imposed series of policies that fall most heavily on those least able to protect themselves is not an appropriate response. It is also hoped that a careful examination of the issues surrounding claims based on developmental disabilities will help practitioners overcome some of the bureaucratic obstacles they must address.

The article begins with a general discussion of various policies and practices adopted by SSA during the 1980s that reflected a shift in focus toward increasing productivity of disability decisionmakers, securing adjudicatory consistency, and reducing erroneous awards of benefits. The article then considers the tightening of substantive standards and SSA’s increasing demands for objectively verifiable proof of disability, and considers how those changes led to changes in substantive standards and their application that make it increasingly difficult to establish eligibility for benefits based on a developmental disability. The article then turns to the procedural apparatus used to process benefit claims, arguing that it is vulnerable to a systemic anti-claimant bias and that various procedural obstacles may be especially difficult for claimants with developmental disabilities to overcome. Finally, the article considers the broader policy implications of these substantive and procedural issues.