Video Blog - Special Veteran Accommodations

Natalia Jofre:	Hello, welcome to the Social Security Disability blog by Hill & Ponton. I’m Natalia Jofre, the Social Security Section Director for our firm.
Shelly Mark:	And my name is Shelly Mark, I am the Senior Social Security Attorney with the firm.
Natalia Jofre:	So you’ll notice she pauses lots of times right before saying “Mark”. This is not because she forgets her last name.
Shelly Mark:	It’s true.
Natalia Jofre:	It’s because she’s recently been married. Congratulations.
Shelly Mark:	Thank you.
Natalia Jofre:	So she has now transitioned from Shelly Campbell to Shelly Mark-
Shelly Mark:	I apologize. I’ll get it eventually.
Natalia Jofre:	There’s a little pause sometimes because she still has to remember “Mark”.
Shelly Mark:	Yes, that’s correct.
Natalia Jofre:	So today we’re not going to talk about that. But we are going to talk about our series on veterans’ benefits, veterans filing for disability, how it works together-
Shelly Mark:	Right.
Natalia Jofre:	-all that good stuff. And there are a lot of special accommodations made for disabled veterans that are applying for Social Security disability, or for veterans, sometimes they haven’t even … They don’t have service connection, or they haven’t been approved, but they are veterans.
Shelly Mark:	Right. One of the big things that we see a lot here is we have a lot of dual clients, meaning we handle both their VA claim and their Social Security disability, and in those cases if our veteran is service connected we always flag the file as a Wounded Warrior claim, and we ask Social Security to expedite the scheduling of a hearing for them. We have been very successful in having the claims expedited. Social Security is not required to do so, but in most situations they do. In some situations, they expedite them so quickly that we’re scrambling to get the medical records from the VA. But that’s a good problem to have.
Natalia Jofre:	Yeah. So expediting means that they’re going to let your … They’re going to schedule a hearing sooner than they would if you weren’t a Wounded Warrior, okay? So right now, on average, it’s taking about 24 months to get a hearing date and if you get your case expedited it means that it’s basically taking less than 24 months. Now, that may not seem like a lot, you know, if you’re waiting 18 months, if you’re waiting 12 months-
Shelly Mark:	Right.
Natalia Jofre:	-but trust me, when you have no income, no way to support yourself, you’re not working, you’re either getting little or nothing from the VA, every single month counts and it counts a lot. That pretty much goes for all of our clients.
Shelly Mark:	Right.
Natalia Jofre:	But the fact that they’re making this special accommodation for veterans, that’s pretty huge.
Shelly Mark:	Yep, definitely.
Natalia Jofre:	Yeah. So another special accommodation would be maybe like their age taken-
Shelly Mark:	That is correct. In a lot of cases with veterans, younger individuals are awarded due to the severity of their medical conditions. You know, sometimes the age factor is kind of loosened a little bit and in a lot of cases with veterans, we win the cases based on listings, which we talked about earlier on. Which is where the medical condition is so severe that it doesn’t matter how old they are, Social Security’s going to say they’re disabled.
Natalia Jofre:	And how about education, how would that factor in? Because we talked about education before as well.
Shelly Mark:	Right. Yeah, well, education, you know, for Social Security purposes, if we have a client that’s going to school on a full-time basis, usually we have to tell them that we’re not going to be able to help you because Social Security equates a full-time student as having a full-time job. In cases with veterans, we will take cases where veterans are going to school full time and we will argue to the judge, to Social Security, that this is a transition period for the veteran. They’re coming out of the military, whether they were Infantry or whatever their position was, they’re no longer able to do it and they don’t have any other skills, so they have to be re-educated or retrained before they can re-enter the work force. So the full-time school for the veterans is definitely something that we can work with.
Natalia Jofre:	The one other big difference that we see for veterans, which is sort of a pretty big exception to the rule, is when there is drugs or alcohol involved in their claim. Social Security, they do not like those cases, okay?
Shelly Mark:	Right.
Natalia Jofre:	I mean, in general, they feel like, “We’re not going to pay you so that you can go out and drink or you can go out and do drugs.” Where we see a huge exception is for veterans, especially those that are transitioning back or have psychiatric problems, and the general sense, I guess, would be that they understand that many times veterans are self-medicating to deal with a lot of the trauma that they’ve suffered and have related problems. And so, even though it’s not something they’re thrilled about or something that they necessarily want to condone, it is sometimes something that we see is comprehended and handled differently, and that they can potentially be approved if they feel as if though it’s almost a side effect of their disability, would you-
Shelly Mark:	Right. Right. Or being used as a coping mechanism or self-medicating or something like that. And of course, the judges also want to see a move forward to move away from that, so whether there’s counseling or treatment or detox or whatever it may be, just to show that the individual is trying to change those habits.
Natalia Jofre:	Yeah. So sometimes maybe in a claimant that isn’t a veteran they’ll say, you know, “You’ve been drinking for two years now, I don’t necessarily believe that you’re going to be rehabilitated,” whereas too if the veteran’s doing that and they see that okay, they’re trying to move away from this drug or alcohol abuse and actually get clean and sober and get proper treatment then that’s something that they’re normally happy about and it could really help their claim.
Shelly Mark:	Right, yeah. And just one other little tidbit, if the claimant has not been found unemployable by the VA and their Social Security claim is approved for total disability that is definitely something that will also, in turn, help their VA claim.
Natalia Jofre:	Yeah. So there’s actually other benefits that you can qualify for once you’re found disabled as a veteran, so we’ll talk about that in another video because that can get real lengthy. But as of for today, we thank you for watching, if you have any questions regarding whether you could qualify or not feel free to call us or visit our website, hillandponton.com. And we thank you for being here.
Shelly Mark:	Thank you.