The cruelest part of a disability claim is the timing. You stop being able to work, which is why you are applying, and then you are told to wait months, sometimes more than a year, with no benefit coming in.…
If you run your own shop, drive your own truck, or ranch your own land, Social Security does not look at your work the way it looks at everyone else’s. For an employee, the question is simple arithmetic: did the…
How long is this going to take? It is the most common question on our intake calls, usually asked by someone who has already waited months for two denials and is now being told to wait again. The honest answer…
Twenty years ago an HIV diagnosis was, for disability purposes, close to self-proving. That is no longer true, and the change cuts both ways. Modern treatment means most people with HIV live full working lives, which is the best medical…
Someone at church, a cousin, a Facebook group: everyone has heard about the five-year rule for Social Security disability, and almost nobody means the same thing by it. We get the question weekly, and the first job is always figuring…
A fair number of the people who call our office open with some version of: I do not think I worked enough to get anything. They are sick, they are out of options, and they have talked themselves out of…
“Arthritis” is one word doing the work of two very different diseases. Osteoarthritis is mechanical: cartilage wearing down in knees, hips, hands, and spine after decades of use. Rheumatoid arthritis is an immune system attacking its own joints, with fatigue…
Schizophrenia has a cruel sense of timing. It most often announces itself in the late teens and twenties, right when a working life is supposed to begin, and the people who call our office about it are usually not the…
Waiting on a Social Security disability decision is a financial cliff. The claim can take months at the initial level and a year or more if it goes to a hearing, and rent does not pause for federal processing times.…
“Can I keep working with COPD?” is the question, and the people asking it are usually already doing the math on a stairwell: how many steps before the pause, how many pauses before somebody notices. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease takes…
