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| Injured Iraq war veterans sue VA head | |
| 2007-07-24 | |
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,
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. VA spokesman Matt Smith said Monday he could not comment on a pending lawsuit. "Through outreach efforts, the VA ensures returning Global War on Terror service members have access to the widely recognized quality health care they have earned, including services such as prosthetics or mental health care," Smith said. "VA has also given priority handling to their monetary disability benefit claims." The lawsuit comes amid intense political and public scrutiny of the VA and Pentagon following reports of shoddy outpatient care of injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and elsewhere. | |
| Posted by:lotp |
| #5 I'm a disabled veteran. It took me about 15 months for my initial evaluation to result in a pension, and almost two years for the second evaluation after my condition worsened. One of the major problems is that there are few counsellors to help vets apply for disability, and the wording of disability claims has to be very precise. On average, I see eleven different doctors when I go for an evaluation. That takes most of one day, and sometimes more than one day. That the VA is overworked and understaffed is a given, but it's the role of Congress and the President to correct those problems, not the courts. This lawsuit has no legs to stand on, and will eventually be dismissed. OS, I couldn't agree more. Tricare isn't very good for retirees, and hardly better for active duty. It usually takes me three to six weeks to get an appointment for anything but a chronic problem. The VA is not an emergency care service, although some hospitals do have walk-in clinics. The average waiting time for walk-ins is two to six hours, unless the problem is critical. The service is a little better at private hospitals, but not by much. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2007-07-24 15:03 |
| #4 Our boy Paulie also reviews books. Here's one he reviewed at the Veterans for Common Sense website... Others defend our liberties by writing excellent books. Republic: A Novel of America's Future should be required reading for as a forcast of what can go wrong when people fail to take responsibility for their freedom. Written by my good friend Charles Sheehan-Miles, I felt a deep cold chill after reading the book, set in independent-minded West Virginia. Charles weaves a very realistic tale warning us what to expect when Dick Cheney remains President through 2017, and our United States falls further into a tyrannical abyss. His political fiction takes a common sense Gulf War hero, Lieutenant Colonel Murphy, and places him in a very difficult situation where he must choose between our Constitutional values and the political expedience of tyranny. His book is not déjà vu for anyone who lived during Adolf Hitler's tyrannical rise in Nazi Germany in 1933 portrayed in William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. With the new novel's fast pace, you’ll get a political thriller with accurate scenes depicting our corrupt Administration and Congress lifted right from BuzzFlash or TruthOut, among the last reliable media outlets remaining not owned outright by supporters of the Administration. There are also war scenes to please folks looking for realistic whiz-bang tank battles set in the rugged terrain of cold, wooded West Virginia and not deep inside a blazing and desolate Iraq. Republic is the best contemporary fiction I’ve ever read. The book reminds me that, to paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, christo-fascism is happening here in America. With the loss of habeas corpus, with the rise of military tribunals who are answerable to no one that can impose the death penalty, with widespread illegal government eavesdropping on your new i-phone, and with our Federal Government lying to start wars of aggression resulting in hundreds of thousands dead and bankrupting our Treasury, we should all emulate the dedicated refugees in the woods at the end of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reciting and remembering the noble ideals of the Enlightenment before they are erased by Winston Smith’s enemies as if we lived in George Orwell's 1984. Sadly, Charles reminds us in the reality-based world that George Lucas' Empire did strike back against democracy in 2000, when the ghosts of disgraced President Richard Nixon, including Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, took power. All they want is more brutal power. Now we live under the gun of Blackwater mercanaries, our President's own praetorian guard. We have faith-based government that imposes a religious litmus test before providing social services and naming new political appointees. We have corporations gutting consumer and environmental regulations designed to protect people from corporations -- just as we fought the East India Company in 1776. The modern Rasputin, Karl Rove, manipulates voter registration and elections so that a dry-drunk moron with thirty percent approval ratings gets installed and re-installed as president when all Bush truly wanted was to be dictator. And we have a President and Congress blindly infatuated with defense contractor campaign cash contributions and piles of purloined profits from their addiction to endless government funding of unrestricted neo-conservative pre-emptive war. Sounds like a lefty The Turner Diaries. Grandstanding? Ya think? |
| Posted by: tu3031 2007-07-24 14:48 |
| #3 "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, See a doctor the same day for any complaint? How about some real Common Sense? (That statement of his shows he is grandstanding). Hell, you don't get that in active duty! First a medic for triage at the troop med clinic for sick call, then a nurse for exam and eval at battalion, then a PA at base infirmary or local hospital - that's normally the best you'll do unless you're acutely ill with something very serious. These guys are grandstanding. Does the VA work? Of course it barely does - its a government agency, so its going to have slow movement, stifling paperwork and all kinds of idiocy attached to it. No lawsuit in the world will change that unless it forces the VA to privatize. I say turn to Kaiser Permanente and use their model. Its been better for me than tri-care. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2007-07-24 11:09 |
| #2 Ditto for us, Besoeker. The travel payments alone are a hugely complex requirement. No, the VA system has not betrayed veterans. It might have fallen short but I am pretty damned sure it wasn't deliberate nor was it a betrayal. That language has me spitting mad. I see 2 issues intertwined in the attacks on the VA. First is the absurd fantasy held by many on the left that it is possible for humans to create and run a perfect bureaucracy. And second is the deep desire to corrode the trust of the public in the military and of the military in the leadership. There are real problems with the leadership in some cases and the military isn't perfect. But this is being used pretty cynically by some on the left. And in the middle is a military that was gutted under Clinton, rose up magnificently to the challenges of the last 6 years and is weary and strained but still functioning with great honor and effectiveness -- where allowed. No More Vietnams. NO MORE. We need to stand up to the attacks, while fixing the problems. We need to rise up vocally and publicly against the Nation's lying articles that slime our brave soldiers and contractors - this war's equivalent of Kerry's Vietnam Winter Soldier lies. This. Must. Stop. |
| Posted by: lotp 2007-07-24 07:01 |
| #1 I sense a potential need for.... contractor outsourcing. I've never been shorted or missed a dfas payment. A few of my buddies have been erroneously "deceased" and payments stopped, but they were able to recover all payments without a great deal of difficulty. DFAS appears to run both smoothly and efficiently. http://www.dfas.mil/ In FY 2006, DFAS Paid 145.3 million pay transactions (5.9 million people) Made 7 million travel payments Paid 13.8 million commercial invoices Posted 57 million general ledger transactions Managed military retirement and health benefits funds ($255 billion) Made an average of $424 billion in disbursements to pay recipients Managed $20.9 billion in foreign military sales (reimbursed by foreign governments) Accounted for 878 active DoD appropriations |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2007-07-24 05:08 |