Conquer Club

The interview speaks for itself. Its not long.

But, here is a quick excerpt to get you started;

Journalist Aaron Glantz has written a series of articles for the Center for Investigative Reporting about how government bureaucracy is failing veterans when it comes to these benefits. He says 900,000 veterans are waiting for benefits and that the number will surpass one million "very soon."
Based on Department of Veterans Affairs documents Glantz collected through the Freedom of Information Act, he learned that 600,000 of these claims are backlogged, meaning those veterans have been waiting for more than four months to access their benefits. Glantz says that on average veterans are waiting 273 days
Glantz says the Obama administration has not been as successful in streamlining the process as it hoped it would be.
"The real question is," Glantz tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "President Obama came in and he made promises of eliminating this backlog, and he had a plan to eliminate the backlog and he implemented the very steps he talked about ... but here we are five years later, and it has simply not worked for veterans."

http://www.npr.org/2013/03/19/174639343 ... r-benefits

Stop handing out benefits to people who sit on their asses and start properly taking care of veterans. It's a pretty simply solution.

I wonder how much of this backlog is the result of a lack of resources, and how much is an intentional effort to deny benefits to veterans.
They've got 23 page forms to fill out with redundant info, untrained representatives to "help" fill them out. (Around one in four forms is botched) Then comes the loooong waiting period for the RVSR to review the claim. (On a side note the RSVR has production quotas to meet in order to get bonuses, a system that has reportedly led to an even higher increase in errors and rushed poor service in general.)

There are still ongoing cases being appealed from the Korean War. The VA will keep making up new ways to screw these people over until they finally just drop dead.

So yes, "97 percent of claims are still done on paper despite the new $537 million computer system intended to computerize the paperwork." That's because Obama and the government mistakenly thought everyone involved were actually rational human beings with morals; who want the problem solved. Private hospitals try to stifle and ignore the implementation of these very same systems because they eliminate waste, and we can't have that when we can give everyone a long series of redundant medical tests to charge to the patient and insurance companies. In the same way the VA can't afford to allow a fair, simple, and honest process to exist instead of "losing claims in the mail".

This is not to say that the VA isn't staffed with some very hard working individuals who serve their country and humanity itself well, but the best thing we can do to fix this problem is to make sure everyone knows about this sabotaged system so that we can finally chase corruption out of the workings.

It's certainly a priority issue. And the VA is a mess, an absolute mess.