Veterans administration is a mess in helping war veterans

 

[caption id="attachment_6066" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="US Army soldiers"][/caption]

Editor - War is hell, but getting help from the Veterans Administration after war can be hell too, according to some veterans who have had to wait many months to get help they need.

 

Federal news tells the story about Retired Marine Sgt. Michael Madden of Prescott, Ariz., who was shot in the head while in Vietnam.  He ended up in a wheelchair after spinal cord surgery.

After that things got complicated.  Madden spent the next ten years fighting the bureacracy for adaptive equipment he needed.  It was what was described as a maze of denials and legal complications.

Madden spent more than $6,000 of his own funds.  He says,"I find it kind of ironic that the VA tells me that I can't drive without the equipment, and then tells me that I can't have the equipment for a service-connected disability." 

Madden is not alone in struggling with the bureaucracy of the Veterans Benefits Administration, the VA sub-agency that handles veterans' disability claims. Seeing the challenges VBA faces, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki has made fighting inefficiency a top priority.

Shinseki's main target is a backlog of claims. As of June 8, a total of 186,777 claims — 35.8 percent of total pending claims — were still unprocessed after VBA's new 125-day processing goal, according to Veterans Affairs.

But some veterans' groups. Joe Violante, national legislative director of Disabled American Veterans, say the problem is more than a backlog but a bad system, with a high number of errors in processing claims.  Audits have shown those errors as high as 20 percent to 30 percent. 

Violante said the culture at VBA emphasizes churning out claims rather than getting them right.

"There is no incentive to do the case right the first time," Violante said. "Right now, it is basically an assembly-line process."

To better serve veterans, Shinseki has set the ambitious goal of an accuracy rate of 98 percent by 2015, but American Legion spokesman Ian C. De Planque said he would like to see that figure higher.

"When [the VA is] processing 1 million claims, 1 percent error is 10,000 veterans," De Planque said at a recent House subcommittee hearing. "That is completely unacceptable."

Shinseki has drafted a bill, the Veteran Benefit Programs Improvement Act of 2010, that is intended to improve efficiency of benefit programs, and Congress is being asked to support a bill that will simplify the appeals process.

Peg Kearns, a counselor with veterans in Arizona, has worked with disabled veterans for a number of years and has seen six month delays and more in processing vocational rehabilitation claims and getting veterans needed counseling for assessment and return to work after injuries.  She too says, "There are  serious problems and delays at the Veterans Administration that can impact rehabilitation and progress of the veterans re-entry into the civilian community.  I have seen veterans wait many months to get help and are still waiting.".

There's also no guarantee the proposed bill will improve things much, and in fact Jason Perry has been quoted by the Federal Times as saying the bill will actually make appeals more difficult.

Madden hopes new legislation to make claims move faster will help, as a new bill introduced by Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz., adds "loss of use" of a limb, rather than just loss of a limb, into the VA's disability code for how disability is defined.  The fact Madden still had limited use of his legs had been used to deny his claims for years.

Based upon these experiences, for disabled veterans, including those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, the road ahead is still rough." Madden and Violante state.

"[VBA] is a mess," Violante concludes.