Is
the Department of Veterans Affairs appropriately compensating veterans? The
answer to that is a resounding no. A sobering reminder of the long term costs
of any war or police action is the cost to our nation of caring for and compensating
wounded veterans. A dramatic spike in disability claims during the last seven
years has overwhelmed the VA and almost doubled the cost of compensating wounded
veterans.
The major increases do not come from veterans of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but from those who served years or even decades before. Veterans from the Vietnam and Persian Gulf eras account for the dramatic rise.
This unanticipated claims crush is exacerbated by the VA’s antiquated compensation system which dates from 1945. Requiring a mountain of paperwork, the cumbersome and heavily bureaucratic system is based on diagnoses far behind the current medical advances and is completely unable to verify a veteran’s deployment with any accuracy.
This has led to a backlog of about 500,000 claims, some veterans groups say
it’s as high as a million, and this threatens the well-being of vets with
diverse ailments. These range from back problems and injuries to cancers and
mental disorders.
An analysis of 200,000 claims shows that almost half take 120 days to be resolved and thousands of claims have been languishing for 2 years or more. However, instead of establishing a new system, Congress has appropriated funds to hire thousands of new processing clerks, pulling the experienced workers off the line to train the new employees. This temporary fix has added to the cost of processing without easing the flow.
The complete unpredictability of war has led to massive expenses for the American taxpayer. The cost to our country from Agent Orange and related herbicides spread in jungle areas has exceeded billions since Vietnam. One result of this is that some vets die before their claims are processed, others are shortchanged by the system because it wasn’t built to deal with the variety of wounds that our military is receiving today.
Some of the issues facing the VA lie outside its area of control.
Disability payments to vets of the Vietnam era of 35 years ago cost approximately fifteen billion in 2009. At the end of 2009 more than three million veterans were receiving some kind of compensation. This is a 24% increase since 2003. The total costs grew from $19.5 billion to more than $34 billion.
Lawmakers seldom take such costs into consideration when determining war funding. Since 2001. Congress has approved $944 billion to fund the global war on terror, but less than one percent was set aside for the care of returning veterans. This information comes to us from the Congressional Research Service.
When our armed forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, officials estimated that about 50,000 of our fighting military would eventually seek disability benefits from the VA. Seven years later, over 500,000 veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have made claims. This is roughly 84% of the rise in spending by the VA.
This whole surge in disability claims is threatening to the well-being of veterans and overwhelming to the entire VA system. Unfortunately, there is no end in sight.
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