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updated: February 6, 2007
Summary
Health care provided by veterans’ hospitals is widely agreed to
be some of the best in the country. But hundreds of thousands
of sick and injured troops and veterans are being forced to wait
months and even years for medical appointments and disability
compensation. Some veterans with serious psychological injuries
have committed suicide while waiting for counseling, and others
have fallen into debt awaiting government compensation for
their combat-related disabilities.
Health Care: While veterans’ advocates agree that the
VA provides excellent health care, accessing the system is
difficult. Those who are enrolled must often wait months
for appointments, and getting to these appointments can
be a major obstacle. As of 2003, more than 25% of veterans
enrolled in VA health care live over an hour from any
VA hospital. This number is likely to rise because the mission
in Iraq has relied heavily on National Guardsmen and
Reservists, who are disproportionately from rural areas
underserved by VA hospitals and clinics.
A fundamental problem with VA health care is the lack of
reliable funding. Unlike the allocations for Medicaid and
Medicare, funding for the Veterans Health Administration
is not mandatory. As a result, veterans’ groups are forced
to fight each year to ensure that Congress provides adequate
funding for veterans’ health care. When the VA
budget is passed late, as it often is, hospitals are forced to
ration care while they scrape by with temporary funding
bills. Because of this broken funding system, the VA has
been underfunded for years. Last year, Congress finally
made veterans a priority, providing the VA with the largest
annual increase to VA health care funding in 77 years. But
the appropriation was held up in Congress, and the VA
again had to cope with temporary funding.
Benefits: The military and the Department of Veterans
Affairs (VA) have separate disability benefits systems, each
with an exceptionally complicated and confusing bureaucracy.
Even the Army admits it does not meet DOD goals
for quick and effective processing of disability claims.
According to the Dole-Shalala Commission tasked with
addressing the problems of troops at Walter Reed, less
than 40% of troops say they are satisfied with the disability
evaluation system.
As troops transition from the military system to the veterans’
system, medical records and military service records
regularly get lost in the shuffle, leading to long delays in
benefits processing. The VA is unprepared to cope with the
looming flood of new claims from Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans. The number of pending disability claims has
increased over 50% over the past three years to about
400,000 claims. The number of VA claims waiting at least
six months has nearly doubled to 83,000. The average waittime
on a claim is 183 days.
According to the VA’s own numbers, about 12% of ratings
decisions are inaccurate. These wrongly-decided claims are
a huge source of the claims backlog; over 81% of claims filed
in 2006 were re-opened claims. Injured veterans who contest
a wrong decision face a drawn-out appeals process which
takes, on average, a staggering 657 days. That’s almost two
years of waiting for disability payments. Despite the back-log, the VA’s claims processing staff has not dramatically
increased. In the meantime, veterans too wounded to work
are often unable to support themselves or their families.
For more on troops’ and veterans’ health care and compensation
issues, consult the IAVA Issue Report: “Battling Red Tape:
Veterans Struggle for Care and Benefits.” All IAVA reports are
available here.
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