Iraq war vets losing the battle with bureaucracy over disability payments

Iraq war vets losing the battle with bureaucracy over disability payments
by Alysia Patterson
Dec 06, 2007

Imagine you went to war in Iraq. Now imagine you were injured in combat. Sound bad enough? The story gets worse. After returning home, your injuries prevent you from resuming civilian work full time, or at all, and your application for disability benefits appears to be gathering dust at the Department of Veteran Affairs.

It’s a story heard over and over again by Tyrone Ballesteros, office manager at the Los Angeles-based non-profit National Veterans Foundation (NVF), founded 33 years ago by a Vietnam veteran to assist other veterans needing help.

“We have been inundated with calls… I have e-mails and e-mails asking if we can help. We don’t have the funding,” Ballesteros said.

Ballesteros estimates he gets 100 calls a week from war veterans in financial trouble as a result of service-connected health problems that prevent them from working and saddle them with enormous medical bills. Many have families to support and are facing eviction from their homes.

“There’s always been a steady flow of veterans needing financial assistance, but the real trend where families have been starting to be evicted, we started seeing it about two- to two-and-a-half years ago,” Ballesteros said.
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http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=72735
Oh how I wish I could say it was just the newest generation of wounded veterans needing help right now, but I would be lying. It is not just the men and women who have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's the Gulf War veterans and the Vietnam veterans, and the Korean veterans and even the remaining WWII veterans. All of them needing to have their wounds taken care of. So little had been done to address the problems the older veterans face, that it is nearly impossible to catch up to the needs of the new guys on the block.

Throughout the 80's and especially the 90's, I wrote letters until my fingers were calloused, sending them to newspapers and Senators, hoping to get someone to pay enough attention to what they were going through. Reporters didn't care back then because they thought it was just too old of a story to bother to cover. Once in a while there would be an editorial popping up but for the most part, the veterans were ignored.

In the 90's the Congress allowed the VA to collect money from veterans who "made too much money" and charged them for their healthcare. They were allowed to bill insurance companies and veterans for any "non-service connected treatment" no matter if it was in fact caused by their service or not. If they VA didn't acknowledge the claim and accept responsibility to cover it, then to them, they could collect for whatever they did to treat it.

When my husband finally managed to turn to the VA to have his PTSD treated, the doctors managed to understand it was PTSD caused by Vietnam, but the bureaucratic end denied his claims. We were charged for his care no matter what we did to prove we couldn't afford it. Our health insurance company said because of the diagnosis from the VA doctors, they no longer had to cover any mental health treatments they had been covering in the past. They said it was the VA's responsibility. Our tax refunds were taken by the VA to collect for the treatment he would not have need had he not gone to Vietnam. Imagine that!

It took six years to have his claim approved. We were told by many people, "well at least he got the money back" while in fact we did get most of it back, but in between the time he filed his claim and the time it was finally approved, we had to have several forbearance agreements with the mortgage company, our credit was ruined and the extra stress made his PTSD worse. He gave up wanting to fight to have his claim approved, gave up wanting them to help him and gave up on himself. It nearly killed him.

For the new generation of veterans, they face the same torture delivered by a system under-funded and understaffed. They face income problems as well as the stresses of having been wounded and knowing they were wounded for the sake of the same country torturing them. Can you think of how you would feel if it happened to you? I don't have to think of it because I know it all first hand and it is one of the darkest secrets this nation has held. No wounded veteran should have to go through any of this and while the administration and the Congress love to talk about how much they are doing or planning to do for the veterans, it is too little and too late. With the backlog of claims there are men and women who served this nation and their families suffering. Congress needs to stop talking and start doing as if this was the most important thing they had to do, because for our veterans, it is a matter of life or death.kc