The Social Security Disability program can be extremely confusing for those navigating it for the first time. For some, the income is needed but possibly not urgently. But there are definitely those individuals with certain disabilities that need their funds as soon as possible. These are typically individuals with very severe medical conditions.
Because of these types of ailments, the Social Security Administration created a list of conditions under the Compassionate Allowances program. This list is a quick way to identify medical conditions that will consistently qualify for benefits without having to obtain a lot of medical information. Typically the condition can be quickly verified with “minimal objective medical information.”
The administration has various ways of figuring out which conditions will make the list, from public hearings to comments from scientific and medical experts and information obtained from research. New conditions are added annually and the administration works hard to identify these conditions.
Once a person has identified that their condition is on the list, they may wish to apply for disability benefits. A decision will be made on their claim in weeks compared to the months or years it may take for those with conditions not on the list. How quickly the claim is processed depends on several factors, including whether or not someone needs a medical exam in order to get evidence of a condition, how quickly it takes to get medical evidence from a doctor, and whether the claim is randomly picked for a quality assurance review.
In our next post we will continue our discussion on this topic.
