Vietnam vet's widow is still waiting

Barbara Hollingsworth: Vietnam vet's widow is still waiting
By: Barbara Hollingsworth
Local Opinion Editor
May 11, 2010
If anybody deserves government health care, it's members of the armed services who literally put their lives on the line for their country. But the government's promise to take care of wounded and sick warriors has too often been an empty one. The Veterans Administration is notorious for red tape that keeps veterans from actually receiving the health benefits they were promised.

Here's just one example: For many years, the Navy provided sailors with government-subsidized cigarettes, which they could purchase for just five cents a carton. So seven months before Vietnam veteran Robert Krone died from end-stage lung disease on Aug. 20, 1998, the VA admitted that his emphysema "is not questioned as being service connected."

Eight months before his death -- and three weeks before the VA stopped accepting tobacco-related claims -- Krone got a call from a VA employee telling him that his tobacco claim had finally been approved and the check would be in the mail within 10 days. His wife, Bessie, who was caring for her terminally ill husband, dashed off a letter thanking former Montgomery Service Center manager Jack Downes and his staff.

Thirteen years later, the check has still not arrived.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: Vietnam vet's widow is still waiting