What makes a good disability case in Missouri and Arkansas?

Hello. This is Springfield, Missouri and Harrison, Arkansas disability attorney Jason Krebs. In today’s video, we thought we’d answer the question, “What makes a good disability case in Missouri and Arkansas?”

Now, there are several factors that go into what makes a good case. First and foremost is, are you receiving current medical treatment, and is that treatment frequent? The fact that you had treatment 15 years ago for a problem is probably not going to be real relevant.

So what is important, for the vast majority of all medical conditions, frequent treatment that is going on currently. Going to the doctor once or twice a year, quite frankly, for most conditions just is not going to be enough, so it’s real important that you find treatment wherever you can. You need to apply for Health Net or Medicaid. Try to find sliding scale treaters, discounted treaters, charitable treaters, but it’s real important that you do that.

Second, are you over the age of 50? If you’re over the age of 50, the law presumes that you’re going to have a harder time adapting to different types of work. We’ve written a book about this that we’d be happy to send anybody, but especially if you’re over the age of 50, it’s very important that you talk to us before you file, because, in your application process, if you make mistakes, you can lose a lot of those benefits that you have under the Social Security regulations.

The third thing, and this is very important, is do you have a good work history? A lot of judges will tell you this is, after medical records, I mean, there’s a couple judges that say this is the first thing that they even look at, does the person claiming that they’re disabled have a good work history? Because it’s generally not a good financial decision to quit a good paying job to try to get Social Security Disability. And it’s difficult to do, so nobody would want to just quit working to go try to do this.

The fourth thing is, are your records consistent? Is everything consistent? You’re not telling your doctor you’re out gardening, and then you’re telling Social Security that you can’t do anything. That’s an inconsistency.

And then, finally, are you following your doctor’s advice? If you’re not following your doctors advice, if you won’t take the medication, you won’t do the physical therapy, you won’t follow the course of treatment, you won’t try to quit smoking if they tell you to quit smoking, you’re giving a judge or an examiner at the application level a reason to say, “Well, if this person did whatever the doctor was telling them, if they quit smoking, for instance, then they would heal up, and they could probably go back to work. Or if they did the physical therapy, they could, you know, go back to work.” So you want to be sure and follow the doctors orders the best that you can.

We do offer this book to anybody in Missouri or Arkansas, and we’d be happy to send it to you. We do offer free downloads at krebslawoffice.com that you can get immediately about how the process works, or give us a call. 417-883-5886 or 1-800-345-0535, and thanks for watching, and we wish you the best of luck.