A homeless woman’s battle to prove Social Security owes her more than $100K
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Social security is one of the bedrocks of the few social safety nets the US government provides [1]. It keeps seniors out of poverty, it keeps the disabled off the streets. It provides results, and its one of the most efficient government agencies at doing so (when you look at the cost of ingesting payroll taxes and distributing funds to eligible recipients).
Clearly, this Washington Post article highlights the dark side. The Social Security Administration is chronically understaffed, not just in providing customer service, but also in processing disability claims (last I checked, the backlog is approaching 15-18 months in some states) [2] [3].
Just last night, I exclaimed to my wife how terrible the SSA is at properly calculating someone's benefits (based on earned income history/credits, spousal/widow benefits, etc), and that this should be a solved problem. The SSA has all of the necessary data to compute the proper benefit amount someone should be receiving monthly.
I won't say this is an easy problem to fix. The pitfalls are numerous. The Social Security Administration is an unforgiving bureaucracy. There are entanglements with attempting to provide what might be considered legal advice through a webapp. Your users would not be what I would consider "receptive". But the data is there. The necessary algorithms the SSA uses to determine benefits are openly available. Earnings credits/history for a beneficiary is an authenticated XML call away. Marriage and divorce records can ingested (you have to be married to someone 10 years to be eligible to collect off of their spousal benefits).
My plea is simple: help me fix this. It's not ads, its not VR, it's not AI; it is lifting people out of poverty. It's not glamourous. There is no glory. But you're helping people who otherwise might have nothing.
If you're at the USDS or 18F, put me in front of the right person. If that's not going to work, we'll work at it from an "automated legal aid" front (think of the bot Joshua Browder wrote to challenge parking tickets [4]; I've already reach out to him regarding this as well), and have an automated system for calculating the proper benefits and submitting the claim to the SSA. I refuse to believe the status quo is the best we can do.
[1] http://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/policy-basics-t...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/08/09/...
[3] https://oig.ssa.gov/audits-and-investigations/top-ssa-manage...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/28/chatbot-a...