Congress still sucks when veterans need them in return

They addressed it back in 2006

Congressional leaders from both parties have begun pushing the Bush administration to boost staffing for its veterans' disability compensation program, now mired in a growing backlog of cases and beset by increasing delays.

Thousands of older veterans die with their claims still pending.

Democrats and Republicans on the committee say the administration also needs to beef up its appeals division, generally the source of the longest waits for veterans. In 2005, the average response time for a board decision was 622 days - well above the department's goal of 365 days

This was the result of screening for PTSD

In all, 9,145 of 178,664 service members who took the screening test were found to be at risk. Of those at risk, 22 percent were referred for help. The Army and Air Force each referred 23 percent of those at risk, the Navy 18 percent and the Marines about 15 percent, according to a draft of the report obtained by The Washington Post.

The final report will have the formal responses from the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments. In the draft report, Pentagon officials are quoted as saying that not all service members who gave positive responses on the screening test needed help, but the report said the officials could not specify what factors are involved in referring some people but not others.

Even before recent veterans began flooding the system, the VA was already underfunded and being criticized for poor services. Then, three years ago, Rep. Evans and Rep. Chris H. Smith, (Rep.-NJ), Chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, raised the alarm that the VA, already short of funds, would face a catastrophe as the troops began returning from Iraq.

Smith was rewarded for his efforts to sound the alarm by being removed not just from his chairmanship, but from the committee altogether, by the House Republican leadership. Similarly, in November 2004, VA head Anthony Principi was forced out by the White House because of his opposition to the VA being shortchanged in the budget the White House demanded -- so lobbyists for veterans believe. But Principi seems not to have suffered from his VA experience.

The Los Angeles Times reported recently that a medical services company Principi headed, and returned to after running the VA, earned over a billion dollars in fees, much of it from contracts approved while Principi was VA chief.

The VA admits its disability system was overburdened even before the administration invaded Iraq; and, by 2004, it had a backlog of 300,000 disability claims. Now, the VA reports that the backlog has reached 540,122. By April 2006, 25% of rating claims took six months to process -- no small thing for a veteran wounded badly enough to be unable to work. An appeal of a rejected claim frequently takes years to settle. One hundred twenty-three thousand disability claims have been filed already by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, in its budget requests, the administration has constantly resisted congressional demands to increase the number of VA staffers processing such claims.

Here's what damage was done.

Trying to get assistance, Anderson was first given an appointment with a psychiatrist through the Veteran’s Administration for Sept. 9. After that appointment was cancelled because the psychiatrist was not available, his next appointment was scheduled for the day after Thanksgiving when he would have been out of town. Anderson would have had to wait until January 2006 for his first appointment, close to a year after he had returned home, if not for the intervention of a friend who was a psychiatric nurse with the Army.

Joseph Dwyer didn't get the help he needed.

"Help me, please!" the former Army medic begged Wilson. "I'm dying. Help me. I can't breathe." Unable to stand or even sit up, Dwyer was hoisted onto a stretcher. As paramedics prepared to load him into an ambulance, an officer noticed Dwyer's eyes had glassed over and were fixed. A half hour later, he was dead.

Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Jerome Sloss, a member of the South Carolina National Guard, seemed fine when he was serving in Iraq. But when he came home to his job as a state trooper, he had trouble concentrating. Sloss committed suicide on May 27, 2004 -- five weeks after his return.

It would be easy enough to go over the other years but what's the point? Seriously, what is the point? No one paid attention when all of this started. Even less pay attention to it now but while the media has nothing else to talk about, at least folks are reminded for now. The truth is, nothing got fixed when there was really a chance to make a difference. Now they forget what they reported on all those years ago so politicians think they're off the hook. They aren't because while the press forgets, veterans have a fantastic memory and remember who did what and who only claimed they did.

The saddest part of all is, while we think honoring them once a year on Veterans Day is doing anything real, we forget about them the rest of the 364 days a year they are still a veteran.