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How long will you wait for Social Security help? Why it's anybody's guess.
How long will you wait for Social Security help? Why it's anybody's guess.

Yahoo

time05-07-2025

  • Politics
  • Yahoo

How long will you wait for Social Security help? Why it's anybody's guess.

Members of Congress and advocates say the Social Security Administration is providing the public with misleading information about how long it will take to resolve their problems. Over the last several weeks, the agency has stopped making public 34 real-time performance metrics about things like how long they will have to wait to reach a live person on the phone, and how long applications for new senior benefits or social security benefits take to be approved. The metrics have been used for years to show how time-consuming it can be to reach a live person at certain locations or through the national 1-800 number, and as an accountability measure for the agency. Instead the webpage now emphasizes how quickly problems can be resolved online, and says the "average speed of answer," which excludes callback wait time, is 19.2 minutes. USA TODAY reporters called Social Security's 1-800 line multiple times over several days and found the wait times to be consistently over an hour. Multiple times they did not reach a live person before the line disconnected with no warning. Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano told members of Congress June 25 that three out of four people who call that 1-800 number use a call-back feature so they are not waiting on the phone. He said he took the wait time metric off the website because he thought it kept people from calling. "If you show that you got an hour and a half wait time, well people are going to be discouraged and not call," he said. When California Rep. Judy Chu asked him to reinstate the metrics so members of Congress and the public can have an accurate barometer of the agency's performance, Bisignano avoided answering the question until Chu's time to ask questions expired. "How can you know how the Social Security Administration is doing with regard to answering calls or processing benefit applications unless you have these metrics? You have to compare them over time so it is shocking that they would just remove that data if they are so confident about all of these metrics that he was talking about," Chu told USA TODAY after the hearing. Social Security staffing was already at a ten-year low when President Donald Trump took office in January. Meanwhile, the number of new applicants has skyrocketed as Baby Boomers retire. That meant wait times to reach employees by phone, email or in person were already high when the Trump administration began to slash staff amidst efforts to downsize government. In February, the agency announced plans to cut 7,000 of the agency's 57,000 employees ‒ more than 10% of staff ‒ in response to President Trump's executive orders. At least 3,000 employees have already accepted buyout agreements. Average wait times to reach a live person by crept up to 90 minutes by early May. A May 22 screenshot of the Social Security website's live metrics, preserved by the Internet Archive, shows that call wait time was 1 hour and 46 minutes, and call back wait time was 1 hour and 44 minutes. It also showed the number of people on hold and current number waiting for a call back. Along with the 1-800 wait time information, the Social Security metrics page also included processing time for retirement, survivor, and Medicare benefits. For disability benefit applicants, which can take more than a year to get a decision, there was information about processing time, reconsideration time, and appeals adjudication time. The average speed of answer was shown as 20.3 minutes, based on an average of monthly data from the last year. That speed is similar to data the agency previously made public. Then, on June 6 the comprehensive dashboard showing live metrics was removed from the Social Security Administration's website, showing as 'under maintenance' until June 16. When the dashboard page went back up on June 16, it no longer included the live call wait time data or information on the number of people on hold or waiting for a call back, instead just listing the average speed of answer excluding call-back wait time as 19.2 minutes over the last year. "We are updating our performance metrics to reflect the real-life experiences of the people we serve and highlight the fastest ways our customers can get service," Social Security spokesperson Stephen McGraw said in a statement to USA TODAY. "It is critical that the agency measures what matters most to improve customer service while providing all Americans the information they need to select the service channel that works best for them." Concerned that the information now available on the website didn't match what her staff was hearing from constituents, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren's staff began conducting its own test of the 1-800 number, making hourly phone calls from June 12 through June 20. Warren leads Senate Democrat's Social Security War Room, which seeks to draw attention to changes the Trump administration is making to Social Security. In a letter Warren sent to Bisignano late on June 25, she called the results of her office survey "deeply troubling." Compared to the number available online, wait times averaged nearly an hour and 45 minutes and often exceeded three hours. Data from the office survey showed that in 50 calls, more than 50% were never answered by a human. The majority ended when the caller was placed on hold and then the call dropped. Of calls that were answered, 32% had wait times exceeding two hours. The average wait time was 102 minutes. "These delays are unacceptable ‒ and made even worse by your misleading claims that service has actually improved under your watch," she wrote in her letter, shared first with USA TODAY. "Service disruptions and barriers make it harder for beneficiaries to receive their Social Security benefits ‒ payments which are the primary source of income for more than half of America's seniors." More: Social security employees warn of delays: What the new priorities means for your benefits Warren accused Bisignano of lying about improving wait times at the agency in a separate statement to USA TODAY. "Donald Trump and DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) took a chainsaw to Social Security, leaving Americans waiting hours just to get help ‒ and that's if their call is answered at all. Instead of owning that failure, Commissioner Bisignano and his team are trying to cover it up," she said. Taking data offline makes it harder for Congress and Americans to know what the agency is doing, said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an advocacy group that wants to expand the agency. The information that is now on the website is an "apples to oranges" comparison to what was previously available, she said. Along with the call wait time, there is less detail on how long it will take for new applications to be processed and for disability claims to be appealed, and less about how wait times vary geographically, she said. There is "zero" evidence that wait times have suddenly gone down, she said. "It would defy logic for it to get easier given how they've hollowed out the agency, every part of the agency." Altman said the agency's lack of transparency about wait times raises questions about other information they are making public. And, if the website says the average hold is 19.2 minutes, but they are on the phone for much longer, it is hard for Americans to tell how widespread the problem is, Altman said. "The American people are getting frustrated, but they don't know if it is just happening to them," she said. More: Social Security wait times were already long under Biden. They're even longer under Trump. Jen Burdick, supervising attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, said they haven't seen a reduction in call times. "Social Security attorneys and paralegals from our office call SSA dozens of times every day. We are uniformly finding that we can't get placed into the queue, either because of system outages, phone disconnects, or AI chatbot issues. When we do get put into the queue, wait times seem to be up from last year ‒ sometimes more than an hour. More importantly, we're having a hard time resolving issues because of SSA training issues when we do reach staff," she told USA TODAY. We want to hear from people affected by or who have knowledge of the Trump administration's efforts to reshape the government, including actions by DOGE. Know something others should? Reach out at swire@ or Signal at sarahdwire.71 This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How long will you wait for Social Security help? Anybody's guess.

Almost 10,000 extra elective surgeries delivered by outsourcing privately, government says
Almost 10,000 extra elective surgeries delivered by outsourcing privately, government says

RNZ News

time11-06-2025

  • Health
  • RNZ News

Almost 10,000 extra elective surgeries delivered by outsourcing privately, government says

Health Minister Simeon Brown says the government has delivered 9696 extra elective surgeries. Photo: Calvin Samuel / RNZ The government says it has delivered 9696 extra elective surgeries, putting it on track to reach its end-of-June target of more than 10,579 operations. Health Minister Simeon Brown said the procedures were completed by 11 May and most, 8631, were outsourced to private hospitals . He said they included hip and knee replacements, cataract and hernia surgeries and tonsillectomies. Brown said the programme targeted patients who faced the longest delays, with almost 60 percent having waited over four months for their surgery. "Our goal is clear - 95 percent of patients receiving elective treatment within four months by 2030," he said. "We are focused on increasing delivery of elective treatments - across both public and private hospitals - to reduce wait times for Kiwis needing procedures like hip replacements or cataract surgery." But the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists warned outsourcing would worsen medical workforce shortages and could create a two-tier health system. The chair of the college's New Zealand national committee, Graham Roper, said trainee anaesthetists needed access to the surgeries that were outsourced. "If the trainees don't get what we call a volume of practise, so a number of cases in particular areas of work, then their training gets extended until they reach that number. So potentially the training will become longer and that will make it less attractive for junior doctors that are looking for a career," he said. "It's a threat to our training scheme if we get a reputation for having to stretch out that training," he said. Roper said the government had said it was talking to private hospitals about training, but it was not clear what agreements had been made. "We do get regular reports from our training group which are keeping a very close eye on trainees and whether they're getting the experience that they need. To date, we haven't had anyone in a situation whereby they're not meeting [requirements], but we feel we're pretty close to it," he said. Any complications resulting from private hospital surgeries were transferred to the public system, Roper said, increasing the burden on public hospitals and making them less desirable places to work. "To look at a model that's going to have these unintended consequences of increasing burden without good consultation and planning is just a recipe for worsening the conditions in the public system," he said. Roper said Māori and Pacific people and people in rural areas were unlikely to benefit from the increased use of the private sector. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.

Patients in N.B. face even longer waits in emergency rooms, report says
Patients in N.B. face even longer waits in emergency rooms, report says

CBC

time04-06-2025

  • Health
  • CBC

Patients in N.B. face even longer waits in emergency rooms, report says

New Brunswick emergency room patients faced a typical wait of about four and a half hours in 2024-25, according to a new report by an independent public-policy think-tank. That median wait — the length of stay from arrival in the ER to discharge or admission to hospital — increased by nearly half an hour over the previous fiscal year and by nearly an hour over 2020-21, the report by the Montreal Economic Institute, known as MEI, says. "The situation is getting worse," said MEI economist Emmanuelle Faubert, who wrote the report, titled Canadians Are Waiting Too Long in the Emergency Room. "And that is a trend that we see all across Canada." Although the report indicates median waits last year ranged from two hours and 45 minutes in Newfoundland and Labrador to five hours and 23 minutes in Quebec, comparisons between provinces should be taken with a grain of salt, Faubert said, because of potential differences in the way they each collect and measure their data. Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan aren't included in the report because they did not provide the requested data, she said. WATCH | 'All across Canada, the situation is getting worse,' says report's author: Stuck in the ER? Wait times are up across N.B., report says 3 hours ago Duration 2:37 A report from the Montreal Economic Institute, a think tank in Quebec, found New Brunswick emergency room patients faced a typical wait of about four and a half hours in 2024-25. That's nearly an hour over 2020-21 wait times. The New Brunswick median wait is based on about 490,000 patient visits to Horizon and Vitalité emergency rooms and represents the middle value of the lengths of stay of all patients, meaning half waited longer, and half less, Faubert said. The median is considered a better statistical measure than the average, she said, because it's less affected by extreme cases and more likely to represent a typical visit. Faubert attributes the increase in waits to a shortage of primary-care providers and a lack of options to deal with minor emergencies. France model could help address 'missing middle' She encourages the New Brunswick government and other provinces to adopt a new model being used in France — immediate medical care centres. These independent clinics, which are generally privately owned by the health-care providers who operate them, specialize in handling non-life-threatening emergencies, such as bone fractures, wounds that require stitches, and infections, Faubert said. This helps reduce the pressure on ERs and fill the "missing middle" when it comes to urgent care. "They fall into a sphere where there's less bureaucracy, there's more place for innovation and less having to ask the government for anything anytime they want to implement a new strategy," she said. "That is what is currently happening in the public sector." Privatization 'a terrible recommendation' Dr. Fraser Mackay, an emergency physician in Saint John and chair of the rural, remote and small urban section of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, calls that "a terrible recommendation." "It's an ideological approach that promotes privatization of health care, siloing of health care, lack of accountability and basically taking us in the wrong direction." Mackay said there's no denying wait times are getting worse across New Brunswick and across the country, and are "terrible almost everywhere you go," particularly in bigger centres. He supports making that data public and making citizens aware. But the MEI report is "impressively off the mark" in terms of its conclusions and advice, he said. Mackay contends the main driver of emergency department waits "has nothing to do with" access to primary care or the acuity of the patients in the waiting room. "People with low acuity problems, I can see them really fast, but I need a place to see them … and available nursing staff," he said. The problem is ER patients who have been admitted but can't be moved to a hospital unit because no beds are available, so they're tying up ER space and resources, said Mackay. "It is an outflow problem … not an inflow problem." While the French model might sound good on paper, it doesn't recognize our finite pool of doctors and nurses either, Mackay said. "If you're staffing that clinic, where are you getting that staff from? Because we have trouble staffing our emergency departments as it is." Hybrid system best, author says Faubert could not immediately say what would be required to set up such centres in New Brunswick or how much it might cost, but did say patient services should still be covered by provincial health insurance. "Of course if we plan to turn this into a reality, we need to dig deeper into how it would work," she said. "But as a concept it has shown that it does work in France, and we think that if it can be adapted to the Canadian environment then it could be beneficial." Asked if she and MEI are pro-privatization, Faubert did not answer directly. "The thing is, we've been putting more money into health care, more and more every year, and what we're seeing is that it's not working," she said. "When we look elsewhere in the world, in some of the most efficient countries with the best health-care systems, essentially all of them are hybrid. "They do have a public system, but they also have private, independent providers, and they work together to make sure that the population gets access to the care that they need." Health department works to expand collaborative teams The Department of Health is still reviewing the report but does "recognize that some New Brunswickers have struggled to access services in a timely fashion at hospital emergency departments," said spokesperson Sean Hatchard. It's working with Horizon and Vitalité, who are responsible for day-to-day operations, to make improvements, including filling health-care positions as quickly as possible, he said in an emailed statement. It's also working to expand family health teams across the province to improve access to primary care and ease pressure on the ERs, Hatchard said. While Premier Susan Holt pledged in last year's election campaign to open 30 collaborative care clinics over four years, existing community care clinics that adopt the family health team model are now being counted among them. So far this year, teams have been announced in Fredericton, Lamèque, Tantramar, and Carleton North. Some other initiatives that divert patients away from ERs include NB Health Link, eVisitNB, and expanded roles for pharmacists, who can now prescribe for 12 common ailments, Hatchard said. Vitalité works on patient flow Improving access to primary health care and optimizing patient flow are two of Vitalité's strategic priorities, according to an unsigned emailed statement. Since 2022, Vitalité has established 26 local family health teams, enabling the regional health authority to care for nearly 32,000 additional patients and divert some non-urgent demand away from hospitals, the unidentified spokesperson said. Vitalité has also implemented a number of initiatives to expedite discharges and reduce occupancy rates, which in turn shorten emergency department stays by increasing access to acute care beds, according to the email. These include discharge planning upon admission and the integration of tracking tools. Horizon did not provide comments Tuesday. More New Brunswick numbers Horizon hospital patients faced the longest ER waits, with a median length of stay of four hours and 51 minutes, compared to three hours and 21 minutes at Vitalité hospitals, the MEI report says. Horizon's Moncton Hospital had the longest median ER visits in the province at seven hours and 22 minutes, followed by the Saint John Regional Hospital at six hours and 37 minutes, and the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital at six hours and 25 minutes. The Sussex Health Centre, which lost its overnight ER services in 2022, was a clear outlier, with a median wait of only 18 minutes, according to the report. Among Vitalité hospitals, Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Joseph de Saint-Quentin patients had the shortest median wait, at one hour and thirty-five minutes, while patients at the Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre in Moncton had the longest at five hours and 54 minutes.

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