Houston residents with serious illnesses or disabilities often face critical financial difficulties. Cancer patients, for example, often are unable to work while undergoing treatment, creating a financial hardship.
The Social Security Administration recognizes these dire circumstances and offers a program known as compassionate allowances for these individuals to quickly get approved for disability benefits.
When a person applying for Social Security Disability benefits indicates on their application that they have a condition on the compassionate allowances list, the claims adjuster will move their documents to the top of the stack for review. Applicants can be approved in as little as 10 days if all their documentation is in order.
To expedite this process even further, the Houston Social Security disability lawyers at The Law Offices Of M. Stanley Whitehead recommend including as much medical documentation as you can with your initial application.
Recently, the SSA expanded the list of conditions that fall under compassionate allowances. The list now includes:
- Angiosarcoma
- Atypical Teratoid/Rhabdoid Tumor
- Chronic Idiopathic Intestinal Pseudo Obstruction
- Coffin- Lowry Syndrome
- Esthesioneuroblastoma
- Giant Axonal Neuropathy
- Hoyeaal-Hreidarsson Syndrome
- Intracranial Hemangiopericytoma
- Joubert Syndrome
- Leptomeningeal Carcinomatosis
- Liposarcoma- metastatic or recurrent
- Malignant Ectomesenchymoma
- Malignant Renal Rhabdoid Tumor
- Marshall-Smith Syndrome
- Oligodendroglioma Brain Tumor- Grade III
- Pallister-Killian Syndrome
- Progressive Bulbar Palsy
- Prostate Cancer – Hormone Refractory Disease – or with visceral metastases
- Revesz Syndrome
- Seckel Syndrome
- Sjogren-Larsson Syndrome
- Small Cell Cancer of the Thymus
- Soft Tissue Sarcoma- with distant metastases or recurrent
- X-Linked Lymphoproliferative Disease
- X-Linked Myotubular Myopathy
While these are the newest additions, the full list contains over 200 different conditions. View the complete list of compassionate allowances to find out if you qualify.
Medical conditions that qualify for compassionate allowances are chosen based on National Institutes of Health research, advice from medical and scientific experts, input from communities in the Social Security and Disability Determination Services, and data from public outreach hearings.
About 200,000 applicants in the U.S. have received disability benefits faster with the help of this program. Our Social Security disability denial attorneys hope that the expanded list will offer this opportunity to even more applicants who are desperately in need of these benefits.
Filing For Disability With A Compassionate Allowance
Compassionate Allowances disability claims are completed in the same way as a normal Social Security disability claim, though it can be helpful to note “compassionate allowance” at the top of your application. There is no special form or process.
While Compassionate Allowance disability claims applicants may receive a decision in weeks, rather than months or years, the length of the processing time depends on several factors, according to the Social Security Administration:
- How quickly they obtain medical evidence.
- Whether a medical exam is necessary to support the claim.
- Whether the claim is randomly selected for a quality assurance review for the decision.
To improve your chances of a disability claims approval, contact the Houston disability lawyers at The Law Offices Of M. Stanley Whitehead today.
