New idea offered for easing VA claims backlog
By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Mar 13, 2007 21:29:29 EDT
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2007/03/tnsvaclaims070313
With the veterans’ disability claims system sagging under the weight of a
growing backlog, partly caused by new claims from Iraq and Afghanistan war
veterans, a Harvard University professor recommends a radical overhaul that
would automatically pay disability compensation to any war veteran who applies.
Linda Bilmes of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who has been studying
veterans’ medical care and disability benefits, said the current backlog of
about 600,000 claims has overwhelmed a system that already was too slow and that
things are only going to get worse. She predicts 250,000 to 400,000 claims will
be filed over the next two years by veterans of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, creating a situation that she said “will rapidly turn the
disability claims problem into a crisis.”
Her solution, which she discussed at a Tuesday congressional hearing, is that
the VA “should accept and pay all disability claims” filed by Iraq and
Afghanistan war veterans, accepting at “face value” a veteran’s statement that
he or she has a service-connected disability. Since 88 percent of disability
claims are approved anyway, Bilmes said that some spot-checking and audits would
be enough to ensure the system is fair.
She also proposes changing the disability rating system, which ranks disability
between 0 percent and 100 percent in increments of 10 percentage points, further
divided into a four rankings: zero, low, medium or high disability. “This would
immediately streamline the process, reduce discrepancies between regions and
likely cut the number of appeals,” she said.
Rep. John Hall, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee on
disability assistance, said the recommendations might help.
“The idea of giving veterans the benefit of the doubt sounds good to me,” Hall
said at the hearing.
The VA’s approach to try to reduce the backlog of claims is to hire more claims
processors, something the House committee generally has endorsed. In fact,
Democrats and Republicans on the committee have each recommended the hiring of
an additional 1,000 VA employees — on top of the roughly 500 more recommended by
the Bush administration — in an effort to cut the backlog.
Bilmes said it takes two or three years to hire and train claims processors,
providing little comfort to veterans who are looking for financial aid now,
which is why she has more radical ideas.
Ronald Aument, the VA’s deputy under secretary for benefits, said it takes an
average of four months to process a disability claim under the best of
circumstances, and that priority is being given to processing claims for the
most severely disabled combat veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. The
average processing time is 177 days, and the VA has a goal of cutting that to
about 145 days, he said.
Aument said the VA handled 774,000 claims last year but received 806,382, which
is why gaining ground is difficult. The number of veterans receiving disability
claims has climbed from about 2.3 million in 2000 to 2.7 million in 2006, he
said.
The claims backlog, along with other problems in medical care in the military
and VA, are having a lasting effect on new veterans’ attitudes toward their
government.
Brady Van Engelen, a wounded Iraq war veteran, said veterans and their families
are suffering. “We may end up with an entire generation of veterans who have no
faith in our VA because those running it — as well as those overseeing it — were
unable to hold up their end of the bargain,” he said.
“We did not prepare for this, and it is painfully evident,” said Van Engelen.
“My generation is going to have to pay for this, and we will be paying for years
and years.”