(NEW YORK) MintPress – Failing to plan is planning to fail, as the old military saying goes. And when it comes to benefits claims, say veterans rights advocates, that is exactly what the current military leadership and bureaucracy have done.
As the Obama administration gets ready to take on a second term,Veterans Affairs (VA) Secretary Eric Shinseki has trumpeted the agency’s accomplishments over the past four years and vowed that vets seeking benefits and health care will see major improvements moving forward.
The 69-year-old retired four-star general and former Army chief of staff has ambitious goals: eliminating the claims backlog and homelessness among veterans by the end of 2015.
Currently, nearly 900,000 claims are pending before the agency, including almost 600,000 that have been waiting for 125 days or more.
Speaking at a recent Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) convention in Reno, Nev., Shinseki noted that the VA completed about 900,000 claims in 2009 and about 1 million a year in 2010, 2011 and 2012. The problem, he said, is that more claims are arriving each year. In 2012, for example, the VA received about 1.3 million claims.
Progress on cutting the backlog depends largely on how fast a fully electronic processing system can be deployed, as well as the number of claims received.
Shinseki maintained there is a chance of real progress in 2013. “I’m told the number of claims received may be peaking,” he said. “There is a chance we will put out more than we receive.”
Fact vs. fiction
But that is contrary to what Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and other activists say, which is that the numbers indicate the VA is headed in the wrong direction.
Shinseki acknowledged that when he took over the reins in 2009, the VA’s inventory of pending claims was about 400,000. Today it is more than double, about 880,000.
And the backlog of claims older than 125 days has grown by nearly 150 percent, to 580,000 today from 135,000 in 2009.
In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal last month, IAVA founder and CEO Paul Rieckhoff, and Pete Hegseth, CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, stated, “The VA has added 4,000 new employees since 2008. But as more Iraq and Afghanistan veterans return home in the months and years to come the gap between claims and services will likely grow.
“That the problem has not even been mentioned in the presidential debates this fall is shameful, and a failure of leadership on the part of both candidates,” they added.
According to the California-based Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), the waiting time for VA services are in fact increasing, especially in more densely populated areas. Veterans in the Los Angeles area wait an average of 377 days for a response to their claims. In New York City, the average wait is 373 days. In Waco, Texas, the average wait is 413 days.
In one particularly bad case, the CIR reports on a Marine vet who suffered three concussions and now has short-term memory loss so severe that he often 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.
“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,” write Rieckhoff and Hegseth.
“Numbers spun by the department to feign change aren’t going to fix the VA’s endemic failures. Only urgent and dynamic transformation will.”
Search for a solution
Rieckhoff and Hegseth suggest moving all disability claims to an electronic, customer service-based model that processes claims quickly and efficiently.
“Today’s tech-savvy vets are returning home from combat to a bureaucracy still struggling to get out of the pencil-and-paper age,” they note.
Another priority should be ensuring that the VA and the Department of Defense (DoD) work together to automatically transition vets from the DoD system into the VA benefits system, rather than having a completely separate registration process.
Shinseki recently told the Huffington Post that a digital claims-processing system is currently in place at five regional VA offices and will be up and working in 18 offices out of the 52 offices by the end of this year.
In addition, veterans advocates have called for a targeted outreach campaign to make sure that veterans fully understand the benefits available to them at the VA.
Said Ralph Ibson, national policy director of the Wounded Warrior Project, while conceding that the VA does a lot of good, “At the same time, we see trends that have not changed in terms of timeliness of care, in terms of a system that remains essentially passive and puts the burden on the veteran to knock on the door.”
Making the list and checking it twice
Shinseki acknowledged at the VFW convention that he has found that transforming the VA into a modern agency and changing the culture of its employees is a daunting task.
Still, he has managed to make progress on his other goal for 2015, moving 31,000 homeless veterans off the streets and into permanent housing last year and enrolling them in health treatment, substance abuse programs and job training.
That work has dropped the homeless veteran population to 65,000, according to Vincent Kane, director of the VA’s homeless programs.
“Saying you have a vision for the future and getting people to share in it is hard work,” said Shinseki. “Change is the most difficult thing any organization has to do, and when you use the word ‘transformation,’ it is bigger than just change. It is comprehensive and fundamental. We are into the guts of how we do our business: Is it effective, is it efficient, are people being held accountable?”
Still, for Iraq and Afghanistan vets who have yet to file a claim, and for those waiting in line, transformation cannot happen soon enough.
“The VA culture needs to adapt to the 21st-century needs of those it serves — by using 21st-century technology and solutions,” maintain Rieckhoff and Hegseth. “Until that happens for everyone, and a veteran in New York or Texas doesn’t have to wait more than a year for services, the Veterans Administration has nothing to boast about.”