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Nearly 900,000 claims for veterans compensation and pension filed by our nation’s 23 million veterans were pending as of last fall, and the numbers are only going up according to a story in The New York Times published in September. It is an article worth a read, because it discusses the problem that vets know all too well….years of waiting, lost documents, needless denials and appeals. These claims are filed by less than 5% of our nation’s veterans, yet the growing VA bureaucracy cannot keep up. It is scary to think of what the sequester might to do the staffing at the Department of Veterans Affairs and how it will impact the backlog.
Click here to read the full article
Related articles
- VA backlog continues to mount; no clear solutions in sight (stripes.com)
- Veterans have waited at least a year on claims (newsobserver.com)
- Want to See How VA is Doing Processing Disability Claims? Check Out this Map (theveteransdisabilitylawfirm.com)
- Lawmakers: why delay for vets’ benefits (newsnet5.com)
- TV Report: Florida VA Office One of the Worst (theveteransdisabilitylawfirm.com)
Thankfully, the sequester is said to have no effect on the VA so far. Many of these 900,000 cases are multiple claims by a single person. There are some people that start a claim, only to find out from a buddy or some other source that they can make a claim for this or that, so they call and start another. Sadly, with the influx of vets showing late stage effects of Agent Orange, (of which there are many and the research continues to find more diagnoses related to it), the system will continue to get backed up. General Shinseki can only be partially blamed, if at all, for this. The lack of a network that is somewhat reliable and uniform throughout the VA is major roadblock for everyone. I don’t mean to say that the people involved don’t have an impact on this by either dragging their feet or just being a pain in the butt because they can, but from an outside perspective it is easy to condemn and curse all of the employees because of the few, when the majority of them are doing the best they can with an archaic system while their work continues to stack up.
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John – great information and so much of it applies to my (our) case. James O. King