Veterans Adversary

You can always tell when people have just begun to discover what our veterans go through as soon as they use the word "advocacy" when talking about the administration end of the VA. To hear of claims approved years after filing is nothing new. To hear claims denied that obviously should have been approved is nothing new either. None of this is new and that's the most infuriating part of all. Old timers like me will say the VA is more Veterans adversary than anything else until the claim is approved. Then they cannot do enough for the veterans needing to have their wounds treated. Getting from wound to treatment however, is like trying to be admitted into an exclusive club where membership is regarded as a privilege instead of a debt owed. We still have veterans trying to fight to have their Agent Orange claims approved and they are still trying to find out how many illnesses are actually attributable to AO. It's almost as if every claim filed is automatically suspected of being a false claim until they finally honor it.

While claims may be worthy of a total rating of 100%, they will approve 50% and then make the veteran fight for the increase instead of just awarding it fully in the first place and this only comes when there has been many years of fighting to have it honored. Ask the Vietnam veterans who came home fighting to have PTSD treated, which had been around since the beginning of time and they will tell you horror stories of getting claims approved.

The following story is just more of the same and will break your heart.


Main Entry: ad·ver·sary
Function: noun
Pronunciation: 'ad-v&(r)-"ser-e
Inflected Form(s): plural -sar·ies
: one that contends with, opposes, or resists : ENEMY
- ad·ver·sari·ness noun

VA or Veteran's advocacy?
Submitted by SHNS on Tue, 07/08/2008 - 17:11.
By MARTIN SCHRAM, Scripps Howard News Service editorials and opinion
When it comes to war and peace, we indeed are two Americas. One fights our nation's wars. The other pays those who go to war so the rest of us, our children and our grandchildren, won't have to.

At least, that is the way it is supposed to work. But a new book, written by this columnist, details scores of shameful ways in which our nation is failing the men and women who volunteer to fight our wars in distant lands -- and especially when they return home and discover they must battle anew, this time with their own government, just to get treatment and benefits earned long ago.

"Vets Under Siege: How America Deceives and Dishonors Those Who Fight Our Battles" (Thomas Dunne Books) chronicles more than a half century of tragic tales of veterans who have been wronged, stacks of dust-gathering studies of delays and denials, official studies followed by official inaction, as problems festered and veterans suffered.

There is the sad story of Gulf War Army veteran Bill Florey, who developed a rare cancer after being exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons that the U.S. Army mistakenly detonated at Khamisiyah, Iraq. A series of horrendous failures and treatment delays left him horribly disfigured and cancer-ridden.

Then the VA coldly rejected his modest request for service-related disability compensation -- without even checking its own data that would have proven the merits of his request. The VA case adjudicator simply asserted in adversarial language that it was "less likely than not" that Florey's chemical exposure caused his cancer. Florey died of his brain cancer on New Year's Day, 2005. Six months later, a government study discovered that actually it was twice as likely as not that Florey's chemical weapons contamination caused the cancer that killed him.

There is the tale of Eric Adams, a military policeman from Tampa, Fla., who served in both the Gulf War and the Iraq War. His job in Iraq included leading truck convoys through dangerous territory. A roadside bomb exploded in front of his convoy and when he braked, a truck smashed into the rear of his rented van, which had no seat belts. Back home, a VA adjudicator initially felt there was inadequate proof that his service even constituted combat conditions!
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