Thousands of older veterans die with their claims still pending

Taking a trip down memory lane to remind folks of how it all got this bad for our veterans is extremely depressing but necessary. Next time one of your buddies sends you an email going around, send them the facts back.

As always, these are from news reports. If you see something that is important, copy it and email it at will. Everything I do is free and free to share.

Because people playing political games were more interested in what they wanted to learn, they did nothing when VA Staff was cut when there was a backlog.

WASHINGTON - 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.

At the same time, Democratic lawmakers are writing legislation to increase funding and enrollment in a pension program for poor veterans and their widows. In December, Knight Ridder revealed that the program was overlooking the vast majority of people who could participate - an estimated 2 million veterans or widows who collectively aren't getting as much as $22 billion a year.

"Many veterans and their survivors who are most in need of the pension program - our World War II and Korean-era veterans - have no idea that the program exists," said Rep. Lane Evans of Illinois, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, which just finished a series of hearings on the Bush administration's 2007 budget proposal for the VA.

The VA's disability compensation program sends checks to 2.7 million veterans for injuries suffered during military service. Yet high error rates, lengthy appeals, backlogs and wide regional inconsistencies mean many veterans wait years for decisions.
One result, detailed by Knight Ridder: Thousands of older veterans die with their claims still pending.

Although the Bush administration expects the backlog to continue rising, its 2007 budget proposal calls for decreasing the staff that directly handles such cases - 149 fewer workers, from the current year's 6,574.

The VA has long wanted to reduce its backlog to less than 250,000 claims. But the department's most recent projections have it rising to nearly 400,000 by the end of 2007.

In addition, the average time to process claims, which the VA had said would drop to 145 days, or 125 days, or even 100 days, is projected to increase this year and next, to more than 180 days.

Both measures are closely watched indicators of the department's efficiency. The fact that the VA seems to be losing ground has Republicans and Democrats concerned.

Although Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives are focusing on staffers directly assigned to disability compensation cases, the VA said in a statement that it is "more appropriate" to look at the overall number of staffers, which also includes workers handling pension and burial cases. Looked at that way, the department said it would see a reduction of 48 staffers next year.

Hope you noticed that there were not ten, twenty, a hundred or hundreds of veterans facing death before the got justice, it was thousands!

Yet in 2003 I wrote about the A CASE OF DISGRACE and reposted it in 2006 because little had changed for good and most of the change was worse.

Congress would leave an estimated 150,000 troops at risk for serious brain damage
Aug 09, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jessica Love
August 9, 2006

When thousands struggle at this hour with a traumatic brain injury; when an estimated 150,000 will suffer a brain injury in this war, Congress should be increasing support, not decreasing it. America supports our troops – the priorities of this Congress are wrong.”Bobby Muller, Chairman of Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation said: “I am shocked and appalled to learn that Congress is not making the health of our soldiers fighting in Iraq a priority.

The Iraq War is escalating, casualties are rising, yet Congress is on recess while their staff plans to slash desperately needed Traumatic Brain Injury research and treatment for our Nation’s men and women fighting on the front lines. Since September 11th, 2001, 1.5 million service members have been deployed overseas to the Global War on Terror (GWOT). More than 3,000 have died. 50,000 have been wounded, injured or become sick with a physical or mental condition. The VA has reported that as of May, 2006, nearly 168,500 GWOT veterans have been treated, and the Veterans Brain Injury Center estimates that up to 150,000 veterans may suffer TBI from war.

This budget cut is a serious moral outrage, and I call on Congress to explain to these 1.5 million men and women why the brain injuries they suffer in war are not a top concern for our country.

If you heard the commercial about homeless veterans, that line was mine but you'd never know it since they never mentioned that fact. It came from a post I did back in 2006 with the exact words. TWO WORDS THAT SHOULD NOT BE "HOMELESS" AND "VETERAN" but it wasn't just veterans going homeless that were ignored. During a time when veterans were committing suicide at higher rates, this shocker happened.

VA failed to use funds set for mental health
David Goldstein
Kansas City Star
Oct 02, 2006
Millions meant to help combat vets went untapped and millions went to other programs.

WASHINGTON Over the last two years, $300 million has been set aside to fill critical gaps in mental health services for veterans, especially troops returning from combat.

But more than $50 million of those allocations didn’t get spent by the Department of Veterans Affairs, and millions more went to other programs, congressional investigators reported Thursday. The funds were supposed to improve awareness of the VA’s mental health programs and provide better access for combat vets, former women personnel and others with serious mental illnesses.

And veterans were dying back then before their claims were approved.

Richmond lawyer knows of 40 clients who died before court ruled on disability WASHINGTON -- Thousands of veterans, many of whom fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, have been waiting years for disability claims to be decided by a little-known appeals court here.

The delays have been so long that some veterans have died waiting.

"The backlog has never been longer than now," said Randy Reese, national service director for Disabled American Veterans.

The appeals court is at the crest of a bureaucratic tsunami that has hundreds of thousands of veterans waiting months and, more often, years for disability benefits. With one in four veterans of the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan already filing for disability benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the wait is likely to get longer.

The Washington Post has reported that as many as 10 million veterans who aren't in the system wouldn't be allowed to enroll under the new rule. In just the past three years, more than 250,000 veterans who sought care at the nation's VA hospitals have been turned away because of the new rule.

VA officials say the changes were necessary, given limited funds, the growing numbers of veterans seeking care, and the need to focus on those with service-connected disabilities and the poor. There are an estimated 24 million veterans in the United States, and about 5.4 million are expected to seek care from the VA this year, compared with 2.9 million a decade ago. This dramatic increase is reflected in the VA's medical budget, which reached $30.7 billion this year.

Veterans Suffer as Congress Drags Feet
Cory Reiss
Sarasota Herald Tribune
Dec 10, 2006

Veterans hospitals returned about $46 million in mental health funding to headquarters in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 because they couldn't spend it fast enough on new programs to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and other problems afflicting veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Department of Veterans Affairs never even distributed another $42 million, despite surging demand, and it had similar troubles in fiscal 2005. The Government Accountability Office reported those findings last week.

Veterans groups and VA officials lay at least some of the blame on Congress, which was two months late in passing the spending bills for both fiscal years that began Oct. 1 in 2004 and 2005.

The delays gave the department, at best, 10-month windows for spending what it planned over the course of an entire year to meet demand for new mental health programs, especially for recent combat veterans.

At the end of each fiscal year, unspent money for such new programs is returned to VA headquarters, where the department often uses it for other purposes. When that happens, the programs originally intended to receive the money can suffer.

After whistling two months past the end of the 2006 fiscal year, Congress punted most of its 2007 spending bills until mid-February, including the VA's legislation. The agencies are running at 2006 funding levels until then.

Congress was expected to allow the VA to borrow about $700 million from construction and other accounts to beef up its health care spending for the next three months, but critics said the VA has been applying such patches on its own for years.

One way or another, the VA will have about seven months instead of a year to spend about $3 billion in anticipated increases for health care over fiscal 2006 levels, once the final spending bill is passed.