It is
helpful to know about some rules for social security disability benefits. This
will help you understand better the overall process and also may eliminate any
confusions regarding this. First of all, let us understand how the evaluation
process of your application works in short.
Steps of
evaluation of application:
Once you are
convinced about your disabilities, you may apply for the social security
benefits without any further delay. But what happens after your application is
submitted. Let us walk through the answer in a simple and comprehensive way:
Firstly,
After filing
for disability benefits, your application is received by the officer in
duty in the social security field office. There are several options to submit
the application like online submission, mail, telephone or in person etc.
Whichever option is convenient to the applicant, he/she may choose it.
Secondly,
The field
office starts your primary evaluation. This evaluation mainly focuses on the
non-medical issues. Some of the non-medical eligibilities are-
·
Age of the applicant
·
Employment information of the applicant
·
Marital status
·
Information on social security coverage etc.
These
eligibilities are important, because if you meet this non-medical eligibility
criteria, your application will be accepted for further evaluation, otherwise
not.
If the field
office finds satisfactory results after evaluating these non-medical issues,
then they forward your application to the disability discrimination services
(DDS) office.
Thirdly,
Once your
application has passed the initial evaluation and is forwarded to the DDS, they
start evaluating whether you are truly medically disabled. DDS investigate all
your medical documents, tries to gather information from your medical sources
and if necessary arrange set up to acquire information from different experts
other than your own medical sources. After gathering all the necessary
information, trained officers of DDS make decision whether you are truly
disabled or not.
After completion
of this entire process, there could be any of the two outcomes-
1)
You are disabled
2)
Your disability claim is denied
In case of the
decision that you are disabled, there should not be so many confusions of what
may happen next! Your disability benefit amount is determined and you will
start receiving it. The concern here is, if your claim is denied, then what
happens?
If your claim
is not accepted and the DDS doesn’t consider you as disabled, then your file is
handed over and kept to the field office. The step you may take now is to
appeal against the decision made by DDS.
Also, you may
wonder whether your family is also capable of receiving the disability benefits
or not. The answer is yes! Under certain conditions, your family may also
become eligible for receiving the social security disability benefits. The main
conditions and beneficiaries include-
·
Spouse of a disabled person, when age of the
spouse is equal or above 62
·
Any-age-spouse when the spouse is looking after
a child of the applicant. Here the child should be below 16 or disabled.
·
Unmarried child of the applicant who is below
18.
·
In some cases grandchild of the applicant.
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