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In San Antonio, Texas, people hoping to get Social Security disability payments could see their cases assigned to any of 17 judges. The luck of this draw matters a lot. One of the judges grants benefits in just 14 percent of cases. Another judge hands over benefits—which range from about $700 per month to about twice that—92 percent of the time.
That 78 percent disparity rate makes San Antonio the second most lottery-like system in the Social Security Administration’s archipelago of hearing offices, according to a data analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a non-profit research organization housed at Syracuse University. (Dallas is number one, with 83 percent disparity).
“To a surprising extent the records on disability decisions show again and again that even within the individual offices there is not a clear consensus among the judges about which claims should be awarded versus which should be denied,” the authors of the report , David Burnham and Sue Long, write. “The problem today is somewhat worse than it was four and a half years ago.”
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