Changes to Social Security disability benefits will affect 50 to 60-year-old applicants

ProPublica graphic, with data from SSA, Master Beneficiary Record, 100% data; USPS geographic data; and Census Bureau, Population Division, 2023 estimates of resident population.

Changes made to Social Security disability benefits by the Trump Administration could harm 50 to 60-year-old applicants “without a high school or college education who have, for decades, toiled in physically grueling jobs,” Eli Hager reported for ProPublica.

“The five states where the highest proportions of people rely on these benefits are West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi and Alabama,” Hager wrote.

Currently, applicants who are at least 50 years old are given priority to redeem disability benefits due to their age. The changes made to the program would mean that age would no longer be a factor in determining eligibility for the benefits.

A senior administration official (who requested anonymity) explained that the current rules reflected the job economy of the 1970s, which mostly relied on manual labor. Now that the internet has created more sedentary jobs, 50-year-olds have more options.

Another change would “modernize the job listings that Social Security’s disability adjudicators and judges use to decide if there’s work available in the U.S. economy that a manual laborer could do despite physical impairments — like a low-skilled desk job at a computer or driving for Uber or DoorDash,” Hager wrote.

But Hager added that Michelle Aliff, who provides expert testimony for Social Security disability hearings, said in an interview that “an oil field roustabout in his 50s isn’t going to just sit down at a computer for work without additional training.”

Report: Social Security trust fund needs attention now if it's going to stay viable past 2034

If changes aren't made, the Social Security trust fund 
will run out of money by 2034.  (Adobe Stock photo) 

Social Security benefits play a vital role in communities nationwide; however, rural areas may be more dependent on the program because their populations skew older. Regardless of region, 73 million Americans currently depend on the program’s monthly payments; however, its 2025 Trustee Report indicates that the program needs attention to meet its expenses, reports Gopi Shah Goda for Brookings.

The report outlines how the Social Security trust fund will run out of money by 2034, and will "no longer be able to make all of its promised benefit payments," Goda explains. According to the report, the shortfall will continue to grow since the program lacks sufficient payroll taxes to cover its ongoing and predicted future costs.

"The shortfall amounts to 3.82% of taxable payroll, meaning that the payroll tax rate would have to be raised immediately—and permanently—from the current rate of 12.4% of taxable earnings to 16.1% in order for the program to be able to pay all promised benefits through 2099," Goda writes. "In 2025, that increase would have amounted to an extra $374 billion in program revenue."

Even if the Trump administration were able to eliminate all Social Security fraud, overpayments and any other human error costs, it would not compensate for the billions needed. "Even this unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky scenario would only yield 'savings' of $10.2 billion per year, barely moving the needle in terms of the program’s $1.48 trillion annual cost," Goda adds. "Social Security is already a lean operation."

Cutting more Social Security staff members would likely result in reduced services and even longer wait times for disability determinations. Goda writes, "It is very likely that any additional cuts in staffing will make it harder for Americans — particularly the most vulnerable — to access benefits they have earned, with dire consequences."

While there are solutions, few are likely to be popular. "There is no free lunch. . .changes would involve difficult tradeoffs between beneficiaries and workers as well as current and future generations," Goda writes. "Policy options that raise revenues include increasing the payroll tax rate or broadening the income base to which that the payroll tax is applied. . . . .Cutting benefits across the board, raising the retirement age at which a beneficiary is eligible for full benefits, reducing benefits disproportionately for higher earners. . . .Some action will be necessary within the next decade."

OPINION: Veterans should not have to prove poverty to 'qualify' for disability payments

Carroll Davis Jr. is a U.S. Marine Corp veteran and adjutant with the Disabled American Veterans Department of Mississippi. A new budget might change his benefits. (Photo by R. Solis, AP Via DY) 

As Congress searches for ways to pay for the massive tax cuts included in the One Big Beautiful Bill, the Congressional Budget Office has proposed cutting disability payments to U.S. Veterans who make too much money. "America is inching toward means-testing for disabled veterans benefits," writes Christy White in her opinion for The Daily Yonder. "We shouldn’t treat our honorably discharged military personnel like beggars."

Current VA guidelines for disability benefits do not consider a veteran's finances. "Benefits are a direct result of a service-related illness or injury," White writes. Means-testing would examine a veteran's "wages and other income to be considered eligible. … If the government determines they have the 'means' to pay for necessities … they don’t get the benefit."

She believes changes to disability payments could upend veteran income and trickle down to economic difficulties for rural regions. White explains, "There are almost five million disabled U.S. military veterans, and roughly two million of them are Appalachian residents. … How many of our kin folk may be affected by harmful means-testing? Encouraging financial success among veterans should be the goal, not penalizing them for achieving it."

White says asking veterans to prove a "lack of means" to receive military disability payments fails to honor the relationship the U.S. government has with its servicemen and women. She writes, "The suggestion that 'wealthier' veterans should not receive full compensation fails to acknowledge the contractual obligation between them and the U.S. Government; that when they sign up to serve, they are told they’ll be taken care of."

Even as the CBO argues that means-testing veterans’ benefits saves taxpayer dollars, it "ignores the fundamental nature of disability compensation — that it is a payment for service-related injuries, not a poverty relief measure," White writes. "Russell Vought is the director of the OMB. . . . [He] believes that disabled veterans should not be compensated for negative health effects caused by exposure to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Proposed changes to Social Security disability determinations would hurt rural residents, researchers write

Map shows the percentage of the population in each county that receives Social Security Disability Insurance payments;
click on the image to enlarge it; click on the story to view an interactive version with data for each county.

"Changes to the Social Security Disability Insurance program proposed in January by the Trump administration could make it harder for over 8 million Americans with disabilities to maintain federal benefits. That’s particularly true for those in rural communities, where we have worked and studied for the past 35 years," Lillie Greiman and Catherine Ipsen write for The Conversation.

Almost 8.4 million people receive an average of $1,200 a month in Social Security disability benefits. In each case, a judge has ruled that the person is unable to hold a job because of a mental or physical impairment, but they must undergo periodic reviews to prove that they're still unable to work. Reviewers classify recipients into one of three groups: Medical Improvement Expected, Medical Improvement Possible, and Medical Improvement Not Expected. Recipients deemed more likely to improve get more frequent reviews, Greiman and Ipsen write.

The Trump administration is proposing a fourth category, which would be called "Medical Improvement Likely." The government expects that about 1 million now categorized "Medical Improvement Possible" would probably move to the new category and get more frequent reviews, leading to more benefit terminations and saving about $200 million a year. "These proposed changes are based on research from the Office of Research, Demonstration and Employment Support showing that, after losing benefits based on a review, 70 percent of people had some earnings within the next five years. However, this research also shows that a majority continue to live below the poverty line," Greiman and Ipsen write.

They say adding the fourth category would disproportionately affect rural residents, who would have a harder time appealing terminations and finding work. Appealing a benefit termination is a lengthy process that often requires travel to a Social Security office or court. That can be a barrier for those without access to transportation, especially for in rural areas, where there are fewer offices.

Rural residents who lose benefits are more economically vulnerable than their urban counterparts overall, Greiman and Ipsen write. Not only are rural residents 5 percentage points more likely to be disabled than urban residents, but they tend to develop disabilities at a younger age. On top of that, "access to economic opportunity is not equally distributed across the U.S. Our research group’s work shows that rural Americans with disabilities are still trying to recover from the recession," they write. "Overall, fewer rural people with disabilities have jobs now than did in 2008 – this at a time when the U.S. unemployment rate is at historic lows. The drop in employment is particularly pronounced across a few geographic areas, including the Mid-Atlantic, Southern, Mountain and Pacific regions."

Research increasingly links depression and suicide to chronic disease, especially among seniors in rural U.S.

"Rural America has some of the highest rates of chronic disease in the nation – the more remote a community, the more heart disease, cancer and diabetes. And there’s a side effect from having a chronic condition many people don’t think about – depression, anxiety and even suicide," Lisa Gillespie reports for Louisville's WFPL. "This is especially true for older adults, who’ve lived their entire lives in places with little access to places to exercise, with diets high in fat and sugar and in a culture that still hasn’t given up tobacco."

To compound the problem, rural residents often have a hard time accessing medical care for their chronic conditions and psychiatric care for the attendant mental health issues. That contributes to the increased risk of suicide in rural areas, which are already at higher risk because of a lagging economy and substance abuse. For example, "suicide rates in 2017 were 30 percent higher in Appalachia than in the rest of the country." Within the region, suicides were concentrated in Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and East Tennessee, areas that struggle with high opioid-addiction rates and poverty. 

Gina Piane, a professor at National University in San Diego, was one of the first researchers to link chronic disease and mental health. Giving rural youth more health and nutrition education is a key way to prevent such issues, she told Gillespie. Psychologist John Fulton, who works in a rural Kentucky hospital, said he tries to teach his patients coping skills and recommends that they develop a support system of friends and family if they don't already have one.

"I try to say, you know, you’re sitting there focusing on the bad things, and all that’s going to do is drag you down deeper,” Fulton told Gillespie. "[I] try to get them to, you know, turn around and start thinking about, 'Well, I’ll go outside and look at dogs or I’ll watch wrestling on TV' — get their mind off the illness and how bad they feel."

Rural caregivers face more financial challenges

Rural caregivers have more financial barriers to their service work than those in urban areas, according to a study of 2011-13 data from Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, published in The Journal of Rural Health. Caregivers were defined as people "providing care to a family member or friend because of a long‐term illness or disability."

Though they were more likely to report financial barriers to their work, rural caregivers were less likely "to report that caregiving created any difficulty" for them, either financially or health-wise, the study report said. "Rural caregivers’ coping strategies or skills in identifying informal supports may explain this difference, but additional research is needed to explore this hypothesis."

We'll bet "coping strategies" would be found to include a dedication to the work that overrode financial concerns, and a feeling that if they didn't do it, no one else would. That seems more likely in rural areas.

Interactive map shows county-level data on Appalachian opioid ODs, correlated with socioeconomic data

Screen grab from interactive map showing overdose rates with
the highest rates in dark blue (click on the image to enlarge it)

A new data visualization tool offers in-depth, county-by-county information about the impact of the opioid epidemic in Appalachia and how it relates to factors such as unemployment, poverty, education and disability.

The Appalachian Overdose Mapping Tool, developed by research organization NORC at the University of Chicago and the Appalachian Regional Commission, "integrates overdose mortality rates for each Appalachian county with data on unemployment, poverty, and disability, as well as other socioeconomic variables. Users can compare county-level information with regional and national data and see changes in the data between 2006–2010 and 2011–2015. The mapping tool can also generate fact sheets to assist in community planning and response efforts," ARC's Wendy Wasserman says in an ARC press release. A few of the correlations shown by the map include:

• In Central Appalachia, counties with the highest rates of overdose are often the same counties with the highest rates of people on disability.
• In Central Appalachia, the counties with the highest overdose rates are often the same counties with the lowest rates of educational attainment.
• In Northern and Southern Appalachia, the highest overdose rates are in urban counties.
• While Central Appalachia remains the most highly affected subregion of Appalachia, other subregions are experiencing increasing rates of overdose.

Disability benefits are nearly twice as common in rural areas, and they can deepen a cultural divide

From 1996 to 2015, "the number of working-age adults receiving federal disability payments increased significantly across the country — but nowhere more so than in rural America," The Washington Post reports in the latest piece of a series on "how disability is shaping the culture, economy and politics" of 102 rural counties "where, at minimum, about one in six working-age residents receive either Supplemental Security Income, a program for the disabled poor, or Social Security Disability Insurance for disabled workers. These are places — primarily white, rural and working-class — where once-dominant industries have collapsed or modernized and the number of people who are jobless or receiving public-assistance benefits has soared."

Tyler McGlothlin and his mother, Sheila
(Washington Post photo by Linda Davidson)

One of those places is Grundy, Va., near where the Old Dominion meets Kentucky and West Virginia, and one of those families is the McGlothlins: a father who became disabled in the coal mines, became addicted to painkillers and is now in jail for selling them; a mother whose disability check isn't enough for her household, which includes her son's fiance; and the son, who got fired from McDonald's for "missing a shift during a snowstorm," then totaled his car and had to drop out of community college, and now begs for money -- following in the footsteps of his father, who was confronted personally and on social media by a neighbor who was offended when the disabled miner wouldn't accept a job offer, Terrence McCoy reports.

McCoy gets into the head of Sheila McGlothlin: "She had wanted something more for him, something other than what she felt most days: shame. She knew how she must look, in her pajamas and mismatched socks, to people who work. She knew what they must say about her disability: It’s only anxiety, only depression. Why couldn’t she work? Why did she buy soda and cigarettes when they needed food? How could she afford the Internet and cable TV bills on a $500 monthly disability check? She would sometimes consider how she would answer. She would say that cigarettes and soda make hard days a little easier. That television is just about her only connection to a world that hasn’t seemed to want her anymore. But it’s simpler to say nothing at all, so she rarely leaves the house now."

Disability has become so prevalent that the federal government will spend more on it this year than food stamps, welfare, housing subsidies and unemployment, combined, and the programs are running out of money, the Post reports. In rural counties, 9.1 percent of working-age people are on disability — nearly twice the urban rate and 40 percent higher than the national average. In Buchanan County, where Grundy is the seat, one in four adults are on SSI or disability, but that doesn't mean it's a broadly popular pursuit. “There is a critical divide in the minds of low-income whites, between people who work, even if they struggle, and what has historically been called ‘white trash’,” University of California, Davis professor Lisa Pruitt, who researches rural poverty and grew up in Newton County, Arkansas, which has one of the nation’s highest disability rates, told McCoy. “The worst thing you can do in rural America among low-income whites is not work.” The a mentality, she told him, is that “only lazy white trash” accept “handouts.” A poll by the Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation confirmed that such feelings are more common in rural areas:

Young reporter receives Livingston Award for documenting the tribulations of Appalachia

Claire Galofaro, left, accepted the award from
Maria Elena Salinas of Univision. (AP photo)

Claire Galofaro, a Louisville-based reporter for The Associated Press, received the Livingston Award for Local Reporting from the University of Michigan Tuesday, "in recognition of her outstanding work documenting economic despair in Appalachia," reports Lauren Easton of AP.

"The Livingston Awards for Young Journalists honor the best reporting and storytelling in any medium by journalists under the age of 35," Easton notes. Galofaro was awarded a $10,000 prize at a luncheon in New York for her series "Surviving Appalachia."

"Her stories examined the rise of Donald Trump, described the effects of the heroin epidemic on a small West Virginia city and detailed the plight of hundreds of families entangled in a disability fraud scheme," Easton writes.

Galofaro said, "The lesson I learned most vividly from reporting these stories is that a generally-improving American economy means nothing to people who look out their window and see only devastation and decay. There is a consequence of forsaking these blue-collar places."

Galofaro is one of three Livingston Award winners. "Brooke Jarvis of The California Sunday Magazine received top honors for national reporting, and Ben Taub of The New Yorker won for international reporting. The late Gwen Ifill was honored with the Richard M. Clurman Award for on-the-job mentoring," Easton reports. Find more information about the winners here. Read the full AP story here.

Lawyer convicted in huge disability-fraud conspiracy has disappeared; may have fled U.S.

Eric Conn in earlier, happier days
(Lexington Herald-Leader photo)

The Eastern Kentucky lawyer who pleaded guilty to defrauding taxpayers out of $550 million in Social Security disability benefits has disappeared. Eric Conn's former employees "heard him say he would flee to Cuba or Ecuador to avoid criminal charges, and Conn had wired substantial sums of money out of the country at times, an FBI agent testified at one hearing," report Bill Estep and Linda Blackford of the Lexington Herald-Leader.

The FBI office said Conn had removed his electronic monitoring device in violation of his bond and that authorities didn’t know where he was. Anyone with information about Conn has been asked to contact the FBI at 502-263-6000.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article154258239.html#storylink=cpy

"Conn pleaded guilty to stealing from the Social Security Administration and paying bribes to a judge to rubber-stamp disability claims for thousands of his clients," Estep and Blackford write. "Conn remained free on bond pending his sentencing next month, but a judge had ordered him to be on home detention with electronic monitoring." The FBI said he had removed the monitoring device and his whereabouts are unknown.

"Conn faced up to 12 years in prison," the Herald-Leader notes. "He had also been ordered to pay more than $80 million — $5.7 million to repay fraudulent earnings; $46.5 million to the Social Security Administration; and $31 million to the government and two whistleblowers who helped expose his wrongdoing and their attorneys. After Conn was arrested in April 2016, prosecutors argued he should have to stay in jail pending trial, partly because of the risk that he could flee."

“It was totally predictable,” Ned Pillersdorf, a Prestonsburg lawyer who helped Conn’s former clients win a class-action lawsuit for which he will also owe damages, told The Associated Press. “There has been a betting pool going on in Prestonsburg on not if he would flee, but when.”

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article154258239.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article154258239.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article154258239.html#storylink=cpy

Rural areas could be hardest hit by budget cuts and work rules in SNAP, Social Security disability

President Trump's proposed budget includes work requirements for “able-bodied” persons in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly food stamps, and cut the funding by $192 billion over the next decade. The budget also proposes a reduction of $70 billion in Social Security disability funding.

"To President Trump . . . access to food stamps is far too easy, and being on disability is just a matter of finding a friendly judge," Yamiche Alcindor and Campbell Robertson write for The New York Times. White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney cites the cost savings and the incentive of good, old, hard work. "We need everybody pulling in the same direction,” he said.

However, many are concerned about the impact that these cuts will have on rural communities, especially in states like Mississippi, a state with much rural poverty, the Times reports: "Since last January, about 83,000 people receiving food stamps in Mississippi between the ages of 18 and 49 without dependents have been required to work, or prove they are looking for work, at least 20 hours a week to receive food stamps, according to Beth Orlansky, advocacy director of the Mississippi Center for Justice, which focuses on issues of racial and economic inequality. "The rules originated a decade ago in Washington, but because of its high poverty rates, Mississippi had been allowed a waiver since 2006."

"While asking people to work might sound like a good idea 'in the abstract', she said, a state like Mississippi — with large pockets of poverty, sprawling rural communities and some of the highest rates of people on disability and food stamps — does not have enough jobs in the right places. Most people receiving food stamps and disability are doing some sort of work, but they need better skills and education to rise above poverty wages."

Rural areas and small towns' measures of well-being resemble inner cities' data 20 years ago

The population of rural America declined in 2016, for the fifth straight year. That historic trend, and lots of other data from small towns and rural areas, led Jane Adamy and Paul Overberg of The Wall Street Journal to conclude that rural America is now the country's “basket case,” a title held by inner cities 30 years ago.

“By many key measures of socioeconomic well-being, those charts have flipped,” they write. “In terms of poverty, college attainment, teenage births, divorce, death rates from heart disease and cancer, reliance on federal disability insurance and male labor-force participation, rural counties now rank the worst among the four major U.S. population groupings (the others are big cities, suburbs and medium or small metro areas).” (Click on charts to view larger versions)

The shift has occurred over the last two decades. “Well into the mid-1990s, the nation’s smallest counties were home to almost one-third of all net new business establishments, more than twice the share spawned in the largest counties, according to the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public-policy organization. Employers offering private health insurance propped up medical centers that gave rural residents access to reliable care.” But then technology happened. “By the late 1990s, the shift to a knowledge-based economy began transforming cities into magnets for desirable high-wage jobs.”

“The internet promised to boost the fortunes of rural areas by allowing more people to work from anywhere and freeing companies to expand and invest outside metropolitan areas. Those gains never materialized,” the Journal reports. "Lawmakers from both parties concede they overlooked escalating small-town problems for years. . . . Barack Obama’s administration tried to lift rural areas by pushing expanded broadband access, but found that service providers were reluctant to enter sparsely populated towns, said former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.”

Agriculture and light manufacturing, long the economic mainstays of small towns, offer fewer jobs as farms have consolidated and relatively low-skill factory jobs have been shifted to other countries. “As employers left small towns, many of the most ambitious young residents packed up and left, too,” the Journal reports. “In 1980, the median age of people in small towns and big cities almost matched. Today, the median age in small towns is about 41 years—five years above the median in big cities. A third of adults in urban areas hold a college degree, almost twice the share in rural counties, census figures show.”

Left behind in rural areas is a population that is increasingly less healthy than the rest of the country.

There may be other factors beyond the range of easy statistics. It can be argued that in many small towns, the advent of big-box stores decimated the local merchant class that provided much of the local civic impetus. Also, rural residents increasingly commute to other counties for work, and research by Eastern Kentucky University and the University of Kentucky's Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues (publisher of The Rural Blog) in 2010 showed that the longer the commute, the less likely the commuter was to read the hometown newspaper, one measure of civic engagement.

Whatever the reasons, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the trend predicts that it will continue. Enrico Moretti found that “In densely populated labor markets (with more than one million workers) . . . the average wage is now one-third higher than in less-populated places that have 250,000 or fewer workers — a difference 50 percent larger than it was in the 1970s,” the Journal reports.

Former Social Security judge pleads guilty to taking bribes in disability scam with coalfield lawyer

David Daugherty (Lexington Herald-
Leader photo by Pablo Alcala)

A federal Social Security judge in Huntington, W.Va., pleaded guilty Friday in federal court to two felonies of accepting illegal gratuities from an Eastern Kentucky lawyer in fraudulent disability cases, Bill Estep reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader. David Black Daugherty, 81, admitted to accepting more than $609,000 in bribes from 2004-11 to award disability benefits to thousands of clients of attorney Eric C. Conn, who pleaded guilty in March to stealing from the Social Security Administration and bribing Daugherty.

Conn admitted he falsified medical documents to show clients were disabled and paid doctors to sign the evaluations, Estep writes. From October 2004 to April 2011, Conn made a payment to Daugherty for each favorable decision made by Daugherty, who "arranged for Conn’s cases to be assigned to him—taking files off other judges’ desks in some cases—and rubber-stamped the claims."

According to court documents, Daugherty awarded benefits to people represented by Conn in 3,149 cases, Estep writes. His decisions in those cases "would have obligated the government to pay $550 million in benefits, the court document said. The government actually paid $46.5 million to people that the agency has determined were not eligible to receive before the scheme came to light, according to a document in Conn’s case. Daugherty retired abruptly in 2011 after federal authorities began investigating."

Prosecutors are pushing for the maximum sentence of four years when Daugherty is sentenced in August. Conn faces up to 12 years in prison when he is sentenced on July 14.

Rural Michigan's 'Disability Belt' is beginning to rival poverty in Appalachia, Deep South

One of the nation's fastest growing impoverished regions, quickly becoming on par with poverty rates in Appalachia and the Deep South, is rural Northern Michigan, Chad Selweski reports for Bridge Magazine, part of The Center for Michigan. Seventeen northern Michigan counties, mostly in the Lower Peninsula, are part of the "Disability Belt," one name for "a region where post-recession aging workers in poor health and with few prospects for work have turned to federal disability benefits as a last resort, a replacement income for their long-lost unemployment checks."

According to federal data, 385,000 working-age Michigan residents receive some sort of disability benefits, totaling $425 million per month, Selweski writes. Gary Kozma, a Michigan attorney who specializes in disability cases, said many older, rural unskilled people with debilitating health problems that can’t find work view disability almost as early retirement.

That's true in Northern Michigan, where "a surprising number of desperate workers have turned to Social Security disability benefits to earn a livelihood," Selweski writes. "Many don’t expect to return to the job market, unless federal investigators throw them off disability rolls. In some counties, rates of poverty and disability hover around 15 to 20 percent, raising questions about whether a some portion of working-age residents apply for disability as much from despair that they will ever land another job as from physical necessity." (Bridge graphic: Disability in Michigan)

"Northern Michigan is part of a national phenomenon that emerged two decades ago and especially during the Great Recession of 2008-10, when an abrupt decline in blue-collar jobs left certain workers—mostly in their 50s, suffering from chronic medical conditions—unemployed or underemployed for years at a time," Selweski writes. "They dealt with persistent pain, often job-induced, and eventually found themselves unable to lift heavy items, stand for hours at a time, or even efficiently climb stairs."

"With jobs in manufacturing, construction and similar manual labor beyond their reach, these economic outcasts also held little chance of landing employment in the region’s fragile retail sector or service industries," he writes. "Armed with a high school diploma or less, they were unlikely to find office work. So, they turned to the Social Security system’s disability insurance."

Eastern Kentucky lawyer pleads guilty to defrauding the Social Security disability system

UPDATE, April 6: U.S. District Judge Amul Thapar ruled on Tuesday that Conn "should pay $31 million in damages and penalties to the federal government and two former Social Security Administration employees who tried to blow the whistle on his fraudulent conduct," Bill Estep reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader. "The government had sought a total of $31.4 million in the case — $12.2 million in damages and $19.2 million in penalties, based on the maximum penalty of $11,000 for each of the 1,746 fraudulent claims it identified."

A Kentucky lawyer who labeled himself as "Mr. Social Security" pleaded guilty Friday in federal court to stealing from the Social Security Administration and bribing a federal Social Security judge. Prosecutors say Eric C. Conn had "a long-running scheme to defraud the government of nearly $600 million in federal disability payments," Bruce Schreiner reports for The Associated Press. Conn's sentencing is July 14 and he faces up to 12 years in prison.

Eric Conn (Associated Press photo)

"According to the plea, Conn participated in a more than decade-long scheme involving the submission of thousands of falsified medical documents," Schreiner writes. "Those fraudulent submissions resulted in payment of more than $550 million in benefits."

He continues: "Conn also admitted to paying the judge about $10,000 a month over more than six years to award disability benefits in more than 1,700 cases, according to documents filed with the guilty plea. Those payments were based on falsified medical documents, the documents said. Conn admitted that he received more than $5.7 million in representative fees from the SSA based on those fraudulent claims, the documents said."

Conn started his law practice in a trailer in 1993 in his hometown of Stanville, building it to one of the nation's most lucrative disability firms, Schreiner writes. "He became a local celebrity for his over-the-top advertising campaigns. He dispatched crews of 'Conn Hotties' to events and had a 19-foot replica of the Lincoln Memorial [statue] erected in the parking lot of his office."

For years, Conn faced no legal consequences, even after the SSA "cut off disability payments to hundreds of his clients in the impoverished coalfields of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia," Schreiner writes. "Conn’s clients have been fighting the federal government to keep their disability checks."

Ned Pillersdorf, an attorney who is representing hundreds of Conn’s former clients who have sued in seeking damages from Conn, told Schreiner that the plea should help speed up consideration of the lawsuit. “I’ve got to get these people money quick,” Pillersdorf said. “I’ve got 800 people going without, and it’s a real humanitarian crisis. His guilty plea should expedite that process.” But Pillersdorf told Schreiner that Conn’s guilty plea is unlikely to have an impact on those cases. (Read more)

Hundreds in E. Ky. seek to keep federal disability benefits put at risk by fraud of lawyer and judge

Attorney Eric Conn advertised widely.

Hundreds of families in Eastern Kentucky are fighting to regain the disability benefits they lost after the federal government said their attorney and a federal administrative law judge awarded the benefits fraudulently. At least three suicides have been blamed on the unprecedented debacle, and the Social Security Administration is refusing to let the people see the medical evidence on which their disability determination was based, though it has acknowledged there is no evidence that they were "involved in the scheme," Claire Galofaro reports for The Associated Press.

About 900 former clients of lawyer Eric Conn of Stanville had their benefits cut off. The suicides spurred U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Somerset, to get the SSA "to allow Conn’s clients to keep their checks as they struggled in a series of hearings to prove they deserved them all along. The Appalachian Research and Defense Fund, a legal-aid organization in Eastern Kentucky, grew so worried they recruited the largest network of volunteer attorneys since the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina," Galofaro reports. "The band of 150 lawyers – some of the best disability attorneys in the nation – has become a sort grassroots suicide prevention network."

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article123600329.html#storylink=cpy

"The government has good reason to ferret out disability fraud," Galofaro writes. "Critics call it a secret welfare program that morphed over the decades from serving the truly disabled to aiding the unemployable: the uneducated, the frail, the unfortunates who live in places where a rotting economy relies on back-breaking labor. Burgeoning claims – in Kentucky’s Floyd County [where Conn's practice was based] 15 percent are on disability – have pushed the disability fund to the brink of insolvency. The government has squeezed other programs for the poor, leaving many in these crumbling corners of blue-collar America with few good options. The mass suspensions laid bare their absolute dependence on disability."

Former U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a physician who led a Senate investigation of Conn, sees "a broken system abused by those who don’t truly deserve it, yet grow dependent on government benefits," Galofaro reports. "They should have known better than to hire a 'shyster lawyer,' he said, and those who didn’t deserve benefits in the first place shouldn’t draw another dime. Government dependency, he believes, is the first step toward tyranny."

Coburn told Galofaro, “Do I feel sorry for them? Yes,” he said. “Do they have hardships? Yes. But do they meet the qualifications for Social Security Disability? Absolutely not. Here’s what the law says: if you can do any job in the economy you don’t qualify for disability. Rules have to mean something, and life isn’t fair.”

It certainly doesn't seem fair for disabled coal miner Tim Dye, the focal point of Galofaro's story, who has been told he could hold down a desk job. He and his wife, who said she nearly committed suicide, "wonder who would want to hire an old coal miner for a sit-down job, with nothing more than a high-school diploma, a crippled back and an eight-year gap on his résumé." Dye told Galofaro, “In a month or two, we won’t have nothing. We’re losing everything.”

The issue of access to medical evidence is in court. "U.S. District Judge Amul Thapar — on President-elect Donald Trump’s short list for the U.S. Supreme Court — issued an opinion last month that found a number of Conn’s clients were afforded fewer protections than suspected terrorists and ordered the Social Security Administration to reconsider its process," Galofaro notes. "But another federal judge sided with the agency. The question will now likely be settled by a federal appeals court." Ned Pillersdorf, the lawyer leading the legal-aid effort, has an op-ed in the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Did leaking gas well cause fire that disabled Texan and burned his family? Probe leaves questions

A well near the Murray home (Texas RRC)

Texas officials didn't fully investigate whether leaking natural gas caused a fire that disabled a Texas man and also burned members of his family, Mike Soraghan reports for Energy Wire.

Cody Murray of Perrin "suffered second- and third-degree burns over nearly a quarter of his body. His father and 4-year-old daughter were also burned in the August 2014 flash fire," Soraghan reports. "The nerves in his arms were burned off to above his elbows. . . . The injuries cost him his job as a field operations foreman for a Fort Worth oil company."

For two years, the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas, has been investigating whether "oil and gas wells scattered around Murray's neighborhood could have leaked methane into his water," Soraghan writes. "RRC officials say they still don't know whether oil and gas wells played a role in the explosion. Although they've traced the gas to the deep layers from which natural gas is produced, they've left the source of the contamination as 'inconclusive'. But thousands of pages of RRC records and emails, obtained by EnergyWire under Texas open-records law, show significant gaps in the investigation and suggest at least one potential source wasn't fully examined. A damaged and possibly leaking gas well nearby wasn't tested to see whether it matched the gas in Murray's water. Before the explosion, agency officials dismissed warning signs of stray gas in a neighbor's water well. And RRC officials found possible errors in their safeguards for keeping stray gas out of groundwater."

Murray has filed suit against nearby well operators but not the RRC. Before Muray was injured, neighbors reported apparent leakage of hydrocarbons into their water wells, and frustration with RRC investigators, though the agency ordered a leaking well to be shut. "A well, a narrow hole drilled deep into the earth, doesn't necessarily stop producing gas when a valve is turned at the surface," Soraghan notes. "The gas can keep coming. It just doesn't always come out the hole it was supposed to."

Widow sues E. Kentucky disability lawyer, says fraudulent activity led to her husband's suicide

The Eastern Kentucky disability lawyer who was implicated in fraud is being sued by the widow of one of his clients who committed suicide after he was told he could lose his social security disability benefits, reports LEX 18 in Lexington.

Late last month about 900 clients of Floyd County lawyer Eric Conn—who was featured in a "60 Minutes" investigative report and was the subject of a 2013 investigation by a Senate Committee on Government Affairs—were told they could have their disability payments suspended. Earlier this month acting Social Security Commissioner Carolyn Colvin lifted the supsensions until they get a hearing before an administrative law judge.

The widow of Leroy Burchett filed a lawsuit on behalf of her late husband's estate alleging that fraudulent activity on the part of Conn resulted in his wrongful death, LEX 18 reports. "According to a Facebook post from Burchett's lawyer, Ned Pillersdorf, Burchett fell into a depression after receiving the letter and was unable to afford his medication," which included anti-depressants. (Read more)

Disability benefits restored, pending new hearings, for 900 who used lawyer implicated in fraud

Acting Social Security Commissioner Carolyn Colvin lifted payment suspensions for 900 disability benefit recipients in Eastern Kentucky and adjoining areas until they get a hearing before an administrative law judge, Rep. Harold "Hal" Rogers, the region's congressman and chair of the House Appropriations Commitee, announced today.

"We are all determined to bring fraud to a rapid conclusion, and if it exists, it needs to be handled appropriately," Rogers said in a press release. "But this is the American way; you are innocent until you are proven guilty. Now our people will be able to pay bills and purchase the everyday items they need while they await the hearing they deserve."

The suspensions resulted from a federal fraud investigation of a Floyd County attorney, some area physicians and a Social Security administrative law judge who retired under fire a few years ago. The agency notified 900 people that their disability benefits had been suspended, and 600 other people were told their Supplemental Security Income would continue only until their eligibility could be examined again. Now the 10-day window to provide medical records has been extended to 30 days, Colvin said.

"Suspending benefits could have left hundreds of people in Eastern Kentucky with little or no income for a year or more," Bill Estep reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader. "That had caused fears about people not being able to afford food or medicine or losing their homes. The loss of benefits might even have played a role in at three suicides." Rogers told Estep that in his meeting with Colvin, "I was rather blunt that this is a matter of life and death."

The area may be the nation's most dependent on disability payments, as indicated by this map. Click on it for a larger version.

Rural disabled often struggle to make long-distance trips to receive medical care

Hospital shortages in rural areas mean patients often have to drive long distances to receive medical care. The long trip is even harder for the disabled, especially those living in impoverished areas where high gas prices make it too expensive to travel hundreds of miles for care. More than 56 percent of rural counties have disability rates above the national average of 15.3 percent, and in the rural South the rate is 18.7 percent. Of the nation's 169 counties with the highest disability rates, 159 are rural, according to data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey from 2008 to 2012. 

In Northeast Louisiana six of the 10 rural parishes have disability rates above the national average, Cole Avery reports for The News-Star in Monroe. That necessitates some people, like Polly Smith, to drive 250 miles to New Orleans to get treatment for her daughter who needs almost constant supervision after suffering severe injuries from being hit by a car.

"The difficulty in reaching health-care providers is one of the biggest hurdles disabled people living in rural places face, according to Aliscia Banks, executive director of Families Helping Families of Northeast Louisiana," Avery writes. The organization provides resources to about 5,000 disabled people in the region, including giving out about $14,000 in gas cards last year. (Read more) (University of Montana Rural Institute map)