Prepaid VA Card Worth Less After Elections

We owe veterans, not the other way around 
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
September 14, 2014

What's in your wallet? Sure you have a debit card, drivers license, maybe some credit cards but there are others with prepaid cards in their wallets.

VA New ID Card

They paid for all of it when they wrote a blank check to the country "up to and including" their lives. For far too many it is a debt that is past due. Too bad veterans don't have a collection agency working for them. Oops, that would actually be Congress with the duty of making sure they get what they are righteously owed.

When we read about the VA claim struggles they face, most Americans don't have a single clue how long it has been going on or how many decades members of Congress and various Presidents promised to fix it. The House Veterans Affairs Committee has had since 1946 to live up to the promises veterans still wait for.

Do we let this keep happening to them or do we force Congress to take action instead of just holding hearings on what they didn't fix before?

There are some solutions. Since none of this can be blamed on the veterans, let the buck end up on the lap of Congress.

For all the claims waiting in the backlog, the VA needs to make sure the DD214's are real and they can get the real ones from the DOD. With computer programs that can change fonts and erase with ease to replace what a few frauds want to put in, they have to come from the DOD records.

Once that is done, approve claims with at least 50% and get them into medical care they need. Let the VA investigators do their jobs afterwards in case the rare crook has slipped into the system. Fraud VA cases are a tiny fraction of real ones. This will free up claims processors to handle new claims. Far from being the first time this was suggested since 2008.

Why was this suggested? Because in 2007 this was going on.

The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people -- too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.

Congress held hearings back then too but as we've seen, the hearings didn't produce any long lasting results.

To train processors right it takes up to two years. They need to hire more because when troops were sent into Afghanistan and Iraq, no one thought to get the VA ready for the wounded coming home. There were less doctors and nurses working for the VA than there were after the Gulf War.

For the lack of doctors, this leaves most of us speechless. A recent report about the lack of doctors in Wasilla Alaska VA showed how bad it has been. The last doctor there left in May. "A nurse practitioner, who transferred from Anchorage last week, is now carrying the 1,000-patient caseload."

Also not a new issue. In 2008 the members of the Senate were holding hearings on the lack of mental health professionals in the Department of Defense.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., will have the opportunity to question the surgeons general at a Wednesday hearing before the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee.

Murray expressed concern that the Defense Department has not hired enough specialists to deal with mental health issues created by extended deployments, the stress of combat and other issues.

“The fact that we aren’t meeting the demand for our troops’ psychological health needs with qualified professionals is a great concern of mine,” she said in a telephone interview. “The Pentagon needs to tell us what they are doing to fill the gaps in the system, particularly when troops are being sent back into the field for their third and fourth tours.”

Everything veterans have been inflicted with and subjected to could have been avoided if the American public were ever reminded of how many promises were broken. None of what is going on right now is new and none of it will change unless the American people not only demand it, but pay attention to it all the time.

November brings another election as well as Veterans Day. How we treat our veterans depends on who we vote for but our duty does not end to veterans unless we are prepared to hold those we elect accountable for what they fail to do and praise them for what they get right.

So far, they haven't done much right but got away with what they got wrong and pretend they didn't know any of it was happening.