- Welcome to the Social Security Disability blog.
I am Natalia Joffrey.
I am the Social Security Director for Hill & Ponton.
- I'm Shelly Mark.
I'm the Senior Social Security Attorney with the firm.
- So today, we're gonna be talking
a little bit more about age, how that affects
your disability claim, how it's evaluated.
We had talked about the sequential evaluation process,
which is basically how Social Security figures out
whether you're disabled or not,
and then, we talked a little bit about how age
affects your case, and depending
on how old you are, how your claim is evaluated.
The last video we did, we talked about younger individuals,
which are people that are between 18 and 49.
- Correct.
- And how their claim is evaluated.
The next age level is closely approaching advanced age,
right, which is 50 to 54.
- That's correct.
- They're in a gray area.
You're gonna talk a little bit more about--
- Okay.
- How that's.
- Sure, okay, so as Natalia said,
the closely advanced, or closely approaching advanced age
is for individuals who are 50 to 54 years old,
and the evaluation is going to look
at whether they can perform their past work,
and then, the second step, of course,
is gonna be whether they can perform other work.
And that, whether they can perform other work,
is gonna be an application.
It's going to depend on what type of work
they performed in the past, what type of physical exertion
was required, what type of mental exertion
was required, and then, from there,
what types of skills they acquired from their past work
that they could readily move and transfer that
into other areas.
- So let's talk first about physical exertion.
- Okay.
- You're talking about standing, walking, sitting, how long?
- Exactly, or if it's a position
that requires a lot of heavy lifting.
Social Security has statutes that come into play
when a person is 50, and then,
they change again when a person is 55,
which we'll go over in another video,
but in certain situations with individuals
in this group, if they cannot perform
their past work, and due to the exertion level,
they can't perform their past work,
and they don't have transferable skills,
they should be considered disabled.
- Okay.
- It gets a little bit more in depth
as to all the factors that go in, but it is a gray area.
So some people may not be able to perform their past work,
and they may be disabled.
Some people may not be able to perform
their past work, but they may find
that they do have some transferable skills
and that they're not disabled.
So like you said, this is definitely a gray area.
- So two things, real quick.
Mental exertion, basically, like memory, concentration?
- Yeah, absolutely.
Memory, concentration, whether or not a person's gonna
have some difficulty interacting with people,
interacting with supervisors, whether or not they're
going to be off task due to pain,
side effects of medication.
Any of those things will be considered.
So it's an evaluation of the physical difficulties
with work and then, also, non-exertional,
so the things that you and I are just talking about.
- Can you give an example of just a case
that you can think of where the person
basically either had transferable skills,
like what kind of work are we talking about?
- We can go, the most, the easiest example
for this age group would be probably a construction worker
who in the past 15 years, that's all that he has done,
very physical work, lifting 50 pounds a day,
or standing, walking constantly.
Let's say that there was an injury
and they cannot hardly walk on their own,
maybe they're using a cane.
They cannot go back to doing construction work.
If they were limited to sedentary work,
which would just be desk work,
that person would be disabled based
on Social Security statutes because Social Security would
find that there is such a leap from being
a construction worker to being a receptionist
that even though the person's not 55 yet,
it would be too difficult to retrain them.
- Okay.
So, and that's where you sort of get
into some of the nitty-gritty where were you doing
real construction work, like where you
out there laying brick, mortar,
or were you basically the guy behind the desk
that was just writing up the work orders and saying,
"I'm gonna send out a crew.
"You need to be here this day, this time,
"but you're never really, really," I mean--
- That's true.
- Right, so that's where they're looking at exertion levels,
like which, and they do get into those details.
- It's very, very, very detail oriented process,
and the thing that we had talked about,
I think, in an earlier video is
it's crucial to how your work is classified
with Social Security, and I think we're gonna
discuss that a little more in depth later,
but if there is a misclassification,
and the example that you just gave,
let's say that that individual was classified
as being a supervisor but just a completely
sedentary supervising position.
Usually, in the construction industry,
a supervisor is a working supervisor.
So usually if there is someone out that day,
they're gonna have to do the work
that their crew has to do.
So we need to be really, really careful
when we're completing the work history forms.
- That is going to be a whole other topic
because it's a, and it's a hot topic
because we see this all the time
where people feel like.
- All the time.
- They want to be boastful or they think
that they're writing a resume.
- Right.
- And so, they're like, "Oh, I was a supervisor."
Yeah, but you also had to do the work,
and that's actually gonna help your case more.
- Absolutely, and it can be a mistake
that can cost you from being approved
at the initial and the reconsideration
to having to wait the 18 to 24 months
to clarify it for a judge.
- Wow.
- So that's a big deal.
- Yeah, so next blog, we'll talk about the next age group,
which is advanced age, what that takes,
what you need approved for that.
For now, thanks for watching.
If you have any questions, feel free
to visit our website or call our office.
Thanks for being with us.
- Thank you.
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