disability law

The Associated Press reports on U.S. Supreme Court arguments held yesterday on how states evaluate mental disability in order to decide whether murder defendants can be executed. Execution of the mentally disabled is unconstitutional.

"Five justices, enough to form a majority, pointed repeatedly to the margin of error inherent in IQ and other standardized tests. They voiced skepticism about the practice in Florida and certain other states of barring an inmate from claiming mental disability when his IQ score is just above 70," AP also reports. The advocate for  not allowing inmates to be executed when their IQ scores are just above 70 conceded that a score of 76 would preclude an inmate from arguing mental disability.

Two separate pieces caught my eye today: the adminstrative-law systems for disability claims and Medicare are failing. The Medicare adminstrative-law system is facing a tremendous backlog, while the disablity-claims system could be facing many fake claims.

The Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals has a backlog of 357,000 claims, which developed because the number of cases grew by 184 percent while the system's resources remained constant, The Washington Post reports. The chief judge has suspended "new requests for hearings filed by hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and other health-care providers," The Post reports.

Meanwhile, D. Randall Frye, administrative law judge for the United States Social Security Administration, wrote in the New York Times today that there are no checks and balances in the system against claimants who might be fraudsters. Frye says other administrative law judges and he want an adversarial system in which there would be an advocate for taxpayers to challenge medical evidence and to review case files and in which social-media evidence could be used to check the credibility of claimants. "Social Security disability courts have millions of claimants and constitute one of the world’s largest judicial systems. But the system is not run by anyone with real judicial experience. Instead, we are at the mercy of unelected bureaucrats whose only concern is how many cases each judge can churn out and how fast we can do it," Frye opined.

The U.S. Senate has not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, including a vote in December 2012 that failed by five votes, The Interdependent reports. The convention was modeled after the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. The Senate likely will consider the convention again this year, The Interdependent further reports.

"Both U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and Secretary [of State John] Kerry have argued that the treaty’s benefits occur not through changing any U.S. laws or even spending U.S. resources, but rather by encouraging other countries to follow U.S. leadership in terms of the ADA—legislation that is widely recognized as among the world’s highest standards for protecting the rights of the disabled," The Interdependent also notes.

A federal judge has ruled that people with disabilities were discriminated against by New York City during Superstorm Sandy. The New York Law Journal reports that "Southern District Judge Jesse Furman ruled Thursday that the city violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act and the New York City Human Rights Law in how it plans to respond to severe storms and power outages." While the judge said the discrimination against people with disabilities in getting them evacuated and housed during the storm and its aftermath was not intentional, "more needs to be done to meet the needs of the disabled in the future, especially in the evacuation of people stuck in high-rise buildings after a storm," the NYLJ further reports.