This is positively shameful. {...}What
This is positively shameful.
{...}What injured or ill veterans are finding when they
return from overseas is a complex set of government processes for
reviewing whether they will receive financial help. They have to
navigate two of the largest U.S. government bureaucracies in the VA and
the Pentagon (news - web sites), and multiple medical review boards
assess the extent of their injuries.
Even with the current backlog and the prospect of staffing cuts, VA
officials are trying to increase the department's visibility, reaching
out to new veterans to make sure they are aware of the services they
can receive and urging them to apply.
Principi said he recently sent letters to 178,000 veterans explaining
the available benefits. He said the department is doing its best to
keep wait times down by giving recent veterans higher priority, aiming
for benefit claims that are filled within 100 days. Currently, the VA
takes about 160 days per claim, and 60,000 to 70,000 new claims come in
each month.{...}
Oh, yea. Letters making soldiers aware of what they need to do to file
for benefits. That's what's needed to sort this out. Let the veterans
know what they need to do...after all,
the burden's on them.
That's crap.
A hundred days is still too long to decide a claim. Come on and get
real. Even thirty days is too long to decide a claim. If someone's been
wounded in combat it's not exactly like they're trying to take
advantage of the system, like a civilian who claims they're disabled,
then moves a refridgerator and gets caught on videotape. If someone's
in a wheelchair because they've been paralyzed, well, it doesn't take a
rocket scientist to figure out that they're going to be disabled for
life, does it? Here's what I suggest: pay the vets their full benefits
whilst the claim process is taking place. If it turns out that they
deserve less than what they're receiving, fine, so be it. But don't
jerk them around in the meantime. They deserve better. Like a system
that's not a nightmare to navigate. The government has futzed around
too damn long on this one. They've had chance after chance to
straighten out the VA and they never manage to get it done. What is it
going to take? And when are they going to realize that drastic actions
need to be taken to ensure that vets are taken care of? It's about time
they sorted it out. Our vets deserve better.
Posted by Kathy at October 1, 2004 01:46 PM
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