HIV and Disability Law

The idea of furloughing state employees to balance budgets is spreading. This could spell disaster for the states’ Disability Determinations Services offices — these are the offices in each state where initial and reconsideration decisions are made on Social Security disability and SSI disability claims.
For the past year or two, the backlogs [...]

Today’s Los Angeles Times notes that “Barack Obama makes no small plans.
“Until last week, there was still skepticism in Washington that the president really meant to tackle all of his big domestic goals at the same time: healthcare reform, alternative energy, education projects, plus a tax hike on the well-off to pay for it [...]

GlaxoSmithKline’s recent announcement that it plans to reduce drug prices in some low-income countries and share information on patented drugs is “welcome” but not a “radical departure from standard fare,” Tido von Schoen-Angerer — director of Medecins Sans Frontieres’ Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines — writes in an opinion piece in London’s Guardian. According [...]

Many people living with AIDS are thriving under the care of their expert physicians. As medicine evolves and specialists gain more experience, the profoundly disabled patient becomes more rare. Still, every person processes the infection and the medications individually, and some do reach the point of inability to work. We see this [...]

Overpayment notices arrive like incoming missiles, shattering the fragile stasis of the lives of disability paymnet recipients. Frequently there are errors in the notices, many caused by Social Secuity itself. A common situation is one where the client has reported income and Social Security has failed to record it. Often a skilled advocate can challenge [...]

Skin infections caused by drug-resistant staph are more common and more likely to recur in people living with HIV, and doubly impact people with HIV and AIDS. In Social Security (SSA) SSA law, it can be argued that these are bacterial infections, and thus Opportunistic Infections which qualify an applicant for bnenefits. [...]