Injured Iraq War Veterans Sue VA Head

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
August 7, 2014

In 2007 conditions at the VA were so bad that Veterans for Common Sense filed a lawsuit to force Congress and the VA to change. It was big news back then because it seemed as if the general public didn't know how bad things were.

Veterans were asking for help but ended up taking their own lives instead of healing. The headline is not from this year, but from 7 years ago!

Injured Iraq War Veterans Sue VA Head
The Associated Press
By HOPE YEN
Tuesday, July 24, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Frustrated by delays in health care, injured Iraq war veterans accused VA Secretary Jim Nicholson in a lawsuit of breaking the law by denying them disability pay and mental health treatment.

The lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, filed Monday in federal court in San Francisco, seeks broad changes in the agency as it struggles to meet growing demands from veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Suing on behalf of hundreds of thousands of veterans, it charges that the VA has failed warriors on numerous fronts. It contends the VA failed to provide prompt disability benefits, failed to add staff to reduce wait times for medical care and failed to boost services for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The lawsuit also accuses the VA of deliberately cheating some veterans by allegedly working with the Pentagon to misclassify PTSD claims as pre-existing personality disorders to avoid paying benefits. The VA and Pentagon have generally denied such charges.

"When one of our combat veterans walks into a VA hospital, then they must see a doctor that day," said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, which filed the lawsuit. "When a war veteran needs disability benefits because he or she can't work, then they must get a disability check in a few weeks."

"The VA has betrayed our veterans," Sullivan said.

"Unless systemic and drastic measures are instituted immediately, the costs to these veterans, their families and our nation will be incalculable, including broken families, a new generation of unemployed and homeless veterans, increases in drug abuse and alcoholism, and crushing burdens on the health care delivery system," the complaint says.

"The performance of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs has contributed substantially to our sense of national shame," the opinion from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals read.

Nicholson abruptly announced last week he would step down by Oct. 1 to return to the private sector. He has repeatedly defended the agency during his 2 1/2-year tenure while acknowledging there was room for improvement.

More recently, following high-profile suicide incidents in which families of veterans say the VA did not provide adequate care, Nicholson pledged to add mental health services and hire more suicide-prevention coordinators.

Yet, the lawsuit says, Nicholson and other officials still insisted on a budget in 2005 that fell $1 billion short, and they made "a mockery of the rule of law" by awarding senior officials $3.8 million in bonuses despite their role in the budget foul-up.

Today, the VA's backlog of disability payments is between 400,000 and 600,000, with delays of up to 177 days to process an initial claim and an average of 657 days to process an appeal. Several congressional committees and a presidential commission are now studying ways to improve care. read more here

The case was tossed out. The outcome was more veterans suffering a lot more years than they needed to because Congress was more interested in saving their own jobs than actually doing what was necessary.

They took the easy way out, pulled out the checkbook and started to fund programs that were not proven. When they failed, they just tossed more money at these "efforts" expecting a different outcome or worse, not even caring if things changed.

We heard their speeches all these years. The most interesting thing of all is, none of them have ever apologized to veterans for what they went through. They just blamed someone else.

We've all read about the reports from the 113th Congress, but it was all happening during the last one. Veterans Affairs in the 112th Congress: Reviewing VA’s Performance and Accountability and when Democrats held the chairs in the 111th. They all had a hand in what went wrong but they think we have short memories.

If you are an average American, you probably don't take any of this personally but if you happen to be a veteran or family member, you don't get to just forget and move onto something else. This is our lives. This is our past pains and the erosion of hope for a better future.