Review history if you think VA claims are bad now

Review history if you think VA claims are bad now
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
October 28, 2013

There are so many really stupid emails going around right now that my head is about to explode. Veterans are getting very upset about things they shouldn't be upset about and not worrying about the things they need to know.

Start with Affordable Care Act and Veterans and read the rest on this link but here is the part you really need to know.

The answer is the Affordable Care Act will not directly impact VA health care system nor will it affect TRICARE or TRICARE for Life beneficiaries (military active duty personnel, retirees and their dependents). Veterans eligible for VA health care will remain eligible under health reform; nothing in the proposed legislation will affect veterans’ access to the care that they currently are receiving. The legislation makes clear that the Department of Veterans Affairs will retain full authority over the VA health care system.

However, the devil is always in the details. A report authored by Jennifer M. Haley and Genevieve M. Kenney for the Urban Institute says that some 1.3 million veterans under the age of 65 are uninsured. It is this population that needs to be better informed about their health care options: which ones to chose and how to exercise them. “It is important that the VA is prepared and communicates with veterans," says Congressman Mike Michaud of Maine, the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives Committee on Veterans Affairs.

The claim backlog is another thing these emails keep getting wrong. For starters, Vietnam veterans are the majority of the new claims as well as the supplemental claims.

According to the VA Claim report they put out on Monday's these are the latest numbers.

711,775 Pending Claims. Vietnam veterans are 36%, followed by Gulf War Veterans at 25%, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans at 20%, Peacetime at 11% and Other at 8%.

For the backlog of 405,656, again, Vietnam veterans are the largest group at 37%, Gulf War at 24%, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans 21%, Peacetime 11% and Other at 7%.

Then there is the part about how this congress loves to complain about the backlog even though they were complaining about it for decades over and over again because they never really fixed it when they had a chance to really do something that would matter in the long run.

This is what it looked like in February of 2008

VBA's pending compensation and claims backlog stood at 816,211 as of January 2008, up 188,781 since 2004, said Kerry Baker, associate legislative director of the Disabled Veterans of America, during a Wednesday hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.

This is what it looked like in April of 2008

“Since 2006, the number of claims has grown 15 percent. The amount of time it takes to make decisions on disability claims is two to three year. On an average, it takes four years to get an appeals decision.”

By July there was this report

The report by the majority staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform domestic policy panel, released Tuesday, concluded that at least 28,283 disabled retirees were denied retroactive pay awards because rushed efforts to clear a huge backlog of claims led program administrators to stop doing quality assurance checks on the claims decisions.

And of the original 133,057 potentially eligible veterans, 8,763 died before their cases could be reviewed for retroactive payments, according to the report.

This is the newest piece of news on the backlog.

U.S. Sen. Mark S. Kirk (R-Ill.) says help is on the way for veterans waiting for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to process their disability claims. Kirk says the backlog has grown, saying veterans are waiting up to 534 days for their claims to be processed. “That’s the bad news,” Kirk said. “The good news is buried in the VA appropriations bill, of which I’m the lead Senate Republican, we have all of Chairman Tim Johnson’s 10 points to eliminate this backlog.”

This is just a start of the growing list of emails being pushed by veterans not fact checking what their friends send them. If your friends or politicians want to pretend any of this is new, then tell them the truth so that maybe, just maybe they may fix it the right way for a change and we don't see repeated suffering that didn't need to happen.