Your questions, answered "Which Covid related illnesses are eligible and recognized to qualify for government disability?" — Jeanne in Illinois Qualifying for disability benefits is a complex, sometimes laborious process. It's typically a tangle of paperwork and requires detailed documentation from your doctors. This is especially true for covid-19 patients because our understanding of the disease and its long-term consequences is still evolving. People suffering from "long covid" or other lasting effects from the disease can seek federal disability benefits through the Social Security Administration. With some narrow exceptions, these are generally the only government disability benefits available for people whose covid-19 symptoms make it impossible to continue their jobs. Andrew Kantor, a disability insurance lawyer, has represented many coronavirus patients in disability cases since the beginning of the pandemic. He walked me through what it takes to qualify for Social Security disability. First, you have to show that the disease has left you disabled for at least several months and that you're expecting to be disabled for another year. You also have to show that the disability prevents you from "gainful" employment, meaning you're unable to make more than about $1,300 a month. To Jeanne's original question, the Social Security Administration has a long list of medical conditions that it considers severe enough to keep people out of work, some of which could very well be triggered by a coronavirus infection. To back up your disability claim, you've got to present your medical records. These can include your original coronavirus test results, doctor's notes and lab work. Eventually, your request will go before an administrative law judge, who decides whether you get payments. "They'll pick apart every aspect of the evidence," Kantor said. "Once the decision is made, it's hard to overturn." If you've had a bad case of covid-19 that left you with severe lung scarring or left you on a ventilator for a significant amount of time, you might not have too much trouble qualifying, Kantor said. But long covid is a different story. Health experts are still trying to figure out what, exactly, this condition is and why it afflicts some people but not others. There's also no broad agreement about how to diagnose it. Rather, long covid usually manifests as a collection of subjective symptoms such as fatigue, cognitive impairment and pain that can range from mild to debilitating. These things are all difficult to test for — and easy for insurers to dispute. Over the summer, President Biden vowed "to make sure Americans with long covid, who have a disability, have access to the rights and resources that are due under the disability law." The Health and Human Services Department has also issued guidelines for recognizing long covid as a disability under the Americans With Disabilities Act. But Kantor says many people with long covid could struggle to qualify for insurance payments. Few doctors specialize in treating it. Diagnostic tests are expensive, hard to come by, and can often present inconclusive results. Some people don't even have access to their original coronavirus test showing they were infected in the first place. Judges can be hard to persuade. "It depends on a lot of factors outside your control," Kantor said. "You can only do so much about what your medical records say." | 
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