VETERAN’S VOICE-For several decades now, the schemes and frauds of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (DVA) have been hiding in plain view. What has already changed is, veterans have found their way onto the Internet to compare notes and to make open discussion on the small details of how the VA advances and perpetuates their propaganda machine through their Public Affairs Office.
What still has to be changed is how news media and the various Congressional oversight Committees go about questioning and probing deeper into the layers of what the VA initially says in press statements at the superficial level.
The VA has suffered a complete meltdown in two key areas of their agency operations in the past 5 years: the VA Hospital system and the VA disability claims system.
In press statements from the VA, the agency will vacillate back and forth between the 2 topics in an effort to confuse people who are outside of both systems.
Activist veterans have learned over time to train on what the VA omits and remains silent about.
If they are issuing a press statement on the VA Hospital system, then this means (interpretively) they are not doing any work at all on the VA disability claims system, and vice versa.
One of the big classic lies that VA is pushing onto unsuspecting reporters and news media outlets at this time is the VA disability claims system is somehow improving, and they make this case by flashing some generalized numbers which are supposed to reflect their number of claims processed on any given day the report is given.
Activist veterans have come to learn what the truth is about these reports, and it’s a case study for all news media reporters to know about.
Most of the time the VA is, falsely, giving out the number of new cases coming from modern day troops who are discharging from their military service with an all-new electronic forms exchange system which is set up between the VA and the Dept. of Defense (DoD).
A tip off about these kinds of press statements from the VA is found in the body of their statement. Any kind of reference or emphasis on the electronic records exchange as the reason why cases are getting processed, is a big “red flag” for news reporters to jump on the question treadmill that they are all so very famous for.
The VA disability claims backlog is made up of old cases, and even lifetime cases, which are holding obsolete and misformatted paperwork that the new electronic systems are not absorbing. The old backlogged cases are still very much in paper format, and microfiche format. These numbers are cleverly omitted and are not a part of the VA tally when they go out to the press. I know because I am one of those cases.
I have been in the VA system for 42 years and am still NOT rated by the VA for disability or impairment. I entered the VA system just days after I was discharged from the Army in 1972 and had emergency facial skin surgery directly attributed to ulcerated sores that were severe enough to require immediate emergency care. Since then, other service-connected disabilities have surfaced, all for which I have never received benefits. Active duty treatment records are not being rated at all.
The VA has changed no process at all that I can see, as it pertains to how veteran disability claims are arriving at the “mailbox level” of the veteran.
So magically and mysteriously, they are pulling the wool over the news industry’s eyes by trying to say the system is fixed without ever changing a single thing to the way old backlogged cases are handled. It’s all about the semantics here because newly filed cases at the VA are NOT the “backlog”.
The backlog is the old cases minus the new cases. New and incoming cases that are getting processed are not a “backlog”. But the VA will be glad to push this deception as far as they can to unsuspecting readers and veterans alike.
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This leaves the question about who is actually getting paid by the VA claims process. Activist veterans have come to learn the truth about that too. Open bragging by other veterans via the Internet and sporadic feature stories on widows have provided us with the answer about who the VA is claiming to be their success cases. The spouses of Gay people who are, just now, newly qualified to file in the system, the widows of deceased veterans who are, just now, entering nursing homes, and rather suspicious cases from male veterans claiming PTSD for reasons other than combat deployment. Spouses never wore the military uniform, and yet they run through as newly filed claims with new electronic exchange paperwork in place.
The veterans who are not getting paid by the VA claims process, and who actually wore the military uniform, include an increasing amount of contamination zone service veterans who are at first locked out of VA disability, and then are put through a grueling, multiyear torture process of getting an act of Congress for their VA priority classification. This “dinosaur” policy even remains true long after the veterans have compiled their own proofing papers from the Environmental Protection Agency or the Dept. of Defense environmental division.
For a brief time, the VA was touting in Press Statements, their new electronic claims filing system for veterans to use called EBenefits. It all sounds good on the surface until you find out that when veterans went to use the system, the VA had imposed such a narrow and small page limit on the uploads from the veterans, that the complete case could never be filed there.
The Raters for Veterans disability claims will reject and deny a case if there are not enough proofing papers submitted with the case. This especially hits the toxic exposure claims veterans hard who have to show an added layer of medical causations unique to their contamination zone service.
Only in recent days have the Oversight Committees of Congress begun to understand that VA has been running on empty propaganda, with nothing at all to fill in the blanks for small details with, for their wild and ridiculous claims that the system is getting better without ever fixing a thing. The VA is a sham at best, and this is how the news media reporters should begin to treat them.
Suffering veterans who have urgent and valid medical cases are getting pushed to the side over spouse cases and dubious PTSD cases which are not related to deployment. They are saddled into a premature death without their VA pay awards by the preventable stress and strain of an Act of Congress procedure that the VA could fix tomorrow.
News media reporters have to do a better job at probing and questioning press releases from the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, because the devil still lives in the small details of what they put out on any given day.
(Susan R. Frasier is a National Veterans Activist in Albany, New York and a U.S. Army veteran. Frasier serves veterans across the country, advocates for legislation and change to the VA system and for toxic exposure service veterans. She can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 91
Pub: Nov 11, 2014