Long...but interesting...

[1stbn27]

Date: Sun Mar 6, 2005 5:51 am
Subject: Fw: Former VA Secretary Principi, and VA Claims


ADVERTISEMENT



----- Original Message -----
From: Robert White
To: VeteranIssues-owner@yahoogroups.com ;
Sent: Saturday, March 05, 2005 9:14 PM
Subject: Former VA Secretary Principi, and VA Claims


From: Ray B. Davis, Jr.
Dear Readers,

President Bush intends to nominate former VA Secretary Principi to
the "Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission". Below my name
is the entire press release.

Also the Knight-Ridder newspapers will publish an article Sunday
03/06/05 titled:
"VA's red tape squelches veterans' long-overdue disability claims
By Chris Adams and Alison Young". (see below the white house press
release.)

Your Editor,
Ray B Davis, Jr.
http://www.valaw.org

-- White House Press Release --

The President intends to nominate Anthony Joseph Principi, of
California, to be a Member of the Defense Base Closure and
Realignment Commission. Upon confirmation, the President will
designate him Chairman. Mr. Principi currently serves as Vice
President of the Pfizer Corporation. He recently served as Secretary
of Veterans Affairs. Prior to joining the Administration, he was
president of QTC Medical Services, Inc. Earlier in his career, Mr.
Principi served in the United States Senate as Republican chief
counsel and staff director of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs and
as counsel to the chairman of the Committee on Armed Services. A
combat-decorated Vietnam veteran, he first saw active duty aboard the
destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy, and later served with the River
Patrol Force on the Mekong Delta. Mr. Principi graduated from the
United States Naval Academy and later received his J.D. from Seton
Hall University.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...050304-11.html

-- Knight-Ridder article on VA claims --

VA's red tape squelches veterans' long-overdue disability claims
By Chris Adams and Alison Young (Knight-Ridder news)


Like thousands of his fellow veterans of America's wars, Alfred Brown
died waiting.

In 1945, when he was a 19-year-old soldier fighting in Italy,
shrapnel from an enemy shell ripped into his abdomen. His wounds were
so severe that he was twice administered last rites. When Brown came
home, the government that had promised to care for its wounded
veterans instead shorted him.

Not until 1981, however, did Brown realize that his monthly
disability check didn't cover all the injuries he'd suffered. He
launched what would become a 21-year battle.

"As a member of the so-called `Greatest Generation,' I am well aware
of the large numbers of us passing away," he wrote the nation's chief
veterans judge in 2001. "I am prepared to meet our Creator. My fear
is that your court will not make a decision in my case."

Brown was right. He died a year later, and his case died with him. As
he closed the books on the case, Judge Kenneth Kramer acknowledged
that Brown might have been right all along. Had Brown not died, the
judge wrote, "I believe that the Court would likely have so held."

Tens of thousands of other veterans have returned from war only to
find that they have to fight their own government to win the
disability payments they're owed. A Knight Ridder investigation has
found that injured soldiers who petition the U.S.

Department of Veterans Affairs for those payments are often doomed by
lengthy delays, hurt by inconsistent rulings and failed by the
veterans representatives who try to help them.

The investigation is based on interviews with veterans and their
families from around the country and on a review of internal VA
documents and computerized databases that had never been released to
the public. Many of the records were made available only after Knight
Ridder sued the agency in federal court.

The VA is a mammoth agency that serves 25 million veterans with a far-
flung health care system and a separate disability and pension
operation. The agency spends more than $60 billion a year, at least
$20 billion of it on disability compensation.

But the Knight Ridder investigation found that the VA serves neither
taxpayers nor veterans well. Some veterans never get what they're
due, while antiquated regulations mean that others are paid for
disabilities that have little effect on their ability to hold jobs or
aren't related to their military service.

For America's veterans, plus the thousands of soldiers now returning
from Iraq and Afghanistan, the investigation identified three points
where cases often go wrong: the selection of a special representative
called a veterans service officer, the review by a regional VA office
and the filing of an appeal.

Among Knight Ridder's findings:

Many of the VA-accredited experts who help veterans with their cases
receive minimal training and are rarely tested to ensure their
competence. These veterans service officers work for nonprofit
organizations such as the American Legion, as well as states and
counties, but their quality is uneven, and that often means the
difference between a successful claim and a botched one.

The VA's network of 57 regional offices produces wildly inconsistent
results, which means that a veteran in St. Paul, Minn., for example,
is likely to receive different treatment and more generous disability
checks than one from Detroit.

Veterans face lengthy delays if they appeal the VA's decisions. The
average wait is nearly three years, and many veterans wait 10 years
for a final ruling. In the past decade, several thousand veterans
died before their cases were resolved, according to an analysis of VA
data.

"How a veteran seeking benefits gets treated should not be an
accident of geography," said George Basher, the director of the New
York State Division of Veterans' Affairs, one of 50 state agencies
that help veterans. "Unfortunately, the current system makes that a
virtual certainty."

In interviews late last year, then-VA Secretary Anthony Principi and
other VA officials admitted to many of the agency's shortcomings, but
they said things have gotten better since the Bush administration
took over. "This agency was underwater in 2001," Principi said. "My
people have made tremendous progress."

The current secretary, Robert James "Jim" Nicholson, who was sworn in
recently, had no comment.

There have been some improvements in the last three years. But when
it comes to delays, cases that need to be redone and backlogs, things
are the same or worse than they were in the 1990s, Knight Ridder
found, when the agency vowed to clean up its act.

For the family of Kentucky veteran Alfred Brown, that decade brought
nothing but frustration. If a decision had come before he died, Brown
could have been entitled to nearly 45 years of back pay, his attorney
said. Based on VA payment rates, that would have been worth about
$30,000.

"It wasn't so much the money," said his son Clayton Brown, on a day
when he visited his father's grave north of Lexington. "He felt he
was robbed. He almost gave his life up, and this is what he was
getting in return?"

VA workers are reminded daily of the pledge by Abraham Lincoln "...
to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow
and his orphan ."

But the task isn't as simple as it used to be.

The VA makes disability payments for injuries as obvious as an
amputated leg and as complex as post-traumatic stress disorder. They
include combat wounds and peacetime injuries, since veterans are
serving their country whether they're in a Humvee in Iraq or in boot
camp. Veterans are given ratings from zero to 100 depending on how
severe their disabilities are. Payments for a single veteran range
from $108 to $2,299 a month, and they're supposed to reflect the
vet's lost earnings potential.

But, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the
disability payments are based on 60-year-old labor-market
assumptions. So veterans who have desk jobs in today's service and
information economy can draw checks based on the fact their
disabilities would keep them from good manufacturing jobs.

The system stems from a time when war injuries were often less
complex. Today's soldier faces mental illnesses unacknowledged two
generations ago, as well as wounds that were often fatal in earlier
wars.

Beyond that are tough fiscal realities. The Congressional Budget
Office has already indicated that the VA could save significantly if
it eliminated new payments for certain diseases not connected to
military service. While most payments can be linked directly to
service, veterans also can qualify merely if they're diagnosed soon
after their military service.

The GAO offered one example: A Navy veteran was hospitalized with a
heart condition three months after his induction. Although the
disease had its inception in childhood, the veteran eventually
received disability payments based on the VA's highest rating. In
all, the VA pays nearly $1 billion a year for disabilities that the
GAO says generally aren't directly linked to veterans' service in the
military.

Many veterans' cases go bad even before they file claims.

Applying for disability benefits requires veterans to navigate a
labyrinth of bureaucratic rules and unforgiving deadlines. It can
require the skill of an investigator and the mind of a physician.

That's why national veterans groups have for decades provided free
help. About 40 veterans service organizations, such as the American
Legion and Disabled American Veterans, are authorized to handle VA
claims, as are many states.

But Knight Ridder found that the network of VA-accredited service
officers is a patchwork of well-meaning helpers whose training and
expertise vary widely. Contrary to its own regulations, the VA does
little to ensure that veterans receive competent representation from
veterans service organizations. Yet the agency prohibits vets from
hiring their own attorneys until after their claims have been denied
and they're generally years into the appeals process.

Two-thirds of the veterans who submit claims use service officers,
and picking the right one can determine whether they get the full
payment they're due, a fraction of it or nothing.

"The best advocates can be very good and lousy ones can be awful,"
said Ron Abrams, the joint executive director of the National
Veterans Legal Services Program, which trains service officers for
the American Legion and other veterans groups.

New evidence from Washington state illustrates for the first time the
odds veterans face in this service officer roulette.

Since July 2003, the Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs
has tracked the outcome of every claim filed by veterans groups that
receive state funding. The groups' success rates range from 53
percent to 81 percent. Among the busiest individual service officers,
those handling 30 or more decided claims, the success rates can range
from 35 percent to 98 percent, the state's data show.

"You might be proud of the fact you filed 100 claims. But if pretty
much everything you filed was denied, it would cause some concern,"
said John Lee, the department's deputy director.

The percentage of the Washington groups' claims being granted is on
the rise - from about 50 percent overall when the program began to
about 70 percent in recent months. Lee attributes it to the
accountability the program requires.

Although they fought the effort for years, the state's politically
powerful veterans groups now see its merit, and they've changed their
training and oversight as a result. The program is "an invaluable
tool to see exactly what the strengths and weaknesses are across the
state," said Court Fraley, the Veterans of Foreign Wars state service
director.

Veterans officials in other states said such performance disparities
are certain to exist nationally because the training of service
officers is so inconsistent.

That's not the way it's supposed to be.

The VA, through its national accreditation program, is supposed to
ensure that all service officers are "responsible" and "qualified."
But the VA program does little more than rubberstamp names submitted
by veterans groups. About 11,000 service officers are currently on
the VA's roster - about 80 percent are accredited through nonprofit
groups.

VA regulatory files, obtained after Knight Ridder's lawsuit, reveal
that the agency has done little in decades to determine the adequacy
of the training provided by veterans groups or to check the quality
of the claims prepared by their officers. Only rarely does the VA
suspend or revoke a service officer's accreditation. When it does
happen, it's generally the result of criminal charges rather than
incompetence.

"What we do is take it on the word of the service organization that
the individual has had sufficient training," said Martin Sendek of
the VA's general counsel's office.

That training, however, varies widely, according to a Knight Ridder
survey of 13 of the largest veterans groups and all 50 state veterans
departments. At one end of the spectrum is Disabled American
Veterans, which has full-time paid national service officers and a 16-
month training and testing program that's so regimented that it
qualifies for 10 hours of college credit.

Groups such as American Ex-Prisoners of War and Catholic War Veterans
rely largely on part-time volunteers who aren't required to complete
any courses or pass any tests. "We don't get paid, so we're not going
to be that strict with these people," said Doris Jenks, the national
training director for American Ex-Prisoners of War.

Nonprofits generally have less stringent requirements for service
officers than those working for the 33 state veterans agencies that
responded to the survey.

Just 62 percent of nonprofits and 73 percent of the state agencies
require continuing education for all service officers, something
experts consider crucial given the VA's constantly changing rules.

Only 38 percent of nonprofits and 67 percent of states require a test
before recommending that the VA accredit a representative. And once
accredited, few service officers are ever tested to ensure their
competence: While 27 percent of the states require later testing,
only one nonprofit, Disabled American Veterans, had that requirement.

VA officials bristled at suggestions that their oversight of
accredited service officers is lax and said they're unaware of any
systemic problems. Retired Vice Adm. Daniel Cooper, the VA's
undersecretary for benefits, said the VA fixes any mistakes that
service officers might make. If anything needs to be done to make an
application complete, Cooper said, "we do it."

General counsel Tim McClain noted that veterans have extensive appeal
rights. "There are a lot of checks and balances in the system," he
said.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, however, has
repeatedly ruled that veterans are out of luck when they've been
steered wrong by VA-accredited service officers.

Ask Gerry Corwin.

As the navigator aboard a B-24 bomber during World War II, Corwin
survived more than 30 missions over Japanese-controlled waters. He
came home to Minneapolis with two Air Medals - and disabling
nightmares and flashbacks.

There were images of his buddies burning in planes crashed on runways
and of a friend killed on a mission that Corwin persuaded him to
take. By December 1984, those nightmares began to overtake the TV
executive.

Corwin applied for disability benefits and was denied, in part
because the VA couldn't find many of his military records, which had
burned in a 1973 fire at a national archive in St. Louis.

So Corwin went to the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs and
enlisted the help of Kirk Jones, a service officer who'd become VA-
accredited a year earlier through his state and the American Legion.

Jones submitted a three-sentence letter on Corwin's behalf and didn't
take any steps to prove Corwin's claim. He didn't, for example, push
for a psychiatric examination from the VA. He didn't round up
statements from Corwin's crew to corroborate that they'd been sent
home in May 1945 for "combat fatigue."

"I should have suggested a VA examination," Jones, who no longer is a
service officer, said recently. He acknowledged that he'd had minimal
training when he first handled Corwin's claim.

That 1984 claim went nowhere.

In 1995, Jones, who by then had gained extensive experience plus
classroom training, restarted Corwin's claim. He did all the things
he hadn't done a decade earlier, and more.

This time, Jones helped Corwin win compensation for post-traumatic
stress disorder and a heart problem. Jones filed several appeals, and
each time the VA granted more benefits, eventually declaring Corwin
totally disabled in 1998.

Even so, the veterans court ruled last summer that Corwin can't
collect back pay from 1984-1995 because the proper documents weren't
filed in 1986 to keep his original claim alive.

Corwin's loss is tens of thousands of dollars, he and his lawyer
estimate.

"It would mean a home. Let's start with that," said Corwin, 82, who
with his wife, Katherine, has been living in a house her family owns
in rural Mississippi.

"To have to come back and to fight 20 years to get what you're
supposed to be given, and to fight your own government for it, is
disappointing," he said.

Even when a service officer does a good job, veterans' claims often
get bogged down in the VA's 57 regional offices, where veterans'
claims are processed.

In an electronic age, these regional offices are a throwback to an
ink-and-paper world. In Waco, Texas, the records room is almost the
length of a football field, with row after row of file cabinets -
2,700 in all - containing records that date back six decades.

Workers wheel massive brown folders with rubber bands around them
around on carts, shifting them from one table to the next as they
move through the approval process. In the constant shuffle of paper,
things get lost and mistakes get made.

Nationwide, errors are made in 13 percent of claims, more than three
times the agency's hoped-for rate of 4 percent, according to a VA
quality-control database that reviews a sample of the decisions. That
translates to 103,000 errors a year; in many cases they can result in
either an overpayment or an underpayment of benefits.

"I don't think anybody is proud of the fact that we have" a 13
percent error rate, said Michael Walcoff, who oversees the agency's
regional offices. Errors often trigger appeals, sending thousands of
veterans into an ongoing cycle of mistakes, appeals, rehearings,
mistakes, appeals, rehearings.

In some regional offices, the error rate last year was far worse - as
high as 23 percent in Wilmington, Del. (The low was 3 percent, in Des
Moines, Iowa.) And such varied performances affect nearly every
aspect of a veteran's experience:

The percentage of all types of claims that are approved ranges from
89 percent in St. Paul to less than 70 percent in Jackson, Miss., and
Cheyenne, Wyo., according to an annual VA survey of veterans.
Perhaps not surprisingly, "satisfaction" among veterans is highest in
St. Paul, at 73 percent, compared with 50 percent in Atlanta.
Knight Ridder found that disability ratings, which determine the size
of a veteran's monthly check, also vary widely.

An analysis of 3.4 million veterans claims shows that major mental
ailments, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia,
are subject to bigger regional swings than major physical ailments
such as bad backs and knees. For example, veterans with PTSD assigned
to the Wilmington office are more likely to have the highest
disability rating than their counterparts in Lincoln, Neb. In
Delaware, 34 percent of those with PTSD have the highest rating; in
Lincoln, it's 10 percent.

Diagnosing mental disorders is more subjective, and parts of the
country have been slow to recognize them. Different training
standards in the past may also have contributed to regional VA
differences.

Because the major psychiatric disabilities on average pay more than
the major physical ones, the wider swings have a dramatic impact on
veterans' payments. The different ratings may help explain a puzzle
noticed by veterans every time the VA releases its annual report:
Average disability checks vary by state.

The VA wouldn't comment on Knight Ridder's analysis but said in a
statement that it's investigating regional differences, which it
attributed to "extremely complex" factors. The agency "is committed
to treating every veteran's claim fairly and equitably" and has
nationwide training programs to help eliminate uneven treatment.

The GAO last year reported that the VA "cannot provide reasonable
assurance that similarly situated veterans who submit claims for the
same impairment to different regional offices receive reasonably
consistent decisions."

The final minefield is the VA appeals system, where claims often
linger.

It's a problem the VA recognizes. "It takes too long. We all agree on
that," said Ron Garvin, acting chairman of the Board of Veterans'
Appeals.

With the average disability payment now $7,860 a year, back-benefit
awards can be substantial because an award is calculated as though
the VA made the right decision when the claim was first filed. Some
veterans with severe disabilities win $100,000 or more.

But if a veteran dies with his or her case under appeal, the case
dies, too. In the past decade, more than 13,700 veterans died while
their cases were in some stage of the appeals process, according to a
Knight Ridder analysis of a VA appeals records database. (While
precise estimates aren't available, the VA said experience suggests a
few thousand of them wouldn't have actively pursued their appeals.)

Even if a veteran wins a case but dies before receiving payment, his
family is often out of luck. Unless the veteran had an eligible
spouse or dependent child, the money stays in the U.S. Treasury.

The agency goes so far as to take back money it's already paid.
George Wilkes, a World War II sailor, spent the last five years of
his life fighting to increase his disability rating, which stemmed
from a spinal cord injury. In April 1997, the VA agreed with him and
said he was due back benefits of $109,464.

Wilkes, ill with pneumonia, died four days later. Six days after
that, the VA wired the money into his bank account.

Once the VA realized Wilkes had died, it wouldn't let his family keep
the money. Although he had no immediate family, Wilkes' nephew and
niece had tended to him for years, allowing him to stay in his New
Orleans home.

Had the money come years earlier, it "would have had a substantial
impact on his life," said nephew Ray Wilkes of Covington, La. "His
house was pretty deplorable and was deteriorating. But he was
determined to live on his own."

In an October interview, then-Secretary Principi said he was "stung"
when he learned a few years ago how common it is for veterans to die
with their cases in limbo. While some deaths are inevitable, given
the VA's elderly clientele, "it's not acceptable," he said. "We need
to do something about it."

He also suggested that a recently formed commission on benefits could
reconsider the legal barriers that prevent heirs other than a wife or
dependent child from receiving a deceased veteran's back benefits.

The VA has admitted that its processes are too slow and too prone to
errors. And veterans have told the agency that they suspect the
worst: that the agency is "just stalling, waiting for them to die so
the claim won't have to be paid," veterans said in focus groups in
1995.

But the agency has repeatedly ignored recommendations to eliminate
redundant steps in the process to speed things up. One exhaustive
review, completed in 1996, declared the entire claims and appeals
process "cumbersome and outmoded" and in need of an overhaul.

Since then, "I think things are basically the same," said the
agency's Walcoff. "I wouldn't say that we have changed the system in
any major way."

In fact, VA data show that delays and the percentage of cases being
sent back for re-hearings are basically unchanged since the agency
vowed to reduce them.

In the mid-1990s, about the time it promised to speed things up, the
VA also denied Berlie Bowman's claim.

Bowman had gone to Vietnam in 1967, an outgoing kid following in his
father's military footsteps. "When he was drafted, he went without a
fuss," said his sister Paulette. "He was a different person when he
came back."

He was skittish, quick to anger, uneasy in crowds. The family trod
warily around him - "learned to wake him from a distance by touching
his feet with something," his VA file said. Over three decades, he
ran through 30 jobs; he lived in a small trailer on a curvy North
Carolina road.

His first disability claim, in 1971 for "nerves," was denied. His
second try, in 1995, met a similar fate.

But that time, Bowman pushed back.

Working with an attorney, he assembled evidence to show that he had
post-traumatic stress disorder and to document that it had started in
Vietnam. The case wound up and down the system, receiving six
different rulings, until Bowman fell ill with pancreatic cancer.

On June 16, 2004, the Board of Veterans' Appeals finally agreed with
Bowman's claim. It declared that "credible supporting evidence"
showed that Bowman suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder
caused by his time in Vietnam, just as Bowman had contended for nine
years.

Bowman's attorney immediately pestered the VA for Bowman's back
benefits, dating to 1995. By then, Bowman's cancer treatment had been
stopped.

On June 21, attorney Dan Krasnegor or his assistant talked with the
VA every two hours. On June 22, they were told that the official
disability rating was complete and that only final signatures were
needed before Bowman's check for $53,784 could be cut. "Oh, it's in
the computer system," they were told.

Berlie Bowman died that night, and his claim died with him. No check
was sent.

At his burial, Bowman's mother accepted a smartly folded American
flag from the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Seventeen old soldiers stood
in formation in the rain. A bugler played taps; riflemen splintered
the silence with a three-gun salute.

"The march of our comrade Berlie Bowman is over," intoned the VFW's
chaplain.

Editors:The following copy block describes the VA's goals for claims
processing:

The VA has repeatedly reset its goals for how efficiently it handles
veterans' claims. One of its critical measures is the time necessary
to decide an initial claim for disability benefits. At one time in
the mid-1990s, the VA had a long-term goal to process claims in 60
days. It later increased that to 74 days, and then to 90 days.
Average processing time instead ballooned to 223 days by 2002 before
coming down slightly.

Last spring, the VA told Congress it was "on track" to reach a
processing time of 100 days by the end of 2004. It didn't reach that
target; today, the actual time stands at 165 days.

The agency recently changed its long-term goal again, to 125 days.
The increased goals, the VA said, are due to changes in the law and
the nature of claims currently being received.

[catman]

Dane...thanks for posting this. It was the front page story here in Minneapolis today. Damn sad state of affairs.

Trav