However, it's difficult to love the Social Security Administration (sorry). While I have met many wonderful, caring individuals within the Administration, the organization as a whole is this giant, faceless, uncaring behemoth of a bureaucracy with the sole purpose, it sometimes seems, of obfuscation and delay. This megalith is compounded by a vast latticework of an entire industry of medical professionals, attorneys, referral services, and so forth that leave claimants' heads spinning. There are so many moving parts. As an appellate attorney, I stand at the top of the structure of each individual case, looking down at all of the individually moving parts; and I am continually frustrated by what I perceive as a lack of understanding by any one of those individual parts about what any of the other parts is thinking or doing. Judges don't know why medical professionals do the things they do. Medical professionals are vastly confused as to why attorneys are asking the questions they're asking. Attorneys (and I'm very much including myself in this) want to (probably figuratively) slap adjudicators upside the head with understanding on a visceral level what claimants are going through. Claimants are confused by everything no matter how much everyone tries to explain it, because we're all explaining it from different angles and nothing makes sense from a lay perspective. Hence my burning desire to write this book. I'm tired of trying to explain myself to everyone under the sun on an individual basis. I want to just lay it all out for everyone. The idea started with wanting to talk to administrative law judges, because that's who I was specifically angry with while working on an appeal; but I think there's a broader application here. My hope is that if everyone in the whole mix understands a little better what all the other players in the disability game are thinking and doing, we can create a system that's more understanding and more just for the claimants who need just a little bit of extra help.
