VA finally changing for the better

Martin Schram: VA finally changing for the better
Published: Thursday, July 15, 2010


By Martin Schram
Scripps Howard

Viewed through the media's close-up lens, this week's bureaucratic mid-course correction at the Department of Veterans Affairs looked like just another slow-mo replay of a proverbial ocean liner turning, ever so slowly, on the high sea.

But viewed through a contextual big picture prism that has monitored the VA's decades of dysfunction and injustice for those who fight our battles, watching the change happen was like witnessing that same ocean liner flipping up like a teenager's skateboard executing a 180-degree reversal and plopping back into the sea, without even making a splash.

President Barack Obama's VA Secretary, Gen. Eric Shinseki, showed decades of top-level VA non-doers how easy it was to end decades of official inaction and unfairness. Just act. Which is to say, just care enough to act.

Shinseki issued a simple regulation declaring an end to the old rule that VA adjudicators used for decades to deny service-related benefits to tens of thousands of veterans who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. The old rule required that veterans had to provably identify a specific combat-related "stressor" incident that caused their PTSD.

But the reality of war, as psychiatrists have long maintained, is that there often isn't one single stressor that can be cited definitively as having caused a service member's PTSD — even though the affliction is real and requires treatment. House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Bob Filner, D-Calif., said Shinseki's action "will immediately help combat veterans get the help they need."
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VA finally changing for the better