Veterans Affairs
Recent veterans are entitled to free health care, but many don’t sign up
Sep 29th
By Body and Mind Staff Pennlive.com–
With a new generation of veterans returning from war, the Veterans Affairs health care system is adapting its outreach tactics to ensure they receive the medical care they’re due.
There are outings at ball games and sites set up through social networking services such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And every VA Medical Center across the country has a team ready to help the service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as special services for women veterans.
“We are out there all the time meeting with units, doing community education” to ensure veterans enroll for the services, said Gretchen Roberts, manager for the Lebanon VA Medical Center’s Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom Program. “Veterans should not have to navigate the system themselves. That’s why programs like ours are in place.”
The federal VA provides medical care and benefits to all enrolled veterans, with a range of preventive outpatient and inpatient services offered within its health care system. OEF/OIF veterans receive an additional benefit — five years of free health care in the VA system for any issue related to their deployment. As with other veterans, once enrolled in the system, they’re always in, but for issues not related to deployment or after those five free years, they may face co-payments.
Popularity: 17% [?]
Secretary Shinseki Orders Emergency Checks to Students Awaiting Education Benefits
Sep 25th
Thousands of Checks to Alleviate Student Financial Burden
WASHINGTON – Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki announced the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has authorized checks for up to $3,000 to be given to students who have applied for educational benefits and who have not yet received their government payment. The checks will be distributed to eligible students at VA regional benefits offices across the country starting Oct. 2, 2009.
“Students should be focusing on their studies, not worrying about financial difficulties,” Secretary Shinseki said. “Education creates life-expanding opportunities for our Veterans.”
Starting Friday, Oct. 2, 2009, students can go to one of VA’s 57 regional benefit offices with a photo ID and a course schedule to request advance payment of their education benefits. Because not all these offices are located near students, VA expects to send representatives to schools with large Veteran-student bodies and work with Veteran Service Organizations to help students with transportation needs.
A list of those VA regional offices is available at www.vba.va.gov/VBA/benefits/offices.asp.
“I’m asking our people to get out their road maps and determine how we can reach the largest number of college students who can’t reach us,” VA’s Under Secretary for Benefits Patrick Dunne said. “Not everyone has a car. Not everyone can walk to a VA benefits office.”
Although VA does not know how many students will request emergency funds, it has approximately 25,000 claims pending that may result in payments to students.
The funds VA will give to students now are advance payments of the earned benefits for education. This money will be deducted from future education payments.
VA officials said students should know that after this special payment, they can expect to receive education payments on the normal schedule — the beginning of the month following the period for which they are reimbursed.
“This is an extraordinary action we’re taking,” said Shinseki. “But it’s necessary because we recognize the hardships some of our Veterans face.”
More than 27,500 students have already received benefits for housing or books under the new Post-9/11 GI Bill, or their schools received their tuition payments.
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Popularity: 18% [?]
Veterans awaiting GI Bill turn to loans, parents
Sep 25th
COCONUT CREEK, Fla. — Brandon Thomas was hit by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade and twice grazed by bullets fired by the Taliban during his final tour with the Army in Afghanistan.
After risking his life, the 27-year-old father and Purple Heart recipient is one of thousands of veterans who now say they are waiting weeks or months for education benefits under a newly fattened GI Bill, leaving many to scrape up money from family or take loans to cover college costs while the Department of Veterans Affairs pledges to speed up payments.
The Post 9/11 GI Bill is the most significant expansion of education benefits since the original GI Bill in 1944. Eligible veterans receive payments for tuition, housing and a book stipend. The VA says more than 50,000 veterans and their relatives have given notice that they’re enrolled in college for the fall semester and hoping to be reimbursed under the program, which started making payments in August.
Popularity: 14% [?]
VA struggles with new GI Bill claims load
Sep 24th
By Rick Maze–Military Times–
Mandatory overtime has been ordered for Veterans Affairs Department claims processors working on Post-9/11 GI Bill certifications as the VA digs out from an avalanche of more 277,000 claims.
More people also have been added to answer the VA’s GI Bill hotline, which students complain often has a wait of an hour or longer.
Keith Wilson, chief of the VA’s education service, said he knows delayed tuition payments to schools and late book and living allowances for students have left many veterans disappointed and some very angry.
“We are doing everything we can,” Wilson said.
Popularity: 12% [?]
VA IG says suicide prevention programs implemented
Sep 24th
WASHINGTON – The Veterans Affairs Department appears to have stepped up its suicide prevention efforts.
The agency’s inspector took a look at 24 facilities and found they generally met new requirements like appointing suicide prevention coordinators to track high-risk veterans, according to a report released Tuesday.
It did say the coordinators and medical providers could do a better job of collaborating with each other. In a letter in response to the IG, a VA official said this fall, the agency would begin using a new system of tracking communication between the suicide prevention coordinators and medical providers.
The VA estimates there are as many as 6,400 suicides annually among all veterans.
New policies were implemented after growing concern about the number of suicides among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Among the suicides was the 2004 death of Jeffrey Lucey, a 23-year-old former Marine corporal, who hanged himself in his parents’ home two weeks after the Northampton Veterans Medical Center in Leeds, Mass., released him.
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On the Net:
IG’s report: http://www.va.gov/oig/54/reports/VAOIG-09-00326-223.pdf
Popularity: 11% [?]
Congress challenges bonuses at Veterans Affairs
Sep 23rd
–By KIMBERLY HEFLING (AP) –
WASHINGTON — Lawmakers on Wednesday questioned whether millions of dollars in bonuses were appropriately awarded to employees at the Veterans Affairs Department.
The agency’s inspector general recently found that over a two-year period, $24 million in bonuses were awarded to technology office employees at the VA, some under questionable circumstances. It also detailed abuses ranging from nepotism to an inappropriate relationship between two VA employees.
In a separate issue involving bonuses at the agency reviewed by the Veterans’ Affairs House oversight subcommittee, executives within all department were awarded $4.3 million in performance bonuses in the last fiscal year — some more than $60,000, said Rep. Harry Mitchell, D-Ariz., who chaired a subcommittee hearing on the issue.
The VA has nearly one million claims to process and has faced criticism in areas of quality control because of issues such as endoscopic procedure problems at three Southeast hospitals that potentially exposed thousands of veterans to infections. The problems make it even more relevant to review the awarding of bonuses, Mitchell said.
“The bonus system must allocate responsibility where it lies,” Mitchell said.
Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., questioned the sensitivity of the executive bonuses being distributed as the same time “we were shedding jobs like a dog shedding hair.”
VA Deputy Secretary W. Scott Gould, who took office earlier this year under the Obama administration, said he agrees that it is a time to be sensitive about the nation’s unemployment levels. He said that will likely be considered when the agency makes future performance awards. However, he said it is “also a time when we need to be encouraging our VA employees.”
He said to the extent possible, multiple levels of review have been implemented to ensure bonus levels to executive level employees are appropriate.
Gould said the situation among technology office employees investigated by the IG was professionally disturbing and inexcusable and that actions were being taken to ensure something like that doesn’t happen again.
James J. O’Neill, assistant inspector general for investigations with the VA’s IG office, said he’s confident the VA is thoroughly reviewing the matter and taking action.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Breaking News-Report says Philly VA home endangered vets
Sep 21st
The Associated Press–Veterans leg amputated after maggots seen falling from his foot
PITTSBURGH – An inspection at a Veterans Affairs nursing home in Philadelphia last year found conditions endangering the welfare of residents, a Pittsburgh newspaper reported Saturday.
Inspectors found dried blood and feeding tubes on the floors, and one patient’s leg had to be amputated after maggots were seen falling from his foot, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review said, citing a report obtained through a federal Freedom of Information Act request.
The report by the Wisconsin-based Long Term Care Institute concluded that the facility, the bed count of which has been cut from 240 to 120, “failed to provide a sanitary and safe environment for their residents.” It cites substandard treatment of wound care and “multiple concerns regarding nursing competencies.”
“There was a significant failure to promote and protect their residents’ rights to autonomy and to be treated with respect and dignity,” the report concluded.
VA spokesman Dale Warman told the paper in an e-mail that many steps had been taken to improve care. A corrective action plan updated on June 29 including the hiring of consultants and additional staff and remedial training and retraining programs for staff, officials said.
The report said no action was taken on one unnamed veteran, even though his toes had turned black, until maggots were observed “falling out of the resident’s foot,” at which point an amputation was ordered. One inspector reported seeing a nurse use the wrong medication despite a week-old order from a physician changing the prescription, the report said.
Some patients had substantial weight loss, including one veteran who lost 51 pounds for unknown reasons.
“The potential for dehydration for these residents presents immediate jeopardy,” the report said.
An internal investigation was triggered three months before the report was issued when David Allen, 56, a mute and disabled Vietnam veteran, choked to death on solid food although he was supposed to be on a soft-food diet.
His death was not mentioned in the report, but the VA said in a statement that the contracts of two agency nurses were terminated and other staff members were given additional training on swallowing difficulties “as well as the effects of behavioral medications.”
Popularity: 21% [?]
The Pentagon’s Bionic Arm
Sep 21st
CBS 60 Minutes: Pentagon Is Working To Develop A Life-Changing, High Tech Prosthetic Arm–
When Americans are wounded in Afghanistan or Iraq, no expense is spared to save their lives. But once they’re home, if they have suffered an amputation of their arm, they usually end up wearing an artificial limb that hasn’t changed much since World War II.
In all the wonders of modern medicine, building a robotic arm with a fully functioning hand has not been remotely possible.
But as 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley first reported in April, that is starting to change. One remarkable leap in technology is called the DEKA arm and it’s just one of the breakthroughs in a $100 million Pentagon program called “Revolutionizing Prosthetics.”
Fred Downs has been wearing the standard prosthetic arm since 1968, after he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam.
“It’s a basic hook. And I can rotate the hook like this and lock it,” Downs told Pelley, demonstrating the limited movement ability of his prosthetic arm. “In those days they didn’t have a lot of sophistication about it. They fit you and say, ‘This is your arm, this is your leg.’ And it was the best technology in those days and you just had to make yourself learn how to use it and I did.”
Today, Downs is the head of prosthetics for the Veterans Health Administration. He told Pelley the technology used for his arm was developed during the World War II era.
“There’s a hook, something out of Peter Pan. And that’s just unacceptable,” Dr. Geoffrey Ling, an Army colonel and neurologist who’s leading the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, told Pelley
Col. Ling is a physician with big dreams and little patience, especially when touring Walter Reed Army Medical Center and meeting the troops he’s working for. “We have a saying in the military, ‘Leave no one behind.’ And we are very serious about that. And that doesn’t mean just on the battlefield, but also back at home,” he said.
Ling told Pelley they’ve made great strides in artificial legs, but a good arm has never been within their grasp. “If you look at your hand, it’s an incredibly complex piece of machine. What nature provides us is extraordinary. The opposable thumb, the five finger independently moving, articulating fingers. It’s fantastic what this does.”
“And when you lose your hand you’ve lost something that makes you human,” Pelley remarked.
“You’re so right Scott. Because, think about what makes us separate from every other animal species. We have an opposable thumb. That is, in fact, what makes us human,” Ling said.
Ling is determined to give that humanity back. His project is run out of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – the same group that oversaw the creation of night vision, stealth aircraft, and GPS.
Ling told Pelley it’s a very large scale project. “It is very much like a Manhattan Project at that scope. It is over $100 million investment now. It involves well over 300 scientists, that is engineers, neuroscientists, psychologists.”
One of the scientists Ling asked to join the team is Dean Kamen, a sort of rock star in the world of inventors. His creations include dozens of medical devices, and the Segway.
They are inventions which have made him a multimillionaire.
“When the folks from the Defense Department came to this office and said, ‘Here’s what we need,’ what did they tell you?” Pelley asked.
“We want these kids to have something put back on them that will essentially allow one of these kids to pick up a raisin or a grape off a table, know the difference without looking at it. That is an extraordinary goal,” Kamen explained.
“He basically said, ‘You’re crazy.’ That’s what he told us,” Ling remembered. “He said flat out, he and he himself, who’s a crazy guy himself, I mean he is very innovative thinking. He’s a brilliant man, totally brilliant man, but mad scientist.”
Kamen told Pelley he thought the Pentagon and DARPA were unbelievably optimistic in their expectations and that he told them that.
“He said to us, he said, ‘I can do my, you’re crazy. But, we’re willing to rise to this, rise to the challenge because it’s important,’” Ling remembered.
Kamen took 60 Minutes behind the scenes at DEKA, his company in New Hampshire, to show Pelley how inspiration becomes invention.
“Engineers design a part on a computer, he fires it up here on our network,” Kamen explained.
Read the rest of the story at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/10/60minutes/main4935509.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody
Popularity: 18% [?]
Scam targets veterans’ credit card info, VA warns
Sep 19th
(CNN) — Watch out for the latest scam targeting veterans and their credit card numbers, the Department of Veterans Affairs warns.
Scam artists are calling veterans and posing as VA workers who need credit card information to update prescription information, as part of a scheme that fraudsters have recycled over the years.
“America’s veterans have become targets in an inexcusable scam that dishonors their service and misrepresents the department built for them,” said Dr. Gerald Cross, the VA’s undersecretary for health. “VA simply does not call veterans and ask them to disclose personal financial information over the phone.”
The scam callers say the VA has changed its procedures on dispensing prescriptions, so it needs the credit card numbers.
“VA has not changed its processes for dispensing prescription medicines,” Cross said. “Nor has VA changed its long-standing commitment to protect the personal information of this nation’s veterans.”
Other schemes targeting veterans and active members of the military have surfaced over the years, including high-priced life insurance sales, payday loans, car title cons, repair scams and fraudulent discounts.
“In Harm’s Way,” a 2003 report by the National Consumer Law Center, concluded that service members often are targeted because of their predictable pay days and a military culture that encourages orderly finances.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Vets impatient with GI Bill payment delays
Sep 16th
By Rick Maze –Military Times– The Veterans Affairs Department is thanking colleges and
universities for being patient about waiting for tuition payments for people using the Post-9/11 GI Bill, warning that it could take another six to eight weeks to completely catch up.
In the meantime, schools and veterans will continue to wait on their payments.
“I realize the learning curve has been steep for us all, and assure you we continue to work to make the process smoother and quicker,” VA Undersecretary Patrick Dunne, a retired Navy rear admiral, said in a letter sent out Sept. 11. “Thank you for your understanding and you support of our nation’s veterans.”
The new education benefits program, in which tuition and fee payments go directly to institutions of higher learning while allowances for books and living expenses go directly to students, took effect Aug. 1. About 260,000 students have applied for payments, but tuition payments have been made for only about 12,000 eligible beneficiaries, while about 8,000 have received living stipends.
Dunne’s letter said a complicated two-step approval process is causing the delay. The process involves first certifying eligibility and then enrollment.
“Claims processing times traditionally spike temporarily during September and October with fall enrollment, and we expect our processing time to reduce after the initial surge,” he said. “Although we anticipate claims processing times to gradually increase, we are requesting that you continue to submit enrollment certifications in a timely manner.”
Dunne assured school officials that full payments will be made, with the expectation that Oct. 1 payments for most veterans will include living expenses for August and September.
GI Bill users and veterans groups have their doubts that living expenses will be paid by then.
Army officer Allen Kiefer, who asked that his rank and unit not be used, is one of those frustrated by delays. Kiefer, who has an undergraduate and two master’s degrees, didn’t need the Post-9/11 GI Bill for himself but wanted to transfer benefits to his son, a college senior.
“When I heard about this program, I knew it was going to be the best benefit I have ever gotten in the Army. I still believe that, but I sure would like to be paid,” said Kiefer.
He said he was among the first to apply to transfer benefits in a process that started four months ago, and he has no idea when his son’s college will get paid.
“If you call the VA’s GI Bill help line, their pre-recorded message states that there is a 6- to 8-week wait for processing due to the unprecedented volume of applications. When I finally reached a person at VA, I was told the processing of my son’s application for benefits will not be completed by VA until the end of September,” he said.
“The real question is, ‘Are the veterans satisfied with the VA’s processing?’ I say no,” Kiefer said.
Isaac Pacheco, an Iraq war veteran who works for a major veterans service organization, AmVets, and is using the GI Bill to attend graduate school, said pleading for schools to have patience doesn’t resolve all the problems facing veterans as a result of delayed claims processing.
“I was among the first to apply,” said Pacheco, who left the Marine Corps in 2006 after an Iraq deployment. “I know my university has been paid but I have not received by book allowance and, like others, am waiting for my first living stipend. Schools may accept a late payment from the VA without a veteran being hurt, but landlords and creditors are not waiting. They want to be paid now.
“I don’t know how VA can say on one hand that it is taking 28 days to process a claim and on the other be telling everyone it will be six to eight weeks for payments,” he said. “There is either a lot of misdirection going on or VA officials don’t understand what is going on in their own department. My hope is this is classic trouble implementing a new policy and that everything will be fine soon.”
Popularity: 25% [?]
