training for VA claims examiners?
I guess I'm not the only one who believes that the big mess that is the VA claims process, including a tremendous backlog of cases waiting to be processed and reprocessed, could be largely cleaned up by training the claims adjudicators so that they rule on claims accurately and fairly the first time. Today it can take ten years or more for a veteran to get a claim through the system, and for that veteran to be compensated at the correct and fair percentage of disability.
Congressman Jeff Miller (R-FL), the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, recently held an oversight hearing on just that subject.
He thinks the way to improve the system is not just to add staff, but to actually train them, so that the system functions in the non-adversarial way that it was originally designed to function.
Wow, what a concept! Too bad it's just a hearing, and may wind up going nowhere. Sort of like the way my own claim has meandered through the system for the past nine years.
It took four years for the VA to decide I was disabled at all. Now we are bickering over the percentage, even though their own Vocational Rehabilitation Division has decided that I am unemployable, and even though, based on my VA claims file, the Social Security Administration has decided that I am disabled.
Social Security doesn't have to pay me a dime, though (except a death benefit to my kids, should I die), because I worked part time while I was disabled, and didn't earn enough credits to be entitled to Social Security disability within the last ten years.
Ain't the government great?
posted by bram_jufuv @ 6:35 PM
1 Comments:
Right now the hoopla on fixing this system is let veterans have attorneys early on in the claims process. The only problem is that the claims process isn't really like regular law. It's a bureaucracy with layers and layers of procedures and regulations. So, I think adding attorneys, who after all get paid by the hour, to the initial claims process would only serve to bog the system down further, and to take money away from the veterans.
The attorneys would be compensated most likely from the back pay of the veterans (those 2 to 10 year waits for disability). Unfortunately the VA pays no interest on that back pay. So once again the veteran would be screwed.
I agree that with the number of severely disabled veterans returning from this misguided war the system needs to be fixed. I am just not optimistic that anyone cares enough to try.
I'll bet you Haliburton gets paid very promptly. But then they are well-connected aren't they? Not suffering from traumatic brain injury and PTSD like many of the Iraq vets.
Post a Comment
<< Home