If you are over the age of 50 and applying for disability benefits with vision loss, the Social Security Administration (SSA) will use some additional factors to determine if you qualify.
Around 12 million people over the age of 40 have some sort of vision impairment. Within this group of 12 million people, 1 million people are blind, 3 million people suffer vision impairment after correction, and 8 million people have vision impairment because of uncorrected refractive error.
The SSA, when determining if your vision loss is serious enough to qualify for disability benefits, will look at your age, work history, educational level, and skills when deciding if you are able to work. The rules the SSA use in their calculations are called grid rules or medical vocational guidelines.
Grid Rules and Qualifying for Disability Benefits with Vision Loss Over 50
If your medical condition cannot match a Blue Book listing, the SSA uses grid rules to assess if your condition prevents you from undertaking any previous work and earning a living.
In other words, the SSA grid rules are used to evaluate your likelihood of being retrained for a different job if you can no longer do your current one. The criteria that are considered when using grid rules to assess your claim are:
- your age;
- educational level;
- current skills;
- if the skills can be transferred to a new occupation;
- the amount of physical work you are able to do.
These rules are designed to accommodate the fact that when you reach 50 years, your skills are less likely to be transferable to other kinds of employment and employers are less likely to employ you.
Medical Requirements for Vision Loss and Disability Benefits
To evaluate your visual loss, the SSA will ask for a report from an eye examination. This eye examination report will have to include the extent of your visual fields or the measurements of your best-corrected central visual acuity. If you have visual acuity or visual field loss, the SSA will ask for documentation explaining the cause of the vision loss.
How to Apply For Disability Benefits With Vision Loss Over 50
There are other requirements requested by the SSA when applying for disability benefits with vision loss. One of these requirements is the number of work credits you have accumulated throughout your working life.
If you are over 50, you will probably have accrued sufficient work credits to qualify for disability benefits. You will need to have worked for 7 years prior to experiencing your vision loss which means you will have accumulated 28 work credits.
Get Help With Your Vision Loss Disability Benefits Claim
It is never easy to win a claim for disability benefits. However, if you ask for help from a lawyer when filing your claim, you are far more likely to win your claim for disability benefits compared to if you filed your claim on your own. Said differently, people who do not seek out legal help when they file their disability claim, are more likely to get their claim denied. And getting a claim denied means that you would have to lodge an appeal.
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