Compassionate Allowances

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Social Security has an obligation to provide benefits quickly to applicants whose medical conditions are so serious that their conditions obviously meet disability standards.
Compassionate allowances are a way of quickly identifying diseases and other medical conditions that invariably qualify under the Listing of Impairments based on minimal objective medical information. Compassionate allowances allow Social Security to quickly target the most obviously disabled individuals for allowances based on objective medical information that we can obtain quickly.

Commissioner Astrue has held four Compassionate Allowance public outreach hearings. The hearings were on rare diseases, cancers, traumatic brain injury (TBI) and stroke, and early-onset Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The Commissioner will hold the fifth public outreach hearing on schizophrenia in November 2009. The hearing will take place in San Francisco, California.

The initial list of Compassionate Allowance conditions was developed as a result of information received at public outreach hearings, public comment on an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, comments received from the Social Security and Disability Determination Service communities, and the counsel of medical and scientific experts. Also, we considered which conditions are most likely to meet our current definition of disability.

A modest 50 conditions were selected for the initiative's rollout. The list which follows will expand over time.