You Counted on Their Promise to Pay. Make Them Keep It.
We Have Been Making Them Keep Their Promises for 30 Years
You’ve probably heard about the terrible and completely unacceptable veterans disability backlog. You may even know that they reduced their backlog in years past by about 200,000 cases after outcry from the public and the government.
But most people have no idea how the VA accomplished that rather impressive task… or why it’s unlikely to do the same thing in the near future.
After three decades, the VA is making headway into getting a final rule established for veterans and their families who were stationed at Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base in Fayetteville, North Carolina and suffered disability through exposure to the base’s toxic water supply.
On Sept 9, 2016, the VA’s proposed rule hit the Federal Register. The rule will establish presumptions for the service connection of eight diseases suffered by veterans who came into contact with the military base’s contaminated water.
Below is a list of common terms with brief definitions, as they relate to your veterans disability benefits and the VA appeals process for denied claims. VA jargon is full of acronyms and abbreviations. The following is short list of acronyms that are referenced within this glossary. Veterans Disability Glossary – VA Terms and Definitions …
When trying to file for disability benefits, the odds might seem to be stacked against you. Part of the problem is because the VA is so backlogged with claims, the “Decision Review Officers” don’t have the time to fully develop each case. Here are the 10 most common reasons for Veteran’s disability claim denial. So, …
In order to keep to their ongoing commitment to provide continuing care to all Veterans and their families, the Department of Veteran Affairs announced this month that they will begin the process of revising regulations to establish service connections for conditions resulting from exposure to contaminated water at the U.S. Marine Corp Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
Veterans advocacy groups and watchdogs in the government have been complaining that the VA is “playing games” with the number of claims on backlog for a while, and as time goes on, evidence mounts that seems to prove this case. Even though the number of backlogged cases has gone down significantly from historic highs last year, appeals continue to rise; suggesting that all the Department of Veterans Affairs is really doing is denying help to deserving people in order to make their progress look better.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is getting a lot of well-deserved bad press these days for their inability to adequately help the men and women who serve our country. Not only are they ridiculously far behind in processing claims from Vets (recently these delays hit a 20-year high despite changes and statements that things are getting better!), there are big problems at Veterans Hospitals that have led to substandard conditions and even directly or indirectly caused deaths. It’s gotten so bad that some people are saying that the entire VA is broken and needs to be completely overhauled or done away with – along with those running it.
If you or someone you love has been denied benefits by the VA, your first reaction – besides disappointment – might be to assume that the organization was right to say no to you. After all, the Veterans Benefits Administration has been processing claims just like yours for decades – surely they know what constitutes a valid claim better than you do.
As a disability attorney, no one understands the VBA better than I do. Most of the people there are honest, hard-working folks who are simply overburdened by the huge numbers of claims that they have to process. This is a big part of the reason that it takes so much time for most claims to go through. But it’s not the only reason. Just like any other agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs makes mistakes, and now more people are finally starting to acknowledge this and try to fix the problem.
This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned this “invisible” backlog that the Veteran Benefits Administration has created with their most recent policy changes. For some time now, the group has been hounded by policymakers and various activist groups around the country to get through claims faster so that disabled Vets can get the help they need without waiting for months or even years. Despite the best efforts of these groups, the VA’s backlog simply kept getting longer and longer and frustration with their system continued to grow.
Then, not long ago, the VA announced that they had made a huge dent in their backlog, cutting it down by upwards of a third. On top of this, they were continuing to modernize their claims process and improve their IT infrastructure. Initially, this was hailed as an immensely positive thing, but once people started looking at how the VA had made this “dent,” there was a backlash. Rather than truly getting through all of those backlogged cases, the organization simply redefined what constitutes a backlog, “ignoring appeals and dependent claims” entirely and making it harder to file a claim in the first place.
You probably know that Veterans Disability claims take forever – years in some cases – and that there has been outcry from various groups all over the country for the VA to get better (and faster) at processing claims. And if you’ve been paying attention to my blogs and videos, you may even know that this year the Department of Defense and the VA finally got their act together and enabled the VA to access Veterans electronic medical records from a central database. This means that, rather than having to request information piecemeal from each individual doctor and wait for the information to be sent to them, it’s now possible for them to simply log in and see everything they need.
There are drawbacks, of course, but it’s still a big step in the right direction, so it’s important that we take a look at how the system actually works.
