The invoice, Allred added, “will present flexibility and prolong the time beneficiaries have earlier than they must repay overpayments and their advantages are intercepted” by the Social Safety Administration.
The Social Safety Overpayment Equity Act would permit people notified of an overpayment to have extra time to know the discover, converse to a consultant from the Social Safety Administration, apply for the related waivers or develop a cost plan, the lawmakers mentioned.
A First Step
Maria Freese, senior legislative consultant on the Nationwide Affiliation to Protect Social Safety and Medicare, informed ThinkAdvisor Monday in an e mail that whereas the group has “not been requested to endorse this invoice” and has no touch upon it, the group helps “any motion to mitigate the detrimental impacts of overpayments on beneficiaries.”
The primary problem, Freese mentioned, “is that the Social Safety Administration wants enough funding from Congress as a way to deal with this and different points it faces. Sadly, the company has been chronically underfunded for greater than a decade.”
Nancy Altman, president of Social Safety Works, added in one other e mail that “calls for to instantly repay advantages deemed overpayments months, years, and even many years after they have been paid, attributable to no fault of the beneficiary, can lead to excessive hardship. The stress of a letter from the federal government demanding the reimbursement of tens of hundreds of {dollars} that you just don’t have and didn’t know that you just owed, has landed folks within the hospital.”
Whereas overpayments have gotten essentially the most public consideration, “underpayments additionally create severe hardship, lowering earnings important to fulfill primary requirements,” Altman mentioned.
The Social Safety Administration “is doing what it might via government motion, however laws is required,” she added.
Whereas the Social Safety Overpayment Equity Act “is an especially essential first step. Congress ought to shortly enact it, but in addition do way more” by enacting a statute of limitations on the demand for reimbursement of overpayments, Altman mentioned.
Congress “must also permit SSA to spend just some tenths of a p.c extra of its accrued surplus to rent sufficient workers to catch overpayments and underpayments extra shortly,” Altman added.
Additional, she mentioned, lawmakers ought to “simplify and replace Supplemental Safety Revenue, together with enacting the SSI Financial savings Penalty Elimination Act, in order that this system is extra administrable and fewer errors happen.”