Social Security Administration February 2008 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

We are considering ways to quickly identify diseases and other serious medical conditions that obviously meet the definition of disability under the Social Security Act (the Act) and can be identified with minimal objective medical information. We are calling this method ``Compassionate Allowances.'' We held one public hearing already and plan to hold additional public hearings this year. This is the second hearing in the series. The purpose of this hearing is to obtain your views about the advisability and possible methods of identifying and implementing compassionate allowances for children and adults with cancers. Our first hearing, on December 4-5, 2007, dealt with rare diseases. We will address other kinds of medical conditions in later hearings.

The Social Security Administration is correcting a final rule that appeared in the Federal Register on January 15, 2008 (73 FR 2411). The document amends our disability administrative adjudication processes to suspend new claims to the Federal reviewing official (FedRO) level, now operating in the Boston region. Claims already transferred to the Office of the Federal Reviewing Official (OFedRO) for FedRO review will continue to be processed by the OFedRO and a related component of the disability determination process, the Medical and Vocational Expert System (MVES), commonly known as the Office of Medical and Vocational Expertise (OMVE).