GAO-17-234, VA DISABILITY BENEFITS: Additional Planning Would Enhance Efforts to Improve the Timeliness of Appeals Decisions

Veterans' psychiatric benefits: enter courts and attorneys.

In 1988, the Veterans Judicial Review Act (VJRA) was signed into law, ending more than a century of Congressional measures that kept veterans' benefits claims completely out of the appellate court system. Before this new law, any decision made by the Department of Veterans' Affairs (VA) about a veteran's claim was final, and there was no recourse for independent judgment of an appeal. The legis...

Results of Efforts to Improve the Disability Claims Process Have Been Disappointing

Page 13 GAO-03-117 SSA Challenges Results of Efforts to Improve the Disability Claims Process Have Been Disappointing SSA’s disability determination process is time-consuming, complex, and expensive. The agency has been working for years to improve this process, yet, ensuring the quality and timeliness of its disability decisions remains one of SSA’s greatest challenges. Individuals who are ini...

GAO-02-806 Veterans' Benefits: Quality Assurance for Disability Claims and Appeals Processing Can Be Further Improved

The Effect of Disability Insurance Receipt on Labor Supply: A Dynamic Analysis;

This paper estimates the effect of Disability Insurance receipt on labor supply, accounting for the dynamic nature of the application process. Exploiting the effectively random assignment of judges to disability insurance cases, we use instrumental variables to address the fact that those allowed benefits are a selected sample. We find that benefit receipt reduces labor force participation by 2...

Incorporating Cost-Effectiveness Data in a Fair Process for Priority Setting Efforts; Comment on “Use of Cost-Effectiveness Data in Priority Setting Decisions: Experiences from the National Guidelines for Heart Diseases in Sweden”

Cost-effectiveness data is useful for use in priority setting decisions in order to improve the efficiency of resources used. This paper thereby responds to Eckard et al. which addressed the use of cost-effectiveness data in the actual prioritization decisions in the Swedish national clinical guidelines for heart diseases. Based on a set of experiences on the use of economic evaluation in prior...