Faqs

Hi, it’s Bernard Nomberg with Nomberg Law Firm in Birmingham, Alabama and we handle workers’ compensation, personal injury and Social Security disability claims and I want to take a few minutes and talk about, in the Social Security world, what happens to benefits after the trial work period ends. First of all, an individual who’s approved for Social Security Disability may attempt to return to work. The Social Security Administration has provided what’s called a trial work period for those receiving disability benefits as an incentive to return to work. The trial work period lasts for a total of nine months and during that trial work period, you will continue to receive your SSD payments, your disability payments, as usual. Only at the expiration of that trial work period may the benefits could be affected. It’s important to note that the trial work period consists of nine months in total, but only those months in which you earn more than $880 count toward the trial work period.

That’s an important fact to remember. This amount is reviewed by the Administration and is adjusted each year. You should check the financial limits of before engaging in any type of work, however. You should also understand that the months that count toward a trial work period do not have to be consecutive. This means any month in a rolling 60 month calendar, which is what the SSA uses for calculating trial work periods, will potentially be counted toward those nine months.

Now after the trial work period has ended, the SSA will review your earnings to determine if you’re able to maintain SGA, substantial gainful activity, during that time. This is essentially it’s a determination of whether or not the work you performed is for gainful living. SGA is defined by the administration as any earnings at or above a certain threshold. The threshold is evaluated and potentially adjusted annually. For 2019, the SGA threshold is set at $1,220 per month for a non-blind single recipient of SSD benefits.

If your average earning during the trial work period hits or exceeds the SGA threshold, then your disability benefits will be terminated by the Administration. If, however your earnings during the trial work period remain below that SGA threshold, then your benefits will continue.

Now, there is also an extended period of eligibility and the definition for that is that if you’re still able to work and you enter what is known as the extended period of eligibility, this last for up to 36 months following the completion of your initial trial work period. You’ll still remain eligible for disability benefits during that period. During the EPE, the extended period of eligibility, the amount of your monthly earned income will determine whether or not you still receive a disability check.

If you’re confused about this, if you have questions about this, please don’t hesitate to give us a call. It can be quite confusing. Our office number is (205) 930-6900, we’re based in Birmingham, Alabama. Our website is Nomberglaw.com. If this video is of interest and you liked it, please give us a thumbs up and a comment or two is always welcome and if you didn’t, we also welcome those comments. Subscribing to our YouTube channel right here will ensure that you’ll get those future videos, which come out every week. We also can be found on YouTube and Facebook. Oh, and Twitter.

Hey, it’s Bernard Nomberg with the Nomberg Law Firm in Birmingham and we wanted to take a couple of minutes and express some of those things, some of those documents that you’ll need to bring with you when you go to the social security administration to file for disability benefits. The more organized that you are before you begin the process, the easier it’ll be in the process. Now, you can either apply online if you know how to do that, you just go to social security’s website, ssa.gov or you can call their national toll free hotline, which is 800-772-1213 or you can go in person to the local social security office and that’s usually the easiest way to do it. And this was for somebody initially filing for social security disability benefits. This is the initial filing, the initial application, and to get organized, we suggest that you pull together the following documents and information before you have this meeting.

Make sure you have your birth certificate or other proof of birth. Make sure that if you’re not born in the United States you have proof of US Citizenship or lawful alien status paperwork. If you were in the military and you were discharged, if you have US military discharge paperwork, if service prior to 1968. [inaudible 00:01:32] forms or self employment tax returns from the previous year. Information about all of your medical care. Have a list of all of your doctors and what they’ve treated you for. Have their contact information, their address and their phone number, any award letters, payment stubs, settlement agreements from any workers’ compensation claims that you’ve been involved in.

Going back to the medical aspect of it, also a list of all of your prescriptions and the pharmacies. Also, it would be helpful if you have any monies that you’re expecting to receive from your employer, have that information available. Have any information if you have any unsatisfied felony or arrest warrant information for escape from custody, anything like that is information that social security administration is going to need. Also, be thinking about what day is it, what date that you became unable to work because of illness or injuries or conditions that you feel are still keeping you from unable to be able to work. There’s other information that you can pull together as well, but just have that all of these things in a mindset, particularly your list of doctors, your list of pharmacy and medications and the conditions that you’re claiming. It’s not an exhaustive list, but it’ll certainly get you going in the right direction.

If you need help with things like this, pulling this together have questions, or if you need assistance with filing for social security disability or the appeal process which has deadlines, please give us a call at 205-930-6900 that’s our office number in Birmingham, Alabama. We can also be reached at Nomberglaw.com that’s our website. We also can be found different places on social media such as a YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

Hi. It’s Bernard Nomberg with Nomberg Law Firm.

One of the areas of law of cases that we handle is social security disability appeals, and I wanted to just take a minute to talk about three key things that you can do to help make your case a little more successful, head it down the right path, et cetera.

First and foremost, after you get an unfavorable decision, you have a limited period of time in which to file your appeal, and it’s going to say in the letter 60 days from when you receive it, if you don’t appeal within that deadline, you’re going to lose your rights, so timely appeals are one of the key things for a successful case. You also have to have the medical evidence that backs up your case, that supports your claim for disability. Think about what doctor or doctors need to address your ability to work or inability to work. Then the third thing that we suggest obviously is to to seek counsel who’s experienced in dealing these cases. Experienced lawyers who deal with social security appeals can greatly help your case. They’ll answer questions, they’ll take away some of the stress, they’ll handle all of the paperwork and guiding you to that hearing, attending the hearing for you, et cetera.

If you have questions or concerns or you feel like you need to an appeal a social security unfavorable decision, give us a call. That’s one of the things that we do here. (205) 930-6900 is our office number. nomberglaw.com is our website. We also can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

 

Hi, it’s Bernard Nomberg with the Nomberg Law Firm in Birmingham. Wanted to spend a minute or two talking with you about authorized treating physicians and medical care in Alabama worker’s compensation cases.

The way that the laws in Alabama are designed that if a case is compensable, meaning that they worker’s comp insurance carrier for the employer is going to cover the medical care and related costs, et cetera in a claim, they have the right to a large extent to control medical care and the direction it heads into.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the injured worker doesn’t have choices and options and make their own decisions, but if the insurance carrier’s going to pay for that medical care, they have the right to authorize who that carrier is, and to a certain extent, what that medical care is going to be.

And we don’t have time to discuss all of the ins and outs about how this works, but what I wanted to really stress was what happens in that situation where the authorized medical care provider has a certain opinion about medical situation with an injured worker, but the injured worker doesn’t think that that’s correct or that should go that way.

Well, if there becomes a conflict there, and the injured worker doesn’t want to stay with that same authorized doctor, if they haven’t already used their panel of four choice, we can make that request of the adjuster. Or the injured worker always has the option to go to his or her own doctor, which they would financially responsible for paying, and the work comp carrier does not have to honor it or pay for it. That would have to come through a court order for them to pay for that.

But let me give you a real case example. Let’s say that somebody has injured their knee in a witnessed accident at work, and they go to what we call the gateway doctor. That’s the plant doctor or the occupational medicine doctor who takes a look at it and says, “This is out of my specialty. You’ve got some kind of injury here. I want to send you to a specialist.” And then they refer the injured worker to an orthopedist who specializes in knees. Scans are done. MRIs, X-rays, what have you, and then the authorized treating knee doctor says, “Well, you’ve got arthritis here, and I think that’s really your issue.”

But in that scenario, the injured worker says, “Well, I’ve never had any problems before this event, this accident. I never knew I had arthritis. Never had any problems, no limitations, restrictions.” But the authorized treating knee doctor says, “This is arthritis. This is not from this accident.”

Well therein lies the problem. Effectively, the authorized treating doctor has curtailed the medical care. The injured worker’s still hurt, still needs medical care, and still believes that it was from work. Well in that scenario, they may be able to ask for a panel of four or go to their own doctor, but they would be responsible for financially.

Now that’s just one very small example. There’s hundreds of different types of examples to share that we’ve dealt with. If you have issues with this, and this is a very, very common problem and concern and stressful time for injured workers, please consider giving us a call. We can help deal with this. We do it every day. 205-930-6900 is our office number. Nomberglaw.com on the web, and we have Facebook and Twitter, as well. Thanks.