Congress Decided to Start Class Warfare on Warfighters

This is what is wrong with Congress, among many other things,

To be eligible, a veteran seeking caregiver assistance must have a serious, enduring injury incurred or aggravated while on duty after Sept. 11, 2001, and require help with such basic daily needs as eating, dressing and bathing. Payment amounts depend on the degree of help needed.

This may sound good to some folks but in the Veterans community, we're not happy at all. Why? Because members of Congress decided to start class warfare on warfighters. Since when does one generation of veterans matter more than all others?

They spent decades listening to major veterans groups fighting for all veterans. The DAV, VFW and American Legion have been testifying year after year. In 2014 the DAV helped 340,000 veterans and family members with their claims. They fight for ALL VETERANS to get the benefits they not only need but paid the price for.

There is a saying among veterans

A veteran is someone who, at one point in his/her life, wrote a blank check made payable to "The United States of America," for an amount of "up to and including my life."

Yet members of Congress decided since the OEF and OIF veterans were getting all the attention they could write a bill just for them. Forget about older veterans and families paying the price all the same much longer without any help. Forget about the families losing their homes and falling apart because they were not cared for going all the way back to 1946 when the first group of politicians sat in the chairs of the House Veterans Affairs Committee.

They must have figured that if the press didn't care about the rest of generations, they didn't have to either. Yet as bad as that is, even when they decided to give out caregivers funds to the new generation of veterans, they messed that up as well. This is a story of families in Colorado losing what Congress promised them.

Veterans in Denver see cuts in caregiver funds
The Denver Post
By David Olinger
POSTED:03/15/2015

The Department of Veterans Affairs medical center in Denver has generated more appeals than any other VA hospital for denials of financial assistance to those caring for injured soldiers in their homes.

The program, intended to help spouses and other relatives provide care to war veterans seriously hurt since 2001, has been growing rapidly nationwide.

Yet the Denver hospital and its satellite offices in cities including military-heavy Colorado Springs have reduced the numbers of approved caregivers since May.

Revocations — when the VA notifies caregivers that they no longer qualify for assistance — are occurring at a higher rate in the Rocky Mountain region, which includes Colorado, than in all but one of 21 regions in the nation.

To be eligible, a veteran seeking caregiver assistance must have a serious, enduring injury incurred or aggravated while on duty after Sept. 11, 2001, and require help with such basic daily needs as eating, dressing and bathing. Payment amounts depend on the degree of help needed.

As of last month, caregivers to 221 veterans in the region had been revoked since the program started in 2010, with 491 still getting assistance.

Jay "Jeryl" Adams of Colorado Springs is one of those veterans.

He enlisted at age 17 and deployed to Al Asad Air Base in Iraq. There, he befriended a barefoot boy who seemed able to supply almost anything a soldier might want.

The boy brought food and tea to Adams at the gate and sold him items from knives to a stereo. In turn, Adams decided to buy him a pair of shoes.

But on the day he intended to deliver them, he heard a ruckus outside the gate. Soldiers were yelling and pointing guns at the boy, who wore a new blue vest. Adams ran toward him. He got within about 30 feet before a suicide bomb exploded, splattering him with a child's body parts, leaving a crater where the boy stood.

His brain rattled, Adams walked around and around the crater. "I remember the sensation of guts on my skin, the smell of human flesh," he recalled. "I lost it. I went absolutely nuts."

Adams' life slid downhill from there. He survived two combat tours in Iraq but returned home a damaged soldier. A decade later he suffers seizures followed by bouts of incontinence. He attempted suicide by swallowing 54 anti-anxiety pills, compelling his wife, Lauren Adams Tkacik, to keep his medicines locked. His weight has ballooned from 180 pounds to more than 400. He relies on Lauren to help him take medicine, change clothes, shave and shower, make a sandwich, leave home.
read more here

It would have been better had they actually waiting until they knew what they were doing before they did it. It would have been even better if they stopped to think of all the other veterans out there with the same wounds, the same basic needs and the same family members giving up so much to take care of them. It would have been best if they listened to the service organizations taking care of all generation of veterans equally instead of the new groups getting all the attention from reporters. After all, they remember families like mine.