Rebecca Schraeder, 37, got her first job in high school, selling popcorn at an Irvine movie theater. As an adult, she worked as a book store cashier, a hotel desk clerk, a customer service representative and a mortgage firm administrative assistant.

But in the past few years Schraeder, who was born with Crohn’s disease, underwent seven surgeries removing parts of her intestines, followed by severe arthritis and bleeding ulcers. Then, as bad luck would have it, a car accident damaged her spine.

Doctors at UC Irvine Medical Center have declared her unable to work. “And nobody wants to hire someone who is actively sick,” Shraeder said, her eyes welling with tears.

So, after paying part of her earnings over two decades to the U.S. Social Security Administration, does she qualify for disability pay under the agency’s worker-funded insurance?

Unclear.

Two years ago, Schraeder submitted her medical records and was turned down — as are four out of five claimants when they first apply. Now she has joined a pool of 1.1 million Americans who are waiting for an in-person hearing before an administrative law judge.

The average wait? 633 days.

“I’m almost always in some level of pain,” said Schraeder, whose Laguna Hills living room is crowded with boxes of medical records and bottles of prescription pills. “But the government makes the wait so long so that you will give up.”

Trisha Gill, 43, who has daily chronic migraines, gazes at her home in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017. “I have chronic daily migraines or intractable status migrainous with aura and daily headache, I go blind in one eye to non stop nausea and vertigo. Clare has helped me through seizures by maintaining eye contact with me through the whole thing and then she puts her paw out at the end for me to shake. Seeing the pictures catch the years of disabling pain is sad but I survive despite disability taking so much time to help and aid my coping process,” said Trisha Gill. (Photo by Ed Crisostomo, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Trisha Gill, 43, who has daily chronic migraines, spends time with her dogs Gina and Clare, left, at her home in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017. “I have chronic daily migraines or intractable status migrainous with aura and daily headache, I go blind in one eye to non stop nausea and vertigo. Clare has helped me through seizures by maintaining eye contact with me through the whole thing and then she puts her paw out at the end for me to shake. Seeing the pictures catch the years of disabling pain is sad but I survive despite disability taking so much time to help and aid my coping process,” said Trisha Gill. (Photo by Ed Crisostomo, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

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Lisa Gonzales,55, worked 32 years as a drug store cashier and manager, paying into the Social Security system. But after suffering a spinal cord injury while unloading pallets of merchandise from a Rite Aid in Indio, California she has been waiting 17 months for a hearing on her disability claim with the Social Security Administration. More than 1.1 million Americans are waiting an average of 628 days for disability claim hearings, as Congress has failed to appropriate enough funding to shrink the backlog. (Courtesy photo)

Trisha Gill, 43, who has daily chronic migraines, shows medications she has taken as she sits at her home in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017. “I have chronic daily migraines or intractable status migrainous with aura and daily headache, I go blind in one eye to non stop nausea and vertigo. Clare has helped me through seizures by maintaining eye contact with me through the whole thing and then she puts her paw out at the end for me to shake. Seeing the pictures catch the years of disabling pain is sad but I survive despite disability taking so much time to help and aid my coping process,” said Trisha Gill. (Photo by Ed Crisostomo, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Rebecca Schraeder at her home in Laguna Hills on Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2017. Schraeder, who is unable to work because of a severe case of Crohn’s disease, has waited almost two years for a hearing before an administrative judge for a decision on whether she will get Social Security disability benefits. (Photo by Paul Rodriguez, Orange County Register/SCNG)



Rebecca Schraeder with the various medications and a stack of files that represent only a fraction of her medical paperwork at her home in Laguna Hills on Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2017. Schraeder, who is unable to work because of a severe case of Crohn’s disease, has waited almost two years for a hearing before an administrative judge for a decision on whether she will get Social Security disability benefits. (Photo by Paul Rodriguez, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Rebecca Schraeder at her home in Laguna Hills on Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2017. Schraeder, who is unable to work because of a severe case of Crohn’s disease, has waited almost two years for a hearing before an administrative judge for a decision on whether she will get Social Security disability benefits. (Photo by Paul Rodriguez, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Trisha Gill, 43, who has daily chronic migraines, spends time with her dogs Gina and Clare, left, at her home in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017. “I have chronic daily migraines or intractable status migrainous with aura and daily headache, I go blind in one eye to non stop nausea and vertigo. Clare has helped me through seizures by maintaining eye contact with me through the whole thing and then she puts her paw out at the end for me to shake. Seeing the pictures catch the years of disabling pain is sad but I survive despite disability taking so much time to help and aid my coping process,” said Trisha Gill. (Photo by Ed Crisostomo, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Bill Adair, 62, suffered severe nerve damage after a 2012 fall at the factory where he worked as a maintenance man. The Orange resident has been trying to get on Social Security disability ever since. Adair is among 1.1 million Americans who are in the pipeline, waiting an average of 628 days for a decision on their claims. He lives in one rented room in Orange and has had to go on food stamps, borrow money, and occasionally panhandle to make ends meet. Adair has paid into the Social Security system on multiple jobs since he was 15. Claimants have worked an average of 22 years. (Margot Roosevelt, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Bill Adair, 62, suffered severe nerve damage after a 2012 fall at the factor where he worked as a mechanic. The Orange resident has been trying to get on Social Security disability ever since. Adair is among 1.1 million Americans who are in the pipeline, waiting for an average of 633 days for a hearing on their claims. Wait times have skyrocketed as Congress has failed to appropriate enough funds to cut the backlog. Adair has paid into the Social Security system on multiple jobs since he was 15. Claimants have worked an average of 22 years. (Margot Roosevelt, Orange County Register/SCNG)



Squeezed budget

The bottleneck may be deliberate.

Under Social Security, about 150 million workers are insured not only for old age benefits, but in the event they suffer a serious injury or illness that prevents them from working before retirement age. Currently, 8.7 million disabled workers get an average of $1,172 a month — barely enough to live on.

But since 2010, Congress has squeezed the Social Security Administration’s operating budget, resulting in an 11 percent cut when accounting for inflation. The effect: staff reductions, a quintupling of hold times for telephone assistance, and a backlog in claims processing that has reached an all-time high.

The agency has closed 65 of its field offices since 2010, including in Corona, Redlands and Barstow. Overall, California field staff is down 14 percent.

For claimants in the pipeline, the delays are “devastating,” Lisa Ekman, an official with the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, a coalition of some 100 nonprofits, told a Congressional hearing in September. “Some become homeless. Some declare bankruptcy. And some die.”

Social Security officials counted 10,002 people who died in FY 2017 while waiting for a hearing. Many more, without income, grew sicker.

Related: How services and funding for Social Security Disability Insurance are changing

The House recently passed legislation to freeze Social Security funding for another year, meaning it will take more than five years to cut the wait time average in half. The Senate Appropriations Committee has proposed shrinking the $10.5 billion operating budget by an additional 4 percent.

Social Security politics

Ideology plays a part.

Republican lawmakers, allied with conservative think tanks, have long sought to curtail government entitlements, including Social Security and Medicare. A few highly-publicized disability scams, including multi-million dollar cases in Puerto Rico and West Virginia, spurred Congress to tighten eligibility. Funding was diverted from processing claims to ferreting out possible fraud.

“We got a system that’s being gamed pretty big right now,” former GOP Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a critic of government spending, told CBS’ 60 Minutes in 2013, before the stepped-up fraud enforcement. “We have so many scallywags in the system.”

Social Security operates 39 investigative task forces across the U.S. But they have uncovered few cheaters. “The best available evidence shows that the level of actual disability fraud is below 1 percent,” acting commissioner Carolyn Colvin told the most recent Congressional hearing on fraud in 2014.

In fact, it has always been hard to get on disability. Today, even among those who navigate the arduous appeals process, only about one in three are ultimately approved.

Some are denied because their illness is not deemed serious enough to preclude any kind of work. Others are unable to assemble the often-voluminous paperwork needed to prove their cases. Still others are ineligible because they haven’t paid into the Social Security system long enough, or they haven’t been employed in at least five of the previous ten years, a requirement to qualify for disability.

Some 3.5 million disabled Americans are so poor — with little or no wages and less than $2,000 in assets — they only qualify for Supplemental Security Income, a program paid through general tax funds, not through Social Security insurance. They get an average of $564 a month.

Fear of homelessness

Schraeder, despite multiplying medical bills, is fortunate to have a roof over her head. Her husband, a computer network technician, helped pay off the mortgage on their two-bedroom mobile home.

For others, the extended wait to learn if they qualify for disability can have catastrophic financial repercussions.

Tricia Gill, 42, declared bankruptcy in November 2016, two-and-a-half years after she was let go from her job as a recruiter at a Los Angeles staffing agency.

Divorced and living alone with her two dogs, Gill suffers from hemiplegic migraines, a condition which affects vision, language and hearing, and causes muscle weakness.

“I get kaleidoscopic vision,” she said. “My lips and tongue swell up. My left side goes numb as if I’m having a stroke. I’m in excruciating pain almost every day.”

Twenty-one months after filing for Social Security disability, Gill is still waiting for a hearing before an administrative judge.

Since losing her $47,000-a-year job, she has relied on $197 a month in food stamps and $204 a month in state aid. She has sold her bicycle and her jewelry. Dog-walking for a neighbor and a GoFundMe account, set up by friends, have helped her pay rent.

“I can’t survive much longer,” she said. “This is how people end up homeless.”

Baby boomer surge

Since 2002, the number of disability recipients has soared by 57 percent to 8.7 million. That’s far faster than the U.S. population growth of 16 percent during the same period.

The trend was predictable, given the swelling numbers of baby-boomers reaching the disability-prone decade before retirement. The recession, with so many employers shedding workers, didn’t help.

“The current backlog is a national disgrace, but not a surprise,” said Mary Dale Walters, a senior vice-president of Allsup LLC a firm that represents disability claimants in California and other states.

“Congress and Social Security could see this coming but haven’t really addressed it. Now it is out of control.”

Part of the problem, she added, is politics: the Social Security Administration has been without a Senate-confirmed commissioner since 2013, as the Republican-led Congress blocked President Barack Obama’s nominees and President Donald Trump has yet to nominate a leader for the agency.

Lisa Gonzales, 55, is among the baby boomers who make up the largest portion of disability applicants. A high-school dropout, she worked her way up from cashier to a $64,000-a-year job as manager of an Indio Rite Aid.

Seventeen years ago, she suffered a pinched nerve in her foot. Three botched surgeries by a workers’ compensation doctor did not fix it, but despite what she described as near constant pain she continued working. Even after later operations for carpal tunnel on both hands, she didn’t give up.

“I was a workaholic — 12 and 14 hours a day,” Gonzales recalled. “No matter how much pain, I would give 100 percent. I was the type of manager who worked alongside my employees. I got dirty with them.”

That’s how, three years ago, she ruptured two discs in her back and landed in the hospital. “We were pulling pallets of merchandise — crates weighing 50 to 100 pounds with liquor and water bottles,” she said.

Social Security officials turned down Gonzales’ initial disability application and she has been waiting 11 months for a hearing before an administrative judge. She has borrowed more than $12,000 from a sister and her ex-husband to pay her $1,300 monthly mortgage.

Getting help

At first, Gonzales tried to negotiate with Social Security officials by herself.

“But when you go to their office, you can’t speak to anyone,” she said. “They send you to a table to call an 800 number. I spent a week calling and couldn’t get through.”

More than 80 percent of claimants seeking a hearing, including Gonzales, find they have to hire help.

“I couldn’t comprehend everything,” she said. “I had to get papers from corporate offices and doctors. But I would get home and forget what I was supposed to do. I was in so much pain.”

Allsup, which has several hundred representatives across the U.S., “takes care of all the paperwork,” Gonzales said. Attorneys or representatives are entitled to 25 percent of a claimant’s back pay, up to a cap of $6000. If they lose, they are not paid.

The challenge that applicants, attorneys and judges face was underscored by harrowing testimony before a House Ways and Means subcommittee in September.

The Social Security Administration has set a quota of 500-700 cases a year for each administrative judge to decide, allowing them an average of 2.5 hours per case, Marilyn Zahm, president of the Association of Administrative Law Judges told House members.

“I doubt there is anybody in this room who could read 1,000 pages of dense medical records, hold a hearing, write instructions, and edit the draft decision in 2.5 hours.”

Since 2011, the agency has made an estimated 1,000 changes to its judicial manual, she said, but judges scrupulously following the rules face “threats of discipline” if they don’t move quickly enough through their caseload.

‘Treated like a bum’

Zahm’s frustration is matched by that of Bill Adair, 62, who lives in a single rented room at an Orange boarding house.

Five years ago, Adair was earning $54,000 a year as a mechanic at a Frito-Lay factory when he fell down stairs. A medical device that had been implanted years earlier for a bladder condition shattered “and fried the living s—t out of my nerves,” he said.

“I haven’t been able to stand up straight since. It hurts to walk. It hurts to sit. I have to self-catheterize for the rest of my life.”

Although Frito-Lay had insurance for long-term injuries, Adair is required to transition to Social Security disability — standard procedure in most industries.

Six years later, he is still waiting for his first check.

His initial application was denied and an administrative judge ruled against him in 2016. An appellate judge found that the first judge made errors. But when Adair appeared for another hearing, in September, it was canceled because the doctor and the vocational specialist, who testifies on whether a claimant is capable of working, were absent.

“I’ve paid into Social Security since I was 15,” Adair said, counting his past jobs on gnarled fingers: oil field hand, construction worker, crane operator, millwright. “I was a respected man who led a middle-class life.”

“Now I’m treated like a bum.”

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