I can attest to the story told by this VietNam Vet about his experience with the VA.  I made an application to the VA and nothing happened for 2 years.  I assumed the delay was to let me die to settle the  application.

Screwing the Troops

What Else is New?

April 4, 2013

For a country always at war, the United States is remarkably not interested in taking care of soldiers it has broken in its wars. Having bankrupted the country, Washington sinks every available penny into the two purposes of the military: funneling money into the arms industry, and fueling imperial ambitions, in large part of pasty fern-bar Napoleons at National Review and Commentary. The Veterans Administration is way back in the chow line. It doesn’t work very well. As best I can tell, nobody cares.
What do I mean, it doesn’t work? Consider a vet blinded or nearly so in some war or other. To use a computer, which has come to be necessary life, he needs screen-reader software, such as JAWS. It costs roughly a thousand dollars retail. For a blinded vet, most likely of slight education and no resources beyond his VA compensation, this is a lot of money.
The software could be provided quickly and easily, as follows: The vet fills out an application online, perhaps prints it, signs it, and scans it to the VA. An employee of the VA receives it and keys the veteran’s social-security number into his computer. In two seconds the vet’s records come up. Yep, blind. The VA emails him a URL and download key, by arrangement previously made with the manufacturer of the software. The vet downloads it. End of story. Elapsed time: an hour, plus download.
What really happens? To begin with, the VA is so disorganized, its web sites so badly designed, its technology so primitive, its staffing so inadequate, its unending forms so incomprehensible, that few vets can navigate the system. I can’t. The kid from Tennessee, with a room-temperature IQ and what passes now for a high-school education, doesn’t have a chance. He will simply be ignored. I know this from personal experience. I have sent letter after letter to the educational-benefits office in Buffalo, and nothing comes back. This is common.
So much for supporting our boys in uniform. They are broken goods. What the hell. We can recruit new ones.
The delay and endless often senseless paperwork involved in getting anything is so great that it is easier for disabled vets just to do without or pay for it themselves one way or another. Remember, we are not talking welfare queens or entitlement parasites. These are guys badly hurt in Washington’s wars, brains scrambled by IEDs, legs still somewhere in Afghanistan.
The vet’s only hope is to have smart, tenacious representation, preferably by a lawyer. Few have this. What it comes to is that, in practice, the benefits that are supposed to exist do not. This saves a lot of money. It doesn’t help the vet.
I did have (very) good representation in a matter involving the VA. A career in journalism gives you contacts that men from small towns in the heartlands don’t have. My rep and I requested my VA records. Easy, right? They pop up on the computer? No. They exist only on paper. Scanning the records of veterans of Viet Nam, who are aging and need care, would cost money. Washington has much more interest in making new cripples in remote countries than in caring for the  cripples it has already made. My country, ‘tis of thee….
The VA said consecutively that my records were in Pittsburg, then Austin, then St. Louis, and then, God knows why, in Portland, Oregon. It took a year to get them, despite threats of litigation.
Utter confusion reigned. Over and over they sent us forms to fill out that we had already filled out, sent letters to the wrong address. This is what most face without help. The barrier is almost insurmountable, and saves the government a lot of money.
I live in Mexico, as do a lot of vets, a fair few of them disabled. (The VA seems not to understand that a world exists beyond America’s borders. Nowhere on the VA’s web site could I find answers to questions that expat vets need answered.) If a vet here makes a claim because his condition has worsened, he goes through the VA office in Houston. On average, it takes Houston 377 days just to get to him. Not to solve the problem, just for him to bubble to the top of the pile. Being technologically at the grass-hut level, the VA doesn’t know about email, and so sends and demands paper letters. These may or may not arrive in foreign lands. The VA insists on the vet’s filling out a form he didn’t receive and didn’t know was sent, so the whole convoluted process stops.
Try dealing with this if, as is the case with an acquaintance of mine, you are so riddled with shrapnel, because something big came through the bottom of your helicopter, that you are in constant pain—forty years later. You have to take so much pain medication just to get through the day that you can’t under bureaucratic letters. The consequence is….
The hell with it. The following is a letter to me from an attorney who represents vets pro bono before the VA:

“Fred: Of course, your suggestion (about screen-reading software) makes perfect sense and that's why it will never happen. Secretary Shinseki means well and has done what he can to improve the claims backlog, but no one ever expected that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would lead to the number of service-connected injuries that currently exist. One of the biggest problems is orthopedic injuries caused by the 100-pound-plus combat loads these kids have to carry. I currently have four claims for Iraq and Afghanistan kids for shoulder, hip and knee injuries, usually caused when they fall going up or down hilly terrain with these loads. Then there are the injuries caused by IEDs. The truth is that the President has given more money to the VA in five years than Bush did in eight, but it's not enough, thanks to Republicans in the House. The new budget proposes a 4% increase to $63 billion, but it does not include enough money to hire thousands of new people to work on claims. Most of the increase is to hire more medical staff, particularly mental health providers. It does no good to offer mental-health services when the vets who are suffering can't get their claims done in less than a year. It is forcing many to live on the streets, sleep in their cars or they end up in shelters. We see this right here, in Central Oregon.”
It makes me feel so patriotic I could choke.

Here is a little food for thought.  You can get the original at fredoneverything.com.  

Fred is a Vietnam vet and got wounded during his tour of duty .  He is about blind from his wound.

Understanding Economics

A Perfect Grasp, and for Free
 

By Fred Reed

August 16, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --Today I'm going to explain economics, society, and the pursuit of happiness, if any. Either pursuit or happiness. When I'm through, there won't be any questions left. You will know everything. Whole university departments will shutter their doors. And good riddance.

A friend of mine is ardent of capitalism, also called “free enterprise” if you are trying to sell it to the rubes, or “codified robbery” by those familiar with its workings. Anyway, this friend had an actual degree in economic theory. He said things like “commoditized debenture yields” and “mezzanine tranche bundles” and “annualized perturbity swaps.” I was so impressed I almost gave him my wallet right there.

I've got nothing against speaking in tongues, but some of it was too many for me. For example, he kept saying that businesses didn't want the government to interfere with them, which he called “distorting the market.” Well, I can understand it. I don't want the government interfering with me either, especially in the midst of a burglary. But I was puzzled. If businessmen didn't want the government interfering in the market, I asked, why did they send thousands of lobbyists to Washington to make the government interfere in the market? He changed the subject. I guess he was distracted.

Of course, as Milton Friedman said, “There's no such thing as a free market.” (That may not be exactly what he said. It's what he would have said had he understood economics better.) I think Milton was right. I mean, as soon as capitalists start making money, they buy the government, and engage in carnal intercourse with it, and pretty soon the chiefs of corporations are in government, and great motingator alpha-crats of government get on corporate boards, and form the roaring mother of interlocking directorates, and so you get Enron and the sub-primes and nobody's got a house. The freer the market, the quicker it happens. A lack of laws favors the smart, the avaricious, and the remorseless. (I live in Mexico.)

Ronald Reagan, an amiable goof but not the Killer Kowalski of intellect, said of the free market (I think it was he) that “a rising tide floats all boats.” Thing is, I keep reading that the rich are getting lots richer, and the middle class, what is left of it, is getting poorer. I guess they don't have boats. Maybe we need a federal program. Maybe No Boat Left Behind.

It's confusing. Conservatives say that it's wrong to take money from those who produce and give it to those who don't. Then theyobmacare, take money from those who produce and give it, great bags of it, to the military, which never earned a nickel and produces nothing but corpses and amputees. It looks to me like a choice between welfare queens, colonels or indigent mothers. I prefer the kind that wants free cheeseburgers, but that's just me I guess.

Which brings us, panting, to Obamacare. It probably won't work, because the government can't do anything right, and the private sector will steal the government blind. Anyway, conservatives don't like the idea of national health care. They pass around the internet stories about some woman in Canada who had to give herself a C-section with a chain saw because there weren't any doctors.

Well, maybe. Or maybe when you underfund national health care, probably because of bribes from the chainsaw manufacturers, you get too few doctors. Anyhow, when they start in on how awful national health care is, I always want to say, “Yes, no doubt. My faith in you is without limit. But, just out of curiosity you understand, can you name two hospitals in France? Give me any three facts about health care in Japan? A brief comparison of medicine in Denmark and Finland? In short, do you have the slightest idea of what you are talking about?”

But I don’t ask. It would be like poisoning goldfish.

Now, America has two examples of socialized medical care, the VA system and the military system. Since it would be intelligent to examine these to see how well they work, nobody does. The VA hospitals ain't great, being over-affirmative-actioned and under-funded, since the Pentagon has more enthusiasm for making new cripples than caring for old ones.

The military system is another thing. The first question you are asked in a military hospital is, “What is wrong with you?” instead of “How are you going to pay for this?” Because the doctors are on salary, they don't gouge. Nor do they refuse to treat you because of the mounds of stupid federal paperwork required for things like Medicare. Nor in the military system do insurance companies hunt, like starving ferrets on the trail of a mouse, for reasons not to pay. While insurance companies won't pay claims if they can help it, they will assuredly pay Congress not to ask awkward questions, so no comparisons with the military hospitals will be made.

The military system works, God help us. You show your ID card, they fix you. You need something expensive? You get it. You don’t need a pricey scan to pay for the new seventy-five-button, six-hundred brake horsepower MRI machine? You don’t get it. When I last covered the military, which is an already-functioning, easily studied system that works under American cultural conditions, it was competitive cost-wise with the private sector. Let us avert our eyes.

Next, why do the cognitively challenged say that Obama is a socialist? The man is an arch-conservative. (I'm not sure what arches have to do with it, but never mind.) He bailed out Wall Street, the beating heart of predatory capitalism, and then carefully didn’t prosecute those who masterminded the sub-prime scan. Socialists hate Wall Street. Obama breast-feeds it. And he sends the military to bomb every country he has heard of, which is very conservative. He is ideally qualified to be president of Guatemala.

Whew. Now a final gem of crystalline truth before I turn to things of greater cosmic import, such as listening to Bob Dylan with Vi. Conservatives and capitalists (What’s the difference? All conservatives are capitalists, and all capitalists are conservatives) say they like competition. Bracing stuff, it is, not like lazy old socialism.

Actually they like competition as long as they are winning, and and when they aren't they want the government to buy their stuff. Why do you think America has such a rocking arms industry? Easy: Because the arms companies can’t make it in a truly competitive world. For example, Lockheed gave up the manufacture of civilian airliners to be a martial kept woman of the Pentagon. Arms manufacturers don’t have to compete with Samsung and Daewoo, which would probably make Pentagonal toys for a third the price. Don’t think so? Make the experiment.

Yes, yes, I know. This tirade is for naught. The arms makers will continue giving oral satisfaction to the withering udder of the Great Federal Cow with the ardor of a lonely sheep herder. Bohica. (That was an ageist, ttwo-animal bovine-antaomical metaphor with sexual reference. Patent applied for.) But I subscribe to the principle that a leper is happiest when he understands why his fingers are falling off.

Fred's Biography - As He Tells It - Fred, a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times. His website -www.fredoneverything.net

Scro

Veterans Administration Stalls while Vets die.

I started out thinking that the bureaucracy of the Government was the reason it took so long to get a decision on my application for assistance to care for my wife who has dementia.  You know  what happens if I am not the one doing it. The tax payers are going to do it.  But I want to do it as she helped me for 70 years.  However the more I think about the delay in getting some help for me is something more sinister than incompetence.  This also applies to all Veterans. While I have been waiting for an answer, depending upon various estimates, 120,000 to 200,00  WW2 have died the past year.  No one really seems to know about how many could be left.  For if they are still alive they would be probably 85 and up.  So no doubt they are dying at a fast clip. I am 89 and will be 90 in August. So the life expectancy is not long. So a few months stalling can solve a lot of  problems.

So if the Government has a budget crunch how else to relieve the crunch by stalling on assistance to veterans?  They wont spend any money on a hundred thousand or so except for burial expenses.  You don't think it is possible for a politician to think this way?  Think again.  They don't want to cut back on their wars but want to cut benefits to their old and the sick.

The more I think about it I am convinced that the delay is a deliberate attempt to avoid settling these claims knowing the vet will die or shorten the time they do provide help. Whether or not it is true is beside the point. That is what is happening.

Fortunately I have a wonderful lady who I pay to come in for a couple hours
once a week to clean up. But it is the physical aspect I could use more help with.

Over a year ago I made my application.  When my son called today they now say they needed another form filled out.  Well, why have they not notified me without me calling them?  More stalling. This form does not cause a delay in processing my application

Doyal Gudgel

 Bill Sheldon June 17, 1920. April 4, 2001. Four years in the 3rd Infantry Division WW2 His story. Find it at Four years in the 3rd Inf in WW2
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