Disability coverage was built into the law of the United States in the mid 20th century to cover those people who worked their whole lives and would unfortunately become disabled or handicapped. Too many times Americans saw disabilities create a situation where their friends or loved ones ended up homeless or hungry.
As time moved forward, the law expanded to include dependents and spouses of the people in the Social Security system. Now, when you are born, you automatically are assigned a Social Security number. Every paycheck you receive will have a small amount of money deducted for this program. The program also offers retirement coverage as a benefit.
“Only about a third or less of people who apply for disability are accepted on their first try,” said Maria, a social security disability attorney in Melbourne FL said. “After that, the applicant is entitled to an appeal. They cannot reapply again unless there are changes to their original circumstances. They can also work with an attorney like me to rebuild their case and apply again.”
If a person is unable to work and needs money to survive, you can imagine how stressful the entire thing can be. This is also where an attorney that specializes in disability law can be worth their weight in gold. They handle all aspects of the case and the applicant has to do very little. For their work, the attorney receives a small percentage of the payments which stops after a certain amount of time has passed.
Behind the Numbers
Over 11 million people receive Social Security Disability payments each month. As you may imagine, managing, approving and regulating all these people takes a large amount of manpower. This is why application and appeal numbers are limited.
The amount of employees working within the system to help approve or deny these applications is minute in comparison to the giant apparatus of the legal system in general. Injury and criminal law have a multitude more people involved in the process than do Social Security Disability (SSDI).
This is because the overall number of injury vases dwarf those in the SSA system. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, approximately 31 million people in the United States suffer personal injuries each year that require medical treatment, with around 2 million of those injuries severe enough to require hospitalization.
The fact of the matter is that resources are applied to where they are most needed. That is why when you deal with any court case, hiring an attorney is paramount. The odds of you winning drop steeply the longer you wait to hire one.
Finding a disability attorney in your area is relatively easy. Use a Google search and make sure the read the reviews. You can also use websites like FindLaw to find qualified attorneys in your area. The time you invest in finding a qualified attorney is time well spent. You won’t regret it later. If you choose an attorney willy-nilly without doing your research you are doing yourself a huge injustice.