Medical Retirement Benefits for US Government Employees: The Maverick

It is sometimes referred to as an unbranded animal, often a calf or yearling; the fact that it is unbranded, implies that it doesn’t belong to a particular stock; ownership is not established; and secondary meanings include an inference of being unorthodox or different.  One assumes that the maverick acts differently by choice; but without knowing the history of one’s life, such an assumption may be betrayed by an opposite set of facts:  that the “others” shunned and excluded, resulting in the unavoidable choice of being the loner.

Medical conditions seem to do that to groups.  Human empathy is supposed to, by myth and self-serving accolades, bring people together for support and community; but the opposite is more often true than not; that a change in the stock spreads rumors of a plague, making nervous the healthy components.  Or perhaps it is merely that strangeness cannot be dealt with, and the reactive response in general is to shun, isolate, and act as if the difference did not exist.

For Federal and Postal Workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition prevents one from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, the sense that one has become a maverick among others is nothing new.  Whether because of the medical condition, or because of the reaction by one’s agency or Postal Service, being unorthodox or tagged as no longer part of the identifiable herd, is part of everyday life.

Filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether under FERS or CSRS, is merely the natural next step in being tagged as a maverick; for, having already been deemed different, it is time to step outside of the orthodoxy of one’s agency or the U.S. Postal Service, and set out for one’s future by creating a path hitherto untraveled.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

Federal Worker Disability Retirement: Understanding the Other

Leo Strauss was a noted philosopher who taught for many years at the University of Chicago.  His works have a common thread throughout:  to understand the works of others as the “others” understood themselves, and not from a modern perspective.

In that sense, he taught that the historicism of individual philosophers was important in attaining a proper knowledge of one’s past; and while there are transcendent principles evident throughout various systems and methodologies of philosophers, how each understood in the context of one’s historical period was the proper manner to approach the history of philosophy and political thought.

Such an approach teaches us to neutralize the arrogant and condescending perspective of the modern mind — that the “present” way of thinking is superior to all that has occurred previously, and that somehow we can judge our past as merely a continuing contribution to our current mode of thinking.

By analogy, one can relate to Strauss’ approach in terms of pain and present circumstances.  How does one convey to a healthy person the human condition of one who suffers from a medical condition?  Without a proper approach, if the third person merely looks at it from their “point of view”, then cynicism and doubt would naturally prevail.

One can argue, of course, that the reviewer at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management who analyzes each Federal Disability Retirement case will merely apply an algorithm of “the law”, and thereby transcend one’s personal viewpoint.  But that was and continues to remain Strauss’ point:  one must be trained in how to view the “other’s” perspective by extinguishing personal influences and viewpoints.  Only in this way can one achieve a level of objectivity in analyzing a case, and to bypass the historicity of one’s limited world.

For the Federal or Postal employee contemplating filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether under FERS or CSRS, it is always important to be able to touch the soul of that person to whom one is applying.  That faceless bureaucrat who will be reviewing one’s application — whether properly trained or not — the key will be to choose the right approach, depending upon one’s unique circumstance, and by describing a compelling case through persuasion and legal argumentation, and thereby forcing the transcendence of the limited perspective of the reviewer.  Thus would Strauss have been proud.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

OPM Disability Retirement: The Autobiographical Slice

Every story is unique.  Uniqueness is a characteristic of each human life story, precisely because there are no two sets of facts which are identical.  Assuming that parallel universes do not exist, the autobiographical details of each human story defines a distinctive and identifiably different set of sequential life experiences as to any given human narrative.  But uniqueness does not mean relevance, or even imply significance or of great interest.  The reason why the minutiae of the personal lives of the “rich and famous” are of such titillating interest is not because they are unique; rather, it is because they are distinctively different — in a voyeuristic sort of way.

In preparing a Federal Disability Retirement application for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the autobiographical details should, for the most part, be left out.  As this author has often referenced Anton Chekhov’s famous short story entitled, “Grief”, it is a given that everyone wants to share the human narrative of one’s story, and more than that, to share it abundantly.  But it is the slice of one’s life, in a meaningful, relevant manner, which must be streamlined in order to ensure relevance and a focused audience — the very attention of the caseworker from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which must be provided.

Federal Disability Retirement is a specific submission; it is not the time to convey the unique story of one’s autobiographical details beginning in years past; rather, it must awaken the empathy of the reader — OPM — by the very hypnotic force of the medical conditions as they relate to one’s inability to perform the essential elements of one’s job.

The human story in a Federal Disability Retirement case must be a compelling one, indeed, but within the context of uniqueness distinctively different from the boring autobiographies of mundane stars.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire