Benefits process turns into a maze

Initiative aims to cut waiting time for disabled

By Chris Lydgate

The Portland Tribune, Dec 14, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (14 Reader comments)

JIM CLARK / TRIBUNE PHOTO

After a rare disease left him too disabled to work, Kevin Kilmer applied for Social Security benefits in early 2005. Now broke and living with friends, he’s still waiting for his case to be resolved.

Kevin Kilmer is stuck in limbo.

Kilmer, 46, is a former machinist who suffers from a rare condition known as a Type II Chiari malformation. The bones of his skull press down on his spinal cord, causing devastating headaches and other neurological problems including blurred vision, tinnitus, and loss of sensation in his arms and legs.

“It feels like someone smacked you in the head with a two-by-four,” he says.

In January 2005, unable to work any longer, Kilmer applied for Social Security disability benefits — and thus stepped into a bureaucratic netherworld that every year swallows hundreds of thousands of disabled Americans.

Three years later, his case still is unresolved, leaving Kilmer broke and frustrated.

“It pisses me off,” he says. “I’ve been working since I was 16. They take that money out of your paycheck — they don’t give you any choice about it. So it gets me — all those years I was paying into it.”

His blue eyes peeking out from puffy dark bags, Kilmer discussed his predicament earlier this week at Central City Concern’s Old Town Clinic on West Burnside Street.

Halfway into an interview, he doffed his ball cap and turned his neck, revealing a wicked six-inch scar running up the back of his head — the legacy of a failed surgery to relieve his condition.

Since he applied for benefits, Kilmer’s condition has grown worse, and he has bounced from one temporary perch to another. He currently is staying with a friend in North Portland.

“I don’t want to stay too long because I don’t want to drive ’em nuts,” he says.

According to Mellani Calvin, Kilmer’s caseworker at Central City Concern, his case is hardly unusual.

“I feel like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill,” Calvin says. “I’ve had a guy walk in with two crutches and barely able to speak a sentence and be denied.”

Delays have dire results

Frustrated by crippling delays and chronic backlogs in the Social Security disability system, local advocates for the homeless and the disabled have hatched a scheme to speed up the process — by short-circuiting the cumbersome federal bureaucracy where the delays are most severe.

The initiative, known as the Benefits and Entitlements Specialist Team, or BEST, is designed to streamline applications from the city’s poorest and most disabled citizens, who now typically find themselves lost in a bureaucratic labyrinth, waiting three years or more before they are granted disability benefits by the federal government, during which time they often have no income, no health insurance and nowhere to live.

The current delays are “awful from every perspective,” says attorney Jeff Mapes, who represents disabled clients seeking Social Security benefits, some of whom have deteriorated, died or committed suicide while waiting for a hearing before a federal judge. “The human cost can be horribly burdensome.”

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