Veterans Are At Mercy of Congress, Not the VA

How Long Have Veterans Been Abused?
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
April 17, 2015

The best place to start this article is simply mentioning a much ignored fact. There are problems with the way some veterans are treated but there are many more getting great care. That's the most under-reported fact of all.

My Dad and my husband are examples of that simple fact. My Dad was a Korean veteran and had been getting care most of his life, so I've seen the best along with the issues veterans have faced for decades.

You may think my husband's care has something to do with this site, but it doesn't and it never did. He's been going since the early 90's.

His claim took six years to be approved but while fighting with that part of the VA, his doctors and their staff were always wonderful. As for being quasi-famous now, they don't have a clue who I am.

Good care isn't any more a secret in the veterans community than troubles are. The difference is, we don't blame the VA. We blame members of Congress because they have been telling us they're fixing the VA for decades.

There have been 8 men blamed for problems with the VA and 4 put in between as acting heads since President Reagan turned it into a Cabinet position. Since then, they got all the blame and Congress, well, Congress was able to just pull off a fast one on the public as if they had nothing to do with any of the problems. The flip side has always been when the VA got something right politicians were the first ones to add it to their campaign ads.

We need to look at the most recent report of all of this for a better view of how badly member of Congress have actually performed.

Boxes of ignored mail, rodent infestations in Philadelphia latest black eye for VA
Stars and Stripes
By Heath Druzin
Published: April 15, 2015

A Philadelphia VA office simultaneously underserved and overcompensated veterans, keeping them waiting for months to get answers to their benefits questions, paying out millions in duplicative benefits and housing some employees in a vermin-infested warehouse, according to a report released Wednesday by the Department of Veterans Affairs Inspector General.

In the latest bad news for an agency that has been embroiled in a yearlong scandal, the exhaustive report details a range of problems, from failure to process thousands of pieces of mail to unsafe working conditions, at the VA’s Philadelphia Regional Office.

“There is an immediate need to improve the operation and management of this VA (Regional Office) and take actions to ensure a more effective work environment,” the 78-page report reads.

One of the most striking findings was that investigators found 31,000 inquiries went unanswered for an average of 312 days even though staff is supposed to respond to each within five days.

That was in addition to 22,000 pieces of returned mail, some which had been there for four years, and almost 15,000 pieces of mail related to claims processes that had not been placed in veterans’ files — some languishing unprocessed for more than three years.
read more here

Guess what isn't new? Army Times from 2009 report

A new report about Veterans Affairs Department employees squirreling away tens of thousands of unopened letters related to benefits claims is sparking fresh concerns that veterans and their survivors are being cheated out of money.

VA officials acknowledge further credibility problems based on a new report of a previously undisclosed 2007 incident in which workers at a Detroit regional office turned in 16,000 pieces of unprocessed mail and 717 documents turned up in New York in December during amnesty periods in which workers were promised no one would be penalized.

“Veterans have lost trust in VA,” Michael Walcoff, VA’s under secretary for benefits, said at a hearing Tuesday. “That loss of trust is understandable, and winning back that trust will not be easy.”

Unprocessed and unopened mail was just one problem in VA claims processing mentioned by Belinda Finn, VA’s assistant inspector general for auditing, in testimony before the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

At the time this is what the VA backlog looked like.

The VA's claims backlog, which includes all benefits claims and all appeals at the Veterans Benefits Administration and the Board of Veterans Appeals at VA, was 803,000 on Jan. 5, 2009. The backlog hit 915,000 on May 4, 2009, a staggering 14 percent increase in four months.

At the same time this was going on,

The 2008 investigation confirms the IG and VA officials were aware that schedulers were using bogus tactics to “game” the system, allowing them to falsely claim patients were getting the medical care they needed within agency deadlines.

With all of this ending up full circle back to a few months ago across the country in California.

The claims, which dated back as far as the mid-1990s, were discovered in 2012 as a national scandal erupted over the VA’s sloppy and slow handling of benefits, which outraged veterans.

The report said the office in 2012 counted 13,184 informal claims for benefits that had been found in the cabinet, with 2,155 requiring “review or action.” Those files were assigned to a special team, the report said, but later, in spring 2014, office workers found a cart of the claims that the team had reviewed but failed to act upon.

Since reporters don't seem all too interested in how things got this bad for veterans any more than they want to remind folks of who is supposed to do what, now you know more than they do.