Saturday, March 16, 2013

Veterans Often Wait Over A Year For Benefits, Some Wait Up To 642 Days As VA Struggles To Handle Claims

Via Billy

 

The Department of Veterans Affairs is failing to keep up with a torrent of benefits claims, and the backlog leaves many service members high and dry for well over a year after first filing their forms, a new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting finds.
From the CIR report:
The agency tracks and widely reports the average wait time: 273 days. But the internal data indicates that veterans filing their first claim, including those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, wait nearly two months longer, between 316 and 327 days. Those filing for the first time in America’s major population centers wait up to twice as long -- 642 days in New York, 619 days in Los Angeles and 542 days in Chicago. 
The ranks of veterans waiting more than a year for their benefits grew from 11,000 in 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, to 245,000 in December -- an increase of more than 2,000 percent.
And the VA is predicting that the situation will get worse, as the number of veterans waiting on the department to process their claims is expected to surge past the current 900,000 and toward a million by the end of March.

More @ Huff Post
Posted by at

4 comments:

  1. AnonymousMarch 16, 2013 at 6:49 PM

    Don't know if you've seen this yet ,,,,

    http://redflagnews.com/headlines/veterans-are-fighting-back-a-follow-up-to-disarming-americas-heroes-by-constitutional-attorney-michael-connelly

    EXPLOSIVE -- VA To Veterans: If You're Late Paying Bills, We Will Prohibit You From Ever Owning A Firearm...

    ReplyDelete
  2. DAN IIIMarch 17, 2013 at 8:48 AM

    My local American Legion office told me that new claims for VA disability is MORE THAN 2 YEARS ! Established claims are less than 6 months (allegedly)

    So I ask where are the big shot retired,flag officers like Colin Powell making public demands of fedgov to take care of us who fought their wars ? When are the RINOs, who are military retired like Songbird McCain and Lypsey Graham, going to start holding hearings on reasons for these disability hearings ?

    While disability claims have sky-rocketed the VA counselors reviewing these claims are doing more with less. In the meantime Songbird and Lypsey are dining with the criminal soetoro-obama as the monarch shuffles $35 billion to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)