Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

SUN EDITORIAL:

Fixing the ailing VA

Veterans are treated poorly by a department that is supposed to help them

Clay Hunt was a Marine Corps sniper in Iraq when he was shot through the wrist. When he returned badly injured, he spent weeks going to doctors and compiling a 200-page packet to support his application for disability benefits from Veterans Affairs. After he submitted it, the VA misplaced his application and his claim stalled.

“I can track my pizza from Pizza Hut on my BlackBerry, but the VA can’t find my claim for four months,” Hunt told the Los Angeles Times.

It took Hunt 10 months to receive disability payments from the VA, and his story is not unique. For years, veterans have complained that the VA has been slow to help them. The Times reported on Tuesday that the agency is overwhelmed by claims, particularly as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drag on, receiving 90,000 new claims a month. The VA has 175,000 backlogged claims and, on average, it takes more than five months for the VA to process a veteran’s claim. The VA reports that up to 17 percent of its decisions on veterans’ disabilities are incorrect, and appealing a decision can take more than 600 days on average.

Part of the problem is that the VA still relies in most cases on paper files to process veterans’ claims, and that can lead to unnecessary delays. Veterans report having to undergo repeated tests and evaluations because of lost paperwork or poor communication within the VA. They also say they have to fight to prove their injuries, and for soldiers dealing with traumatic injuries, that can be daunting. Some veterans settle for compensation below what they are due because they don’t want to battle the bureaucracy.

As Hunt puts it, “You fight for your country, then come home and have to fight against your own country for the benefits you were promised.”

VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, a retired Army chief of staff, has pledged to cut down the backlog in claims and, just as important, “to change the culture inside VA to one of advocacy for veterans.”

That will be a large task, given that the VA has been lacking for years. And Shinseki’s staff knows there are, as one official noted, “a lot of negative feelings” toward the agency. VA officials have proposed a budget for next year that would increase funding for claims processing by 27 percent, which would include hiring new staff and investing in new technology to speed veterans’ claims. That is a good start, but given that the men and women who are filing claims suffered terrible injuries in the service of their country, continued delays and problems with the VA cannot be tolerated. Congress and the administration should make sure that fixing this is a priority and that the VA is working with utmost speed to help veterans. Doing anything less is disgraceful.

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