Department of Veterans Affairs should draft temps

Department of Veterans Affairs should draft temps
by Kathie Costos
Wounded Times Blog
March 30, 2013

The claims backlog problem didn't start last month or last year, but started a long time ago. It got worse because as Afghanistan and Iraq were creating more and more disabled veterans, older veterans who were waiting for far too many years joined them after their claims had been denied.

This isn't from this year but from August 2008.
More than half of wounded troops slipping through the cracks

"The VA needs aggressive, pro-veteran leaders, for more additional funding for staff, office space and for screening and treatment equipment," said Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense. "The VA needs more streamlined policies so that veterans don't need to fill out a 20 page form in order to get care."

Sullivan said his organization decided to file suit when it became clear the agency wouldn't take action on its own. Before helping to found Veterans for Common Sense, Sullivan monitored disability claims for the VA. In 2006, he resigned in protest.

"In 2005, while working at VA, I briefed senior VA political leaders that VA was in a crisis of a surge of disability claims of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans," he said. "I recommended in writing that the VA hire more claims processors to make sure the veterans get their benefits faster instead of facing six month delays or even longer."

"The VA didn't do anything to help the veterans. What the VA actually did was several things to lock the doors and block veterans from getting mental health assistance from VA," Sullivan added.

There is a lot more that has been going on for a very long time.

Stressed soldiers sue for disability benefits
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Soldiers: Army denied them disability rating, so they were denied benefits
Lawsuit filed by veterans advocacy group on behalf of vets with PTSD
In October, Army ordered all future PTSD sufferers to be eligible for benefits
Soldiers want eligibility to go back six years

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Army intentionally denied benefits to soldiers suffering from a widespread stress disorder after they returned from service in Iraq and Afghanistan, a veterans advocacy group charges in a suit filed Wednesday.

The lawsuit, filed by the National Veterans Legal Services Program, accuses the Army of illegally cutting off benefits to thousands of veterans and their families by refusing to assign a proper disability rating to those veterans after they had been discharged with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

As a result, the veterans have been denied benefits, including, among other things, lifetime monthly disability payments and free medical care for themselves and their families.

"I experience firsthand the horrors of war" said Juan Perez, an Iraq veteran and one of five plaintiffs in the lawsuit. "My expectation was that the military would be there for me, and my country would be there for me. Instead, the way I was treated felt more like a slap to the face."

There was also this report when President Bush's Administration fought a lawsuit to get veterans the care they needed.

During an interview given in November for the original CBS story, Dr. Katz told reporter Armen Keteyian that "There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem." When pressed for an answer to explain the VA's inability to come up with any suicide statistics among veterans, Katz replied "That research is ongoing."

However, "After a public records request, the VA provided CBS News with data that showed there were a total of 790 attempted suicides by VA patients in the entire year of 2007." This number does not match up at all with a private email sent by Dr. Katz to a colleague in which he states that the VA has identified "about 1000 suicide attempts a month in patients we see at are medical facilities," a far cry from his public estimate of 790 a year.

So how to we fix the backlog and take some extra stress off of PTSD veterans and other disabled vetearns? Draft and Army of temps to get things moving.

During a conference in Orlando a couple of years ago a VA representative stated that it takes two years to train a claims processor. We don't have two years. Some say that temps can't deal with the sensitive data of veterans. I think they are wrong.

One of the temp jobs I had was for a social services organizations to help them transfer data from one program that didn't work with the new one. All the data had to entered in for millions of files. The agency hired 20 of us to work as temps and get them caught up freeing the other employees to keep the flow going so that people didn't have to wait for it to get done.

The key is, we were fast and accurate. They tested us to see how well we did before they hired us on. Very few mistakes were made and we were able to get the data in weeks ahead of what they originally thought it would take.

We had sensitive information but were removed from the subjects we were entering the data for. It was straight out data with no emotional connection to the cases.

The DOD and the VA have programs that do not work together. There are not enough claims processors and it will take too long to get them trained and ready to go. Instead of making veterans wait, they should take the files that need to be transferred and get temps to get the job done.

That will free the processors up so they can work on the claims instead of doing the task of entering information. Keep the temps on until the backlog is cleared up and hire the good ones. It sure will cost a lot less than hiring a contractor to do it and then being faced with data breaches and delays. Veterans have waited far too long while one hand of the VA is trying to make up for mistakes of the past and the other is trying to figure out how to get today done.

This is from a Vietnam veteran talking about his county Veterans Service Officer and the debate about replacing a retiring officer.

I served my country during the Viet Nam conflict. In 1997, I had a heart attack. In 2009, I had another heart attack. My hearing is not good. When I heard about Nellie, I went to see her. She helped me sign up at the VA, which was one of the best things to happen to me. I received hearing aids from the VA. I also found out my heart problems are caused by Agent Orange. I was set at 60 percent disabled and receive compensation from the VA. In January of this year, I had double bypass surgery. Nellie helped me file another form and now my disability has been raised to 100 percent.