Veterans Wait for Benefits as Claims Pile Up

Veterans Wait for Benefits as Claims Pile Up
New York Times
By JAMES DAO
Published: September 27, 2012

For Dennis Selsky, a Vietnam-era veteran with multiple sclerosis, it was lost documents. It seemed that every time he sent records to the Department of Veterans Affairs, they disappeared into the ether.

For Mickel Withers, an Iraq war veteran with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, it was a bureaucratic foul-up. The department said he received National Guard pay in 2009, though he had left the Guard the previous year, and cut his disability compensation by $3,000. He filed for bankruptcy to protect himself from creditors.

For Doris Hink, the widow of a World War II veteran, it was the waiting. The department took nearly two years to process her claim for a survivor’s pension, forcing her daughter to take $12,000 from savings to pay nursing home bills.

These are the faces of what has become known as “the backlog”: the crushing inventory of claims for disability, pension and educational benefits that has overwhelmed the Department of Veterans Affairs. For hundreds of thousands of veterans, the result has been long waits for decisions, mishandled documents, confusing communications and infuriating mistakes in their claims.

Numbers tell the story. Last year, veterans filed more than 1.3 million claims, double the number in 2001. Despite having added nearly 4,000 new workers since 2008, the agency did not keep pace, completing less than 80 percent of its inventory.

This year, the agency has already completed more than one million claims for the third consecutive year. Yet it is still taking about eight months to process the average claim, two months longer than a decade ago. As of Monday, 890,000 pension and compensation claims were pending.
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This was on CNN last night

KTH: Vets suffer while waiting for benefits

U.S. veterans are fighting for disability benefits they say they're entitled to from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Randi Kaye reports.

To be fair, there are a few things that need to be mentioned. It was just as bad in the 90's when my husband's claim was tied up for 6 years and we had to figure out how to survive. Reporters didn't care back then. They care a little more now but they are doing too few reports, too late to have stopped most of the suffering when the American people could have been motivated to fight for our veterans if they knew all of this. Also to be fair, with the election coming up, you need to know what all of this would look like if Romney had his way. This is from last year before Romney was the nominee.

Dems say Romney wrong on vets' health care
Posted by
CNN's Kevin Liptak
November 16, 2011

(CNN) - Mitt Romney's campaign is pushing back after Democrats released a Web video painting the candidate as insensitive to the health concerns of veterans.

The video, from the Democratic National Committee, hits Romney for mentioning health care vouchers as an option for veterans. The former Massachusetts governor made the comments on Veterans Day during a roundtable with vets in South Carolina.

"Sometimes you wonder, would there be some way to introduce some private sector competition, somebody else that could come in an say, you know each soldier gets X-thousand dollars attributed to them and then they can choose whether they want to go into the government system or in a private system with the money that follows them," Romney said.

The video released Wednesday by the DNC says the vouchers would amount to "undermining veterans' health care when they need it the most."

The DNC poses the question, "But what if a voucher doesn't cover the care for our wounded warriors?"
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We've already seen how politics took over our obligation to our veterans with Bills tied up or rejected that would have helped them.