What Should I Know About Continuing Disability In SSDI?

Being granted SSDI benefits is not the end of the disability benefits process; every once in a while, the Social Security Administration may contact you to inquire about your continuing disability. When they call, you will need to prove that you are still disabled, which means you will need to have proof that you are undergoing continued treatment. In this video, Tulsa SSDI attorney Steve Troutman explains more about continuing disability.

Our law office offers free evaluations of your case for SSDI applicants and operates on a contingency fee basis, meaning you only pay attorney fees if your case is successful.

Video Transcription

When a person is found to be disabled, what they need to understand is that Social Security may contact them periodically to ask them about their continuing disability. So they need to understand that they need to continue getting treatment. If it’s a mental illness, for example, and they stopped going to the doctor and stop going to the psychiatrist, two or three years later when Social Security contacts them and they haven’t seen a psychiatrist in two or three years, Social Security may very well assume that their condition has improved. They may send their own psychiatrists. So what I tell people is that whatever problem you’ve got, whether its physical or mental, you need to keep getting treatment for it. Now, if it was a physical problem, let’s say a person had a back injury and now they’ve gotten surgery, there are certainly times where Social Security reviews the records and believes that they’ve gotten better. Social Security can’t just reevaluate the claim and just decide to change their mind if the persons’ essentially the same and decided that they no longer think this person’s disabled. What Social Security has to show in order to determine a person’s benefits is medical improvement. And the burden is on Social Security, not the claimant to show medical improvement. So the reason that we can get the continuing disability reviews reversed is because a lot of the time, Social Security can’t show that medical improvement.

To have a free evaluation of your disability claim, call us at (918) 265-1404 or visit us at TroutmanLaw.com.