Administrative Law Systems for Medicare, Disability Claims Failing

Two separate pieces caught my eye today: the adminstrative-law systems for disability claims and Medicare are failing. The Medicare adminstrative-law system is facing a tremendous backlog, while the disablity-claims system could be facing many fake claims.

The Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals has a backlog of 357,000 claims, which developed because the number of cases grew by 184 percent while the system's resources remained constant, The Washington Post reports. The chief judge has suspended "new requests for hearings filed by hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and other health-care providers," The Post reports.

Meanwhile, D. Randall Frye, administrative law judge for the United States Social Security Administration, wrote in the New York Times today that there are no checks and balances in the system against claimants who might be fraudsters. Frye says other administrative law judges and he want an adversarial system in which there would be an advocate for taxpayers to challenge medical evidence and to review case files and in which social-media evidence could be used to check the credibility of claimants. "Social Security disability courts have millions of claimants and constitute one of the world’s largest judicial systems. But the system is not run by anyone with real judicial experience. Instead, we are at the mercy of unelected bureaucrats whose only concern is how many cases each judge can churn out and how fast we can do it," Frye opined.