Deadlines, Dismissals and Disabled Veterans

The following is a great example of what is really going on. In the cases of veterans with "mental" problems, the vast majority are harder than hell to get to seek help. Then there is the issue of expecting them to be able to fight the system to have their claims approved at the same time they are expected to make doctors appointments and show up for the testing that has to be done. Should they make a mistake on their claim because they cannot really understand it, then their claim gets turned down. They have to file an appeal within a certain amount of time and should they dare not do it in time, they lose retroactive pay if and when their claim is finally approved.

Some veterans have a family member helping them, standing by them and doing the Lord's work taking care of them. (Most of the time it takes a Saint to do all that comes with this.) That is in a perfect world however, the majority of the veterans have no one to fight for them. Families surely love them but they have no ability to understand what's going on and they trust the system, so they assume the VA is right and their family member is looking for excuses to act the way they do. These rules are abusive to the veterans.

“It is the veteran who incurs the most devastating service-connected injury who will often be the least able to comply with rigidly enforced filing deadlines,” Judge Mayer wrote.

Deadlines, Dismissals and Disabled Veterans
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: April 5, 2010
Three years ago, the Supreme Court said there are some filing deadlines so rigid that no excuse for missing them counts, even if the tardiness was caused by the erroneous instructions from a federal judge.

The vote was 5 to 4, and Justice David H. Souter wrote a furious dissent. “It is intolerable for the judicial system to treat people this way,” he said, adding that he feared the decision would have pernicious consequences.

He had no idea.

The court’s decision concerned a convicted murderer who had beaten a man to death. But now it is being applied to bar claims from disabled veterans who fumble filing procedures and miss deadlines in seeking help from the government. The upshot, according to a dissent in December from three judges on a federal appeals court in Washington, is “a Kafkaesque adjudicatory process in which those veterans who are most deserving of service-connected benefits will frequently be those least likely to obtain them.”

The Supreme Court will soon consider whether to hear an appeal from David L. Henderson, who was discharged from the military in 1952 after receiving a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. He sought additional government help for his condition in 2001, and he was turned down in 2004.

read more here

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/us/06bar.html