Category: Veterans’ Affairs Department

Preston sends us this video in which the media notices what we’ve all known and been complaining about for years – that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs isn’t living up to it’s name;

At NBC, they quote Paul Reickhoff and Republican Jeff Miller as they call for president Obama to get personally involved in the process. My question is this; what in Obama’s past makes them think that 1) he’s at all interested in veterans, and 2) he can do anything to clear the logjam.

They need someone with a history of successful personnel management to kick some ass at the Veterans’ Affairs Department. Shinseki was a failure as a general, and there was no indication that he’d be successful at this job, and I’d remind Reickhoff that he was emoting in his jeans about Shinseki’s appointment initially, while we warned that he was a walking abortion. Everyday, this situation gets worse and the longer veterans wait to get into the system, the more veterans are lost.

Today, House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller, R-FL called for the resignations of top officials at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs for their “utter failure” at overcoming backlogs and incompetence, says the Stars & Stripes;

“There are many people losing patience as we continue to hear the same excuses from VA about increased workload and increased complexity of claims,” Miller said at a hearing Wednesday. “Without better workload or surge capacity planning, I fear that VA is simply one national mission away from complete collapse and utter failure.”

Nearly 900,000 veterans compensation and disability claims are currently pending with the department, and about 630,000 of those have been in the system for more than four months.

That backlog has steadily worsened over the last few years, despite VA promises last summer that the numbers would improve by now and the department’s stated goal of erasing the overdue claims in 2015.

The official who was addressing was Allison Hickey the VA’s top benefit advisor and her response was that 2013 is the year the whole system is going to turn around – you know, like 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009 were the years the whole system was going to turn around. This fish rotted from the head down. There are enough Chinese-made black berets that will fix this problem, so Shinseki has been out of his depth from the beginning. If there are any resignations due to veterans, it has to start with Shinseki.

As I’ve said before, I’m no fan of Joe Klein, but lately, he’s been hitting on all cylinders in regards to the troops and the veterans. Today is no different. He criticizes Eric Shinseki – the guy I’ve been publicly criticizing for more than 12 years. I think it’s because he’s a complete dumbass who doesn’t have a clue as to why things do and don’t work, beginning with the Black Berets, oh so long ago. Klein is nicer;

When was the last time you saw Shinseki say or do anything in public? He is universally regarded as an exemplary man. But even his supporters say he’s old-school military, stoic, wary of the press. And his detractors, who are legion among the generation of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, say he lacks the creativity and leadership skills to deal with Veterans Affairs’ mind-boggling problems, like the 900,000 unprocessed disability cases. In any event, he has been in office for four years, and the problems our veterans face are worse than ever–and about to get still worse as the military demobilizes tens of thousands of additional troops in the next few years. It is time for him to step down.

To be sure, the problems are not all Shinseki’s fault. There’s been a lot of flag-waving and patriotic blather from politicians, but there’s also been a scandalous absence of action.

Klein left out the millions of dollars wasted on lavish parties disguised as “training” at the VA. The scads of phonies who we’ve uncovered who were drawing VA pensions. The hundreds of undiscovered phony POWs that the Department refuses to investigate. And there’s Joe Cryer who I’ve submitted to the VA as a phony no less than four times still drawing a pension for PTS on his non-existent mission into Libya. Not to mention the veterans who need help and just aren’t getting it from the VA. Every month, there seems to be a scandal about the VA losing thousands of veterans personally identifiable information or hundreds of veterans infected by a careless employee.

Earlier this month, when there was a rumor being passed around the internet about Veterans’ Affairs coming for our gun rights, did anyone hear anything from the VA? Nope they left it up to me and TSO to spread the word that they weren’t. Buy me a beer sometime and I’ll tell you the whole story.

Shinseki is captain of a rudderless ship careening around the oceans with no direction, and Klein is correct, he needs to go and a real leader needs to take the helm.

Steven Coughlin, a formerly an epidemiologist for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs testified to members of Congress yesterday that the Office of Public Health “hides or obscures research findings on veterans exposed to environmental toxins and hazards going as far back as the Persian Gulf War” according to Bryant Jordan at Military.com;

“On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible,” he told the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Coughlin said his former office never released findings of a $10 million study that produced data on 60,000 Iraq and Afghan war vets – of which up to 30 percent were Gulf War vets – that revealed exposures to pesticides, oil well fires and more.

He said the results of a congressionally mandated study on Gulf War veterans and their family members also was never released, and claims he was advised that “these results have been permanently lost.”

“Anything that supports the position that Gulf War illness is a neurological condition is unlikely to ever be published,” he said. One of Couglin’s former supervisors, Dr. Aaron Schneiderman, threatened retaliation against him after he balked at the idea of deliberately leaving out certain relevant data in a research project, Coughlin said.

Well, of course it can’t be neurological condition – the VA would rather hire psychiatrists than doctors;

Victoria Davey, chief of the VA’s public health and environmental hazards office, told lawmakers that the office follows strict guidelines in analyzing and publishing its work. However, but she never directly addressed Coughlin’s allegations.

In a statement released after the hearing on Wednesday, the VA said VA Secretary Erik Shinseki has ordered the VA’s Office of Research Oversight to review Coughlin’s claims, including the alleged threat.

Shinseki does an awful lot of closing barndoors after the horses are out. So his statement says that the agency doesn’t punish whistleblowers, but I’ve gotten email from DVA employees who have been critical of practices in the VA and have been told in no uncertain terms that their jobs might be in danger if they continued.

Yesterday, someone sent us a link to a post at Red Flag News about a letter that’s going out to some veterans in regards to the finding that they are not considered competent enough to handle their own financial affairs and that the VA reporting their names to the NICS system for background checks. I made a snap judgement yesterday by reading the overblown description of the letter by the blogger, who claims to be a lawyer, and guessed that the post was bullshit. Today he has posted the actual letter and here’s the relevant paragraph;

So, this is how TSO explains it;

If a guy is to the point where he’s having problems with his finances, the VA (usually under a request from the family) will put a vet in for Guardianship. Again, this is *usually* but not always a request from the family. It wouldn’t be everyone with PTSD, not everyone even at 100%. But what it does is allows VA to pay the family, who in turn has to pay the guys/gals bills. Different things kick in then to ensure the money is appropriately spent. That also is fraught with trouble.

Now, at that time the vet can ask for a hearing, provide evidence, and do all the other happy Due Process stuff.

The change here is that this didn’t automatically send the names to NICS. And in my opinion is probably unconstitutional. The NICS statutes say that the person has to be a threat to himself or others. But the Guardianship thing in VA regs doesn’t say that, only that they are incompetent with regards to handling their money. For years we’ve kept the VA from reporting those names because of the differences. Seemingly they have changed that now. There is a bill to correct that.

For what it’s worth, Shinseki has said that the VA is not reporting those veterans to the NICS system, this seems to be a change in procedure. But the letter, despite the breathless reporting by this lawyer dude at the blog, explains to the veteran to whom the letter is addressed how to avoid being ruled incompetent.

By the way, I looked up the cite from 18 USC 942(a)(2) which merely refers to 18 USC 922(a)(6) which, in turn says you can’t lie when you buy a gun – so all of that legal crap doesn’t say anything we don’t know and it has nothing to do with being a mentally incapacitated veteran.

But, basically, what the letter doesn’t say is that the VA is disarming veterans arbitrarily. Don’t let this letter be the reason you don’t go to the VA to get the treatment you need and earned. I doubt very much that any of you are being supervised by a fiduciary, anyway. And I’m sure if one of you had got this letter, I would have had a copy by now.

By the way Tom Coburn and The American Legion is working to get the law changed. The article from 2007 shows that this issue is with the VA not with Obama since TAL has been fighting the law since pre-Obama days.

 

TSO ADDS:

Like Jonn said, I’ve been involved in this issue for 10 years, so it’s not an “Obama thing.”  This predates him even being elected to the Senate. 

I don’t think I have ever done this, but I wanted to include a comment from Twitchy from “Gothguy.”  I hope he doesn’t mind, but he said EVERYTHING that I would have said, and about 30 times more eloquently.  PLEASE READ IT BEFORE HYPERVENTILATING. 

Folks,

Having dealt with this extensively when I was a Veterans Advocate, a little clarification is needed. This is not something new, and the VA is not in the gun grabbing business.

What he (the author) has written is misleading on a couple of points (actually, more than a couple). Not just ‘someone in the VA’ can declare a veteran incompetent, the veteran must be diagnosed by a doctor as incompetent during an examination. Once that has happened, the VA does a proposed decision, notifying the veteran of the proposed incompetency, and details with specifics the reason(s) why the proposal is being done.  They don’t just get a letter, and it’s a done deal.

The veteran is given 60 days to submit medical evidence as to why the proposal should be overturned. It is a fact that during that 60 day period, the veteran cannot appeal the decision, because the decision hasn’t been finalized, it’s only a proposal or pending decision. Even if the veteran cannot get a letter or statement or other evidence during that time period and the proposal goes into effect, he or she can still appeal that decision, and the VA advises him or her of the appeal process.

I would advise the veteran to get in touch with their doctor and get a statement from him or her stating that the veteran is not incompetent, submit it to the VA, and the proposal would be rescinded.

Further, the author cites the 5th Amendment, well, again, it’s misleading the way he wrote this. The veteran is free to submit evidence, request a pre-determination hearing before being declared incompetent to handle his or her affairs, and trust me, I have participated in those hearing many times over 16 years, and have won virtually all of them prior to the final determination. No 5th Amendment rights are violated.

Also, the author again cites that some nameless person would be appointed by the VA to handle the veterans’ financial affairs. Not true. If the veteran is declared incompetent after all avenues have been exhausted, in virtually all cases, a family member is appointed, and the veteran can even request that a friend be appointed. The VA will interview these people to make sure they understand and agree to be appointed the fiduciary. The only time an outside fiduciary is appointed is if no family member or friend is willing to do it, and that person or agency the VA appoints have under gone extensive background checks, credit checks, etc., and have been approved by the VA.

The VA also has what is called the ‘Guardianship Unit’, which constantly monitors the fiduciaries to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to do.

Finally, the author attempts to make this appear widespread, and that is simply not the case. And, even if a veteran has been declared incompetent for years, he or she can always have that decision overturned…seen it…done it.

And trust me, there are some veterans that are so whacked out mentally, that even I wouldn’t want them to have access to a firearm.

As a disabled veteran, Patriot, and as an American, I am a huge advocate of the 2nd Amendment, but what the author wrote is simply scare mongering, and it does a disservice to veterans.

If anyone knows ANY VETERAN who has been adjudicated as incompetant to handle his fiduciary stuff, but who isn’t absolytely BATSHIT crazy (and/or) who hasn’t threatened to kill themselves or others, than contact us. Seriously. I looked for months and months, and never found one. I’d find someone who was almost perfect, and then we’d find out how he threatened to kill his mom or himself. If you know an actual person that shouldn’t have had this happen, JUST CONTACT US.