1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

SSA in person requirement will be devastating I’ve just learned that I have until March 31 to update my parents’ address over the phone before I have to take them in person to a local office to do this. We recently moved my parents, because they needed more care (my 90 year old father is blind, my 86 year old mother has advanced Parkinson’s), and I didn’t know they needed to update their address with SSA. As a result, they missed paying their Medicare part B and have lost coverage. As part of fixing that, I’m trying to update their address while I’m on medical leave for breast cancer. I’m trying to work through SSA’s phone tree, but if I can’t get it fixed in 12 days, I will have to wheel my mother into a social security office in between my cancer treatments and wait with her in a wheelchair. I can’t help her to the bathroom for a while due to the lumpectomy I just had, so she while sit in her wheelchair and pee through her depends while we wait the hours it takes to possibly speak to a human. This is insane. The government needs to increase, not decrease access to SSA. This includes allowing us to do simple things like updating an address online. Major financial institutions can do this, so why can’t DOGE use its vaunted tech expertise to implement that? I may have to put off a return to work to help my parents with changing their address while, which is beyond comprehension. SSA needs to provide more options for its services, not make them more difficult for the already vulnerable to reach.