In one of the ugliest stories of veterans care and the help to process his claim thru the VA, this shows the perfect example of how these government employees are failing to due what is expected of them.
There is no excuse for this man to be on the verge of being evicted, and for the veterans organizations who are chartered by Congress to help him and other veterans like him, to have ignored him and not do the follow up on his claim when he went to them in 1990 is disgraceful. Is the veterans at fault for not following up, yes, but the thing is most soldiers/veterans feel that if they deserved it, the government would give them to it, if they don't deserve it then the government won't.
As all of you regular readers of my diaries know, I have been fighting a just fight with the VA over my use in chemical weapons and drug experiments at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland since November 2002, I have 8 or 9 denial letters and yet I keep the appeal going, why? Because it's the right thing to do, the Army used me in illegal human experiments, refuse to acknowledge the 77 toxic chemicals in the drinking water and soil of Edgewood. I have 6 of the 13 known medical problems related to musttard agent exposure, can I prove I was exposed to mustard, No, I can't prove I was exposed to anything, many of the experiments were done in double blind parameters and not even the doctors know who was exposed to what, or who got a placebo. It's hard to get to the truth in these circumstances.
This man's claim is simple, he has cancer, cancers that are on the list of presumptive conditions for exposure to Agent Orange, there should not be any question if he is entiteld to benefits. The VA has flat done him wrong.
Then in December 1999, he blacked out.
"I was out for 11 minutes," he said. Undiagnosed tumors in his neck had blocked his windpipe. He was rushed into emergency surgery.
"They cut me from ear to ear," he said. "They took everything out, my larynx, thyroid gland, lymph nodes," and he endured two rounds of chemotherapy and radiation to halt the spread of the disease.
"In 2005, Wal-Mart let me go," he said. "I had too much sickness. I couldn't keep up with the hours.
"They were kind and polite, but I was still out of work."
He burned through his unemployment compensation and all of his savings. "Cancer ate that up real quick," he said. Now, for the first time in his life, he gets his clothes out of trash barrels, his groceries from food banks. He's broke.
When he went to the VA office in Denver to apply for disability benefits, the outpatient social worker sent him to Catholic Charities.
Lee said he first applied for help from the VA in the mid-'90s. "It never got processed. They said it was lost or maybe stolen. I don't know." He reapplied last January.
When Mike Collins, another Vietnam vet with an artificial voice box, learned of Lee's troubles, he reacted with outrage. He told Lee, "You're being railroaded."
The full article can be read here, the writer covered it quite well. Her e mail addy is at the bottom, a nice note for her work would be appreciated I am sure.
As a disabled veteran, it just pisses me off to see stories like this, it just shows me there are still to many lazy azz employees in the VA claims processing system. This has nothing to do with the health care portion of it, I have nothing but good things to say about primary care, mental health and cardiology, I get great care, better than I was getting thru Blue Cross.
But it is time that the claims process to be fixed, a major overhaul as Professor Blimes has advocated might just be the best solution. She has found that 88% of all claims are valid, she advocated approving all claims and then going thru and auditing the funny looking ones and then prosecuting the frauds who intentionally filed false claims.
Crossposted at Daily Kos
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