
A homeless woman’s battle to prove Social Security owes her more than $100K - sudoscript
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/i-wasnt-crazy-a-homeless-womans-long-war-to-prove-the-feds-owe-her-100000/2016/08/22/3913e4c2-6541-11e6-8b27-bb8ba39497a2_story.html
======
toomuchtodo
Far too often, I see hackers looking for something to disrupt; a problem to
fix. I implore you, this is a cause the requires fixing, more than almost any
problem you'll find in Silicon Valley.

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...](http://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/policy-basics-top-
ten-facts-about-social-security)

[2]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/08/09/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/08/09/closed-
social-security-offices-furloughed-staff-under-gop-cuts-agency-warns/)

[3] [https://oig.ssa.gov/audits-and-investigations/top-ssa-
manage...](https://oig.ssa.gov/audits-and-investigations/top-ssa-management-
issues/social-security-disability-hearings-backlog)

[4]
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/28/chatbot-a...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/28/chatbot-
ai-lawyer-donotpay-parking-tickets-london-new-york)

~~~
effingwewt
Well said and well done! I think it's important to remember this could be ANY
of us, given just one bad turn of events. How would we feel if programming,
even new code, was totally automated overnight, how many engineers would be
out of jobs? Especially given the high pay scale? If only because that could
and very well may be us all one day, we should not let problems like this go
unanswered and left for yet the NEXT generation.

