| Natalia Jofre: | Welcome to the Hill and Ponton Social Security disability blog. I’m Natalia Jofre, I’m in the Social Security section here at our law firm. |
| Shelly Campbell: | My name is Shelly Campbell and I am the Senior Social Security attorney here. |
| Natalia Jofre: | So we’ve dedicated a couple of blogs to the sequential evaluation process which is basically Social Security’s questions or what they’re looking at in order to determine if a person is disabled. |
| We’re now on to step three, which is listings. | |
| Shelly Campbell: | Right. |
| Natalia Jofre: | What are they Shelly? |
| Shelly Campbell: | Listings are basically a list of medical conditions. If the individual meets the severity of the listing for their medical condition, they are disabled. It doesn’t matter their age. It doesn’t matter what type of work they used to do or whether they could be retrained. All of that is irrelevant. If they meet a listing, the process stops at step three and the person is disabled. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Wow. So, can you give an example of a condition and how they would meet the listing? |
| Shelly Campbell: | Sure. Some of the listings are very objective and based on testing. Some others are very subjective and based on symptoms. An example would be for COPD, the listings require that- |
| Natalia Jofre: | What is that? |
| Shelly Campbell: | Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary … |
| Natalia Jofre: | Disease. |
| Shelly Campbell: | … Disease. Yes thank you. So for COPD you have to have a pulmonary function test and if the levels come back at under a certain level, then you’re disabled. It doesn’t matter at that point, the questions stop and Social Security issues you your benefits. |
| Another example would be for anxiety disorder. There’s a listing, but it entails probably 10 to 12 different symptoms and the severity of those symptoms. So in those cases, it takes a lot more to actually determine if the person actually meets the listing. | |
| Natalia Jofre: | Because I would guess it’s much easier if you have an objective finding where you can say in this medical record or in this test it says so much, black and white, versus subjective findings like the severity of an anxiety disorder, you’re kind of taking the patient’s- |
| Shelly Campbell: | Word for it. |
| Natalia Jofre: | … account. Their word for it. Yeah. |
| Shelly Campbell: | Right. Yeah. That is absolutely correct. I would also say that, just so everyone knows, I would say only about five percent of cases actually meet listings, and that number is not exact but there is a very small amount that actually meet listings. And there are a lot of cases that end up meeting listings that don’t meet listings at the initial or the reconsideration level. |
| We can ask for medical expert testimony at hearings, and at that point we can have the doctor discuss whether or not the person actually meets the listing. | |
| Natalia Jofre: | I know that you mentioned Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and you know, often times people can’t afford to have the pulmonary function test and so Social Security will order one and that’s on of the times we tell people, “Yes, go.” That’s an expensive test that’s basically going to measure how well you can breathe, how much you can breathe or what your lung capacity is. So you want that, you want that objective finding. |
| Shelly Campbell: | That’s correct. And just remember that if you do not meet a listing or you’re not at that severity that there are two more steps to determine still, even if you don’t a listing, whether or not you can actually work on a substantial basis. |
| Natalia Jofre: | So we use COPD as an example, but obviously there are umpteen amounts of conditions and different rules, and each one has their own set of rules that you can meet, right? |
| Shelly Campbell: | Thank is correct. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Yeah. All right. Well, we’ll be talking more about the sequential evaluation process in future blogs. Feel free to stay tuned for those. For now, thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time. |
Video Blog – SS Sequential Evaluation – Listings
