Women's Institute For A Secure Retirement

A major victory for individuals with disabling diseases and other medical conditions has been won through the addition of new Compassionate Allowances by the Social Security Administration. Compassionate Allowances allow SSA to offer benefits quickly to applicants whose medical conditions are so serious that they obviously meet disability standards. This update marks the first addition to the Compassionate Allowances list since its creation, and includes diseases like Tay Sachs Disease, Mixed Dementia and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The list is used to give individuals with those diseases access to benefits within days, as opposed to months or years, which has often been the case for people with more complicated applications.

Commissioner Michael J. Astrue asserted, “There can be no higher priority than getting disability benefits
quickly to those Americans with these severe and life-threatening conditions.”

This victory has been celebrated by Alzheimer’s disease advocates, who have been fighting for streamlined benefits since 2003. Individuals with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease often have difficulties when applying for benefits which can take years to gain through appeal.

To see the full list of Compassionate Allowance Conditions that have been added, visit Social Security’s Compassionate Allowances webpage. Check out WISER’s website at www.wiserwomen.org for more information on why Social Security is important to women.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Social Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.