Category: Veterans’ Affairs Department

In a hearing yesterday, representative Jeff Miller of Florida in a Veterans Affairs Committee hearing asked the Department of Veterans’ Affairs “WTF, over” (my words);

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said the extra funding and effort by the Department of Veterans Affairs seems to be going toward more bureaucracy and not better care for veterans. That’s particularly concerning with the wave of Iraq and Afghanistan servicemembers expected to reach the department in coming years.

“The true measure of success with respect to mental health care is not how many people are hired but how many people are helped,” he told VA officials during a hearing Wednesday. “It has become painfully clear to me that the VA is focused more on its process and not its outcomes.”

Of course, the VA came back with it’s usual;

Veterans Health Administration Undersecretary for Health Robert Petzel countered that the department is on the right path, but acknowledged they still have a daunting task ahead.

They’re always on the right path, but they’re not motivated enough to move forward on that path in this electronic age, the same age that has passed by the Post Office is now shooting ahead of the VA, apparently.

Earlier this week, department officials announced they have hired more than 1,280 clinical providers and support staff to new posts in the last five months, part of an effort to add 1,900 new mental health specialists.

They’ve also filled 1,980 vacant mental health positions since last summer, and increased the number of crisis workers and phone lines. In a statement, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki said the moves mean that “we can treat more veterans and provide greater access to our mental health services.”

So you “can” treat more veterans, but I think this question remains unanswered; “why aren’t you treating more veterans?”

Still clinging to the myth that Veterans’ Affairs in on the right track to clearing their backlog, Eric “Black Beret” Shinseki, along with Leon Panetta, announced yesterday that the Department of Defense will be doing a better job of handing off veterans to the DVA to help the army of bureaucrats who are busy handing out benefits to liars and fakes clear the backlog of claims according to Stars & Stripes.

Panetta and Shinseki said better medical information on veterans before they leave the military will simplify claims later on, hopefully speeding up the process.

VA officials said the extra information will be especially helpful with severely wounded servicemembers, who often have multiple injuries and much more complicated paperwork.

I don’t why they think this is new. It’s exactly what happened to me when I retired in 1994. The Army gave me a complete physical and sent the records to the VA and a few months later, I went to do a physical with the VA and a few months later, my benefits were approved. So, basically, they’re just going to do what they should have been doing all along.

VA Secretary Eric Shinseki said those efforts, combined with earlier department initiatives to create express service for simple claims and highly trained processing teams for complex ones, will help ease the problem in 2013 and keep the agency on track to eliminate the backlog by the end of 2015.

Everyone who thinks that the DVA can off their ass and clear the backlog of records that they accumulated over the last four years in the next three years, raise your hands…yeah, me neither.

FrostyCWO send us another link to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ growing backlog of claims from vets.. This link from NBC. I guess now that they got their guy elected, they can start criticizing his incompetent deputies;

VA Secretary Eric Shinseki earlier this year vowed to shrink the so-called “VA backlog” to 125 days by 2015 as the agency finishes transitioning to a digital processing system.

Despite that promise, the claims-completion gap has expanded steadily during the past year. The VA’s benefits-aspiration web page shows the average claims-processing time was 223 days in October 2011, 246 days in April 2012, 257 days in July and 260 days in August. In fact, the backlog has doubled in size since 2008, congressional members report.

The agency called its widening claims backlog “unacceptable” but said it is taking steps to try to fix that problem.

“VA has completed a record-breaking 1 million claims per year the last three fiscal years. Yet too many Veterans have to wait too long to get the benefits they have earned and deserve,” the VA said in a statement emailed to NBC News on Tuesday. “That’s unacceptable, and VA is building a strong foundation for a paperless, digital disability claims system — a lasting solution that will transform how we operate and eliminate the claims backlog. This paperless technology is being deployed to 18 regional offices in 2012, and it will reach all 56 VA Regional Offices by the end of 2013 to help deliver faster, better decisions for Veterans.”

Oh, well, as long as their intentions are to do better, that makes it OK, I suppose. Now, as we’ve discussed before, the VA has hired tens of thousands of new employees to make the system work and it hasn’t. They’re in the midst of using a new information system which is late and isn’t helping.

All the while that they’re failing to do what they’re paid to do, veterans are slipping through the cracks. But all of that is “acceptable”. Nice.

Eric Shiseki was a miserable failure as a general, and now he’s a miserable failure as director of the Veterans’ Affairs Department. While Obama is contemplating moves in his cabinet, he should shove Shinseki through the door, too. He’s an incompetent boob, in fact an incompetent boob should be doing better than Shinseki has done.

McClatchy reports that which you probably thought was impossible – that claims processing at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs has slowed to a crawl. Despite promises by Beret King, Eric Shinseki, the backlog of claims has grown, while processing claims has, in fact, slowed;

The disability-processing time is closely watched by Congress and veterans’ advocates as a measure of VA efficiency. In fiscal 2012, the average days to complete a VA disability compensation or pension claim rose to 262 days, up from 188 days in fiscal 2011, according to a recently completely VA performance report.

The 262-day average is the highest that measure has been in at least the past 20 years for which numbers were available.

The VA’s long-term goal is to get the processing time to an average of 90 days.

But, keep your fingers crossed, the VA recognizes that there is a problem;

“We recognize that from the standpoint of the veterans, they are waiting too long, and that’s unacceptable,” said Diana Rubens, who helps oversee the VA’s regional offices. “We’ve got to transform how we do things. We know that fixing decades-old problems is not going to be easy.”

Horseshit. The problem isn’t decades-old. When I retired, it took about three months for my claim to run it’s course – and that was in the days before computers and their networks. Whatever happened to the system, happened recently.

I’ve never heard any of the criminals who don’t deserve VA treatment complain about the time it took to process their phony claims, only the folks who deserve VA attention. So, I guess their out-reach to phonies program is working just fine.

Tequila Volare sends us a link from the Atlanta Journal Constitution that recounts the battle that Veterans Affairs is having with their oversight committee on their irresponsible spending that is not helping veterans one whit;

“There is a culture at the VA that doesn’t put the veterans first,” complained Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX), who said videos of dancing bureaucrats in Orlando brought back memories of the GSA conference in Vegas.

“I don’t want you testifying about this kind of crap,” Flores told the VA’s Gould.

Of course, the battle is over the $6 million that DVA spent on training conferences last year, which we discussed earlier. The article says that the DVA has finally admitted that they spent $85.6 million on conferences last year, if I’m reading the article correctly, but the article is as convoluted as the DVA’s responses to 66 responses for the House Veterans’ Committee which has arrived at that number.

It seems to me that $85.6 million dollars would go a long ways to cleaning out the VA’s backlog of veterans’ claims, not that it matters, apparently, since it looks like Veteran Affairs has more to do with entertaining it’s employees than doing the business of veterans.

With the large number of phonies we’ve seen getting benefits they didn’t earn, I guess the DVA is more interested in rewarding everyone except veterans.

Adam Jose Cora met Robert Granger, a veteran, in jail. When Cora was released, Granger gave him his discharge papers which Cora used to scam $15,000 worth of medical treatment from a West Palm Beach VA facility, according to the Palm Beach Post. Cora’s scam was discovered when VA personnel noticed that they hadn’t been treating the guy in the photo they had on file;

After being arrested by Riviera Beach police on Wednesday, Cora admitted to using Granger’s identity to access medical care because he could not afford it elsewhere. Cora faces one charge of fraudulently obtaining services from a health care provider and one charge of criminal use of personal identification.

Officials at the hospital said they could not comment because the investigation was ongoing.

Mary Kay Hollingsworth, regional public affairs officer for the VA, said hospitals always ask a patient for a photo identification and input the biographical information into a national database to confirm the person is eligible for benefits. Hollingsworth added that they usually recommend veterans present their military discharge papers if their name is not found in the database.

But if a patient comes into the emergency room and needs immediate care, hospital officials will first make sure the patient is treated and stabilized, and then will verify the person’s eligibility.

I’m constantly amazed at how people off the street always find a way to get VA benefits, but tens of thousands of veterans are backlogged in the system.

Our buddy, Pete Hegseth of Concerned Veterans for America and Paul Rieckhoff founder and director of OpTruth/IAVA have a column in the Wall Street Journal today in regards to many of the things we’ve discussed here in the recent past about how the Department of Veterans Affairs claims to be doing great and wonderful things to help veterans with the DVA’s backlog of claims, but nothing really seems to be getting done;

The backlog in claims processing represents real men and women with serious needs who aren’t being served, after they have fought and sacrificed on behalf of our nation. Their stories are heartbreaking. For example, the CIR reports on a Marine veteran who suffered three concussions in combat and now experiences short-term memory loss so severe that he gets in the car and forgets where he’s going. He has been waiting for the VA to process his disability claim since November 2010.

Numbers spun by the department to feign change aren’t going to fix the VA’s endemic failures. Only urgent and dynamic transformation will.

Transformation like moving all disability claims to an electronic, customer-service-based model that processes claims quickly, efficiently and accurately. Today’s tech-savvy vets are returning home from combat to a bureaucracy still struggling to get out of the pencil-and-paper age.

Of course, I don’t have to tell most of you how badly they’re doing, since many of you have your cases sitting in a stack of files somewhere for more than two years. But at least Pete and that other guy are getting the problem some national exposure. Maybe enough exposure to get it a mention in the next Presidential debate.

StrikeFO Addition:

Brandon Friedman responds on Twitter. His Twitter bio now reads “former U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs” so I guess he jumped from the sinking ship.

 

The Stars & Stripes reports that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs won’t “further” punish Chief of Staff John Gingrich for his participation the recent scandal in which six million dollars were wasted on training conferences. By “further” punish, they mean not-at-all punish. It seems that Eric Shinseki merely scolded Gingrich for wasting the tax payers’ money.

In a statement late Tuesday, the department said that “Mr. Gingrich’s conduct has been addressed by the Secretary” and that a further review of other employees’ actions is underway. Gingrich received a mild rebuke from VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, who called Gingrich’s oversight of the conferences “inadequate.”

In our first post on the subject, I outlined some of the excessive and wasteful spending;

Among the more egregious expenses were $50,000 for a conference video parodying the move “Patton,” $98,000 for promotional items such as tote bags and thumb drives, $37,000 for questionable travel expenses for VA employees and $43,000 in extra pay for staff running the events.

Like I said in the first place, Shinseki was acting like he was sorry that Gingrich and his minions got caught, and this proves it.

In the Inspector General’s report, Gingrich accepted partial blame, saying he approved the conferences and should have better investigated the conduct of employees and costs of the event.

Oh, well, there you go [pat on gingrich’s butt] just don’t do it again, OK, Johnny? If you do it again, do a better job of not getting caught or I’ll have to go Honey Boo-Boo on your ass.

ADDED: TSO send this screen shot of the opening sentences of the Office of the Inspector General Report on their investigation into this most egregious waste of taxpayers’ money – especially money that was supposed to benefit veterans’;