AARP Hawaii announced Thursday in a press conference that the Social Security Administration has given the nonprofit an assurance that the planned April 14 elimination of customer service over the phone will no longer be enforced.
The decision was made following outcry from millions of Social Security beneficiaries and AARP members.
“Customer service in itself is a Social Security benefit,” said AARP Hawaii State Director Keali’i Lopez. “This is a win for older Americans.”
The announcement one month ago that Social Security would no longer field customer service phone calls was part of the agency’s restructuring under the Department of Government Efficiency led by billionaire Elon Musk.
DOGE had asserted that stopping phone access for those seeking benefits would eliminate fraud being perpetrated over the phone, though the department failed to provide proof that such fraud was occurring at a worrying level, according to the New York Times.
“One in four older adults have never gone online,” said Lopez, explaining that Social Security’s announcement that people wanting to apply for or make changes to benefits would need to do so in person or online created widespread confusion and concern.
Lopez also said the Social Security website has been failing to provide beneficiaries with the support they need, citing five website crashes throughout the month of March and an entire day of the website being down on March 31.
According to AARP’s statistics from 2022, more than 1 in 5 Hawaii residents — 282,623 people — receive benefits from Social Security, injecting more than $4.8 billion into the state’s economy every year.
An AARP member who exemplified the downside to ending customer service over the phone was also present during the Thursday press conference.
The retiree, Cathy Nelson, shared her arduous experience of trying to apply for Medicare, which ended up taking two months of nonstop phone calls to Social Security that were met with anxiety-inducing misdirections and nonanswers that almost left her without health care.
Nelson said she and her husband both decided to retire in December 2024 and together went online to apply for Medicare through Social Security to ensure they’d have coverage by the time the health care they’d been receiving through work expired in March. By January, Nelson’s husband had received Medicare, but she had not.
Nelson said she “can’t even count the attempts” she made to speak to someone at Social Security about her Medicare application, saying she was consistently met with wait times between 90 and 120 minutes. She ultimately learned through trial and error that the only way to speak to a person was to begin her efforts as early as 4:30 a.m.
Of the four customer service representatives she spoke to in January and February, Nelson said the first three all told her she “just had to wait” and see if her application was approved.
Nelson was never given a reason why her husband’s online application was approved and hers was not, with the only vague answers being that hers was “a different case” and that her online application was “held up in California,” she said.
As the March 1 deadline for her health coverage quickly approached, Nelson reached a fourth representative, who became the first representative to tell her she needed to call her local office, the phone number of which is not available online. That fourth representative gave Nelson the unlisted number, which led to one more 15-minute hold and a conversation with a “pleasant” representative at her local office, and she finally received her Medicare in the final days of February.
“I had to go through this whole experience of being worried that I would lose coverage,” Nelson said, adding that she believes her persistence is the only reason she ended up with the benefits she deserved.
“No one should have to go through this experience,” she said. “We worked all through our lives. We earned our Social Security and Medicare benefits, and the customer service really needs to be improved.”
Lopez said that following the controversial announcement from Social Security last month, 2 million AARP members lobbied Congress to keep the phone banks open, along with over a million other Americans who implored the Social Security Administration directly.
Lopez said AARP is “as comfortable as one can be in this rapidly changing situation” with the assurance they were given about phone access remaining available, and that they’d continue to monitor how the Social Security Administration deals with their members because “the quality of the customer service and the wait times need improvement.”
“We’re urging Social Security to be very deliberate in their approach as they propose changes, because we’re not certain there aren’t going to be future changes,” Lopez said.
Lopez said AARP members who want to keep up with the latest policies regarding Social Security benefits can learn more by visiting aarp.org/socialsecurity.
Email Kyveli Diener at kdiener@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
