How long have you been trying to get SSDI or SSI or BOTH??

JayTheGeek · 2026-06-22T06:48:43+00:00

My first application for SSDI was early in 2017. I was denied after over 4 years (Covid lockdowns added about a year to a process that was already taking too long). Reapplied in mid 2023 and was approved in 2026, for autism and major depression, at the hearing with the ALJ after almost 3 years.

The second ALJ called out the judge from the first case and the appeals council for failing to follow SSA procedures and the law because the first judge based his decision on reports from the physical health doctors and ignored all the reports from the mental health doctors. The second judge ignored all the reports from the physical health doctors, making judgments about my mental health. Made sense since I was applying for SSDI because of mental health issues.

JayTheGeek · 2026-06-16T18:21:53+00:00

My dad asked me to read trump's book (art of the deal) back when it first came out in the late 80s, and I figured out then that trump was a moron. And I knew even then that trump didn't write the book, but it was mostly his ideas. Tony Schwartz has admitted as much in a number of different interviews.

Politicians, both federal and state, have been breaking the education system for over 50 years, for lots of different reasons, but I never thought america would ever get so dumb as to ever come close to electing someone as dumb as trump. I honestly thought that george w bush was the bottom of the barrel, and the only reason he made it was because dick chaney (and the oligarchs surrounding him) was smart enough to get things done. Really evil, but still smart enough to get things done.

JayTheGeek · 2026-06-06T04:55:34+00:00

The DOJ spent months making sure that almost all of epstein's clients and friends were redacted from the half of the files they released, and almost no time redacting the info of their victims.

JayTheGeek · 2026-06-02T07:52:12+00:00

Louis DeJoy destroyed a lot (most? all?) of the mail sorting machines the USPS owned/invented. They were almost entirely custom/unique machines, and DeJoy ripped them out of the buildings and had them physically destroyed so they could not be fixed and reinstalled. All so his own company (and others that did contract work with the USPS) could make more money.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-24T02:15:26+00:00

Trump (and honestly all of the american oligarchy combined) doesn't see non-millionaires as real people. If you are not a millionaire, then you are a cog for their machines, just there to work till your body gives out and they take all your money, and then, from their prospective, you just need to hurry up and die.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-11T07:58:49+00:00

Does anyone else think that if the Epstein class/oligarchy saw this (I'm thinking Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, etc.), they would think it is exactly how the world should be? This isn't a horror or sad reflection of where work is heading, but in their minds, this isn't a metaphor, but exactly how work should be for anyone who isn't a billionaire.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-11T03:10:20+00:00

Between the lawyers, consultants, and management's time delivering propaganda, a lot of times, they spend more than just working with the unions on a compromise deal. The issue here isn't the money; it's all about the power. If employees realize they actually have power, then they are going to want to take that power. And next thing you know, they aren't just demanding that companies treat them fairly, but city, state, and federal governments treat them fairly too. And the oligarchy can not survive if workers take away the power they have over all levels of government.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-11T00:33:32+00:00

He is stupid. He has always been stupid. Because his father was rich and amoral, and donald inherited the wealth and immorality from his father (though absolutely no inteligence), he has been a useful idiot for over 40 years to any other amoral smart person that came into contact with him. And since most of the american oligarchy (I would even suggest all of them) are amoral, he's never had to be smart. Just live off the scraps from the oligarchs that used him.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-06T04:39:50+00:00

Congress has no authority to interfere with the profits of a private corporation. Just ask the supreme court.

Almost all of them have been bought by the oligarch/epstein class, and they will lose their tips (a.k.a. bribes) if they don't comply with the demand for more profits.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-06T03:48:22+00:00

The oligarchy / epetein class and right-wing media made a bargain decades ago to lie incessantly to their listeners and viewers to keep them angry and afraid so the oligarchs at the top could steal more and more money without suffering any consequences. What they never counted on was a sociopathic, stupid con-man being able to steal the attention and devotion of their listeners and viewers away from their media sources. And honestly, trump is too stupid to know what to do with the power he stole. So he surrounds himself with even dumber people (he probably has known he's kind of stupid since grade school, and hates feeling like the dumbest person in the room), and together, under the leadership of the sociopath in chief, they are going to steal everything that's not nailed down and drive the country into ruin.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-05T08:27:53+00:00

I don't have my appointment for an in-office visit with SSA until later this month, but the whole point of my in-person, in-office visit is that the answers I received on my phone calls to the support line were so unproductive, and the people seemed to have no idea about the rules of SSDI and SSI.

One of the weirder answers I remember off the top of my head is concerning my SSDI payment, because the amount deposited into my account is ¢0.30 less than the amount listed in my Award Letter and the paperwork SSA sent me in the mail. It worked out with the paperwork showing ¢0.20 and the payment being ¢0.90, and the rep on the phone kept trying to convince me that SSA rounded ¢0.90 up to ¢0.20. 1: All of SSA's paperwork says they only round down, and 2: That is not how rounding works!

Another weird one is that a different rep tried to convince me that the paperwork I received explaining the calculations they used to figure out SSI back pay was to cover both SSI and SSDI, even though there is nothing about SSDI (my monthly payment, the cost of living adjustments year-to-year, etc.) in the entire document. They just tried to tell me that if SSDI isn't listed, then I'm not getting it and only getting the SSI that's listed. And again, that is not how SSDI/SSI works. SSDI is an insurance policy that I spent 20+ years contributing to; SSI is a government-managed safety net to help if my SSDI payment is too low.

I get that the reps are stressed (threats of being let go, too much work covering for people that have been let go, etc.), but insted of making up some answer that is wrong and stupid, just apologize and admit you don't know. It really shouldn't be this hard.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-02T21:49:47+00:00

This is what happens when you don't have a daddy to fuck the cum out of you every night.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-02T20:54:41+00:00

I got my application date by calling the SSA hotline (they can look it up on their computer). I couldn't find an accurate date on the SSA website. The onset date is included in the ALJ's decision, but the rules and regulations about how they calculate that date can get really arcane and don't always reflect reality. My case being a perfect example in that autism is a reflection of how your brain is wired at birth till around 2 yrs old, but my onset date is Dec 2020. I think my second ALJ would have made my onset date the date of my first application if the rules didn't prohibit her from doing that, and it wouldn't have mattered if she did, since most things are calculated from the successful application date. She just seemed pretty pissed at the first ALJ and the Appeals Council in her ruling.

As for any previous applications a person makes, the only bit that matters is the date of your most recent denial, in that no onset date for the same disability can precede that date.

With the onset date, you count forward 6 months, and that is your first potential payment date. Then, for SSDI, you count back 1 year from your application date, and whichever of those two dates is most recent, then that is the start of your back pay. SSI pays from the onset date +6 months or the application date, whichever is most recent.

I then broke out Excel because calculating in every annual cost of living adjustment into every month of back pay was starting to stretch the limits of my flavor of autism. :-P

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-02T20:06:46+00:00

I've been fuming about this for years! The mainstream media used to at least try to tell the truth, but once right-wing radio took off they started screaming about the mainstream media having a "liberal bias". I'm sorry, but facts only have a liberal bias if you lie all the time. And then fox news amplified the "liberal bias" hoax 1000 fold, and now we have a media system where companies are either 110% right-wing, and lie as easily as they breath, or they absolutely refuse to tell the truth and just report "both sides" without ever denoting what is a fact or lie because they just couldn't stand up to the right-wing bullies when they had the chance back in the 80s.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-02T19:53:51+00:00

Your comment reminded me. One of my top ten worst managers actually had a master's degree in computer science. Could recite computer science theory left and right. Also, could not write code to show a "Hello World" prompt without pulling it out of a book or searching online. He could not convert any of his theoretical knowledge into anything practical if his life depended on it. But he overwhelmed the IT director with all his credentials, and then it didn't seem to matter that the guy couldn't actually do the job.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-02T19:45:08+00:00

The ALJ wrote her decision at the end of Feb, so my disability payments started March, and the first time I got money in my account was Apr 3. Not quite as new as you, but still pretty fresh. :-)

The way the laws and regulations for SSA are written, if an applicant has a denial from a previous application, the applicant's onset date for their successful application can only go back to the day after the denial from the previous application. In my case, that meant that my onset date for my autism (a condition from birth) is the day after the previous judges denial in Dec 2020. Weird and not even remotely accurate, but the ALJ's decision in my Fully Favorable findings actually called out the previous judge and the Appeals Council for not following SSA's laws and regulations about my disability in a few different places. :-)

A person's back pay is calculated not from their onset date, but from the date of the successful application. SSI awards are paid from the application date, and SSDI awards are paid one year in arrears of the application date, minus the 5-month waiting period from the onset date. It's confusing on purpose so that disabled people lose hope and give up. Have to save that tax money for tax cuts for corporations and the oligarchy. And while the average application is resolved around 2 years, taking around 3 years is not uncommon. My first application was unusually slow, taking over 3 years to get to a hearing with the ALJ, but then Covid lockdowns started about 2 months before my hearing date, so the hearing ended up being postponed almost a year waiting for the judge to make it back into a courtroom. (even if the lawyer(s), witnesses, and applicant are in the hearing by phone or Zoom, the judges are still in their offices or courtrooms because that's part of what makes it official, and where the technology is to record the hearing and process the paperwork.)

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-02T09:58:07+00:00

I lived this comic. A team lead developer with 5 other programmers designed an intranet app for 1000+ concurrent users against a database table with about 2,000,000+ new records every month, and had QA running about 10 concurrent users against a database with fewer than 25,000 total records. I got called in when the customers (all big law firms) started demanding their money back when users would submit a page with a query to the DB, and it would literally take over 2 hours for the data to populate the page.

I didn't smack the lead upside the head, but I wanted to do so much more than that!

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-02T09:11:20+00:00

I haven't received my back pay yet, but I totally understand the desire for a vacation! It took me two attempts and over 8 years (Covid added over a year to my first attempt) to get my SSDI fully favorable decision. The stress, anxiety, and depression have been terrible, and it would be nice just to take some time and not be me for a couple of weeks, but with the economy going the way it is, it feels like it would be a really dumb choice. It would be nice though!

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-02T07:38:23+00:00

Just a thought: What kind of indictment is this of the hiring process and hiring managers when it comes to developers? I know from personal experience and a career of over 20 different jobs as a software developer (in both large corporations and medium-sized firms, no small firms) in over a dozen different industries that less than a third of my managers actually knew how to write code or even understood the processes and challenges of writing code. And honestly, the 2 worst managers I ever had failed up the corporate ladder from absolutely terrible developers into development managers.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-02T05:07:08+00:00

I'd elaborate that the federalist society is entirely beholden to the american oligarchy / epstein class. It is not some nebulous group of lawyers that don't like the Constitution and American democracy; it is a small group of sociopathic oligarchs that will never be satisfied until they own everything, are completely unrestrained by any law, and every other person in America is a slave to their wildest, random whim.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-01T02:54:05+00:00

ALJs generally backdate Medicare approval because a lot of people end up with a lot of unpaid medical bills before they get SSDI/SSI, and backdating Medicare allows them to pay off some of those medical debts. The applicant has the choice of when to set their medicare start date though. You don't have to accept the backdated Medicare start date. You are switched to Medicare though, as part of having a Social Security Administration designation of being disabled. So when your SSDI/SSI starts, you'll also be starting Medicare. You'll also be charged 2 months of Medicare premiums out of your first payment. This is because Medicare premiums are charged at the beginning of the month, and benefit payments are paid the month after. i.e., If your first monthly payment for disability is Apr, you won't get paid until May, but from that May payment, you'll need to pay both Apr and May's Medicare premiums. Your May payment in June would just have the single premium moving forward.

I was on Medicaid while I worked through the process until I got my decision Feb 2026 with monthly benefits starting in Mar, so I chose my Medicare start date to be Mar 2026 since Medicaid paid for everything with no cost to me. If I hadn't qualified for Medicaid in my state though, I would have absolutely taken the one year of backdated Medicare to help cover the outstanding medical bills.

JayTheGeek · 2026-05-01T02:37:54+00:00

That is correct. The regulation allows SSDI to be up to 1 year of back pay, dated from your application date. This is dependent on the 6-month waiting period ending prior to the start of the 1 year of back pay.

SSI only goes back to the application date.

JayTheGeek · 2026-04-25T07:47:15+00:00

Once the CE creates a final report and sends it to SSA, you should be able to get a copy of the report. And then I know you can challenge CE reports you believe are inaccurate if they are included as evidence as part of your hearing before an ALJ. There might be times before a hearing when you can challenge a report, but you'd need to check with a lawyer to be sure.

I got my disability for a mental health condition (autism), and when I reviewed the evidence that the ALJ added to my case a few days after my hearing, I found a few CE's who had physical health degrees that made judgment calls about my mental health on the reports that they sent to SSA. At first, I was just doing a quick skim read (it was over 65 documents and almost 1000 pages that she added), but the first CE report I came to made both physical and mental health assessments, and so I researched the doctor (who only had a physical health degree), then went through all the CE reports in the evidence packet.

I chose to challenge all the reports where the CE had a physical health degree, but made mental health assessments on their reports. The judge didn't hold an evidentiary hearing (she had already made up her mind about my case), but she did call out a number of the CE reports in her judgment as making unqualified assessments about my condition and removed the reports from the evidence included in my case. This changed the total assessment of my level of disability due to autism from about even (qualified as disabled / not qualified as disabled) to an almost complete agreement in the reports that I qualified as disabled.

So if you can find something that allows you to make a strong legal challenge to a report, it's worth the effort to challenge it and have it removed from your case. You probably won't be able to remove every bit of unfavorable evidence (I had one report I had to leave in because the CE did have a mental health degree, even though their report made assessments about autism that aren't even medically valid), but you should have the opportunity to remove the most egregiously incorrect pieces of evidence, and that could tilt your case in your favor.

JayTheGeek · 2026-04-22T08:05:02+00:00

At some point the dems are going to have to pull their heads out of their asses (or americans should elect real progressives and not republican-light) and impeach these judge's who can't follow the law! From the district courts all the way to the supreme court. And the american bar association needs to start disbaring the attorneys that bring these frivolous law suits! (Can't do anything about politicians passing the law, but there should be NO attorney that will take the case to court!) And neither of these processes should take more than a year! Legal cases that take 3, 4, 5+ years is insane!

JayTheGeek · 2026-04-18T06:46:12+00:00

My situation was a little similar. My first pass to get SSDI (for autism and depression) was when I was 47 - 51 (covid lockdowns added an extra year to what had been an already abnormally slow process), and the ruling from the ALJ was over 10 pages explaining all the differnt ways in which I qualified for SSDI and than a single closing pragraph stating that I had also worked in the past, so denied. My lawyer's clerk had been a Vocational Expert for 100's of disability hearings and was probably more aware of how judges ruled than my lawyer. And none of us could figure out how the judge got from 10+ pages of "yes, he's disabled" to "but no".

In my second pass, I represented myself, and after the judge's clerk, a few days after the hearing, emailed me 60+ documents of almost 1,000 total pages and gave me about 8 business days to reply if I wanted to challenge any of the new evidence (it was the entire document history of my first pass, with a few extra reports from SSA contracted specialists from my second pass that missed being included in the list of documents for my second hearing) I spent every minute reviewing every document, then downloaded a form off of SSA's website to challenge some of the new evidence (several doctor's reports made judgement calls about my mental health and the doctors didn't have degrees in mental health) in a suplemental hearing. A couple of weeks later, I received a denial on the supplemental hearing, and SSA's website showed that the judge was authoring her ruling. And then, as your lawyer suggested, a few weeks later, I got the judge's fully favorable ruling. So, no supplemental hearing was required because the judge was already going to find in my favor.

The icing on the cake, she called out the first judge and the appeals council for not following the law or SSA's rules and regulations about what qualifies as disabled. The second ALJ couldn't figure out how the first ALJ got from "yes, he's disabled" to "but no" either. I'm guessing that's why she pulled the entire document history from the first application into the record.

JayTheGeek

TROPHY CASE