Patti's Blog - Advocate for Elders, People with Disabilities and Their Families

House chairman calls delayed payment to veterans 'an insult'

Excerpt from The Hill: (click for entire article)

Delays in disability benefit payments are "an insult" to military veterans, the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee said Wednesday.  Committee Chairman Bob Filner (D-Calif.) urged the federal government to cut through red tape in deploying benefits.

"People have died before they've gotten their benefits or they've lost their houses because they didn't have a check coming in," Filner said during an interview on Federal News Radio. "What I would like to do is just cut through all [the] red tape."  The chairman said that the government's slowness to respond to claims from disabled veterans is "an insult."

Filner called on the Department of Veterans Affairs to process claims as quickly as the IRS handles tax returns, guaranteeing a three-week turnaround in benefits payments.  "Why don't we do the same thing with our veterans?" Filner asked. "We send out a check as soon as we get their application, and audit it whenever we ... as much time as we have to take. But at least recognize that the soldiers that deserve compensation, we ought to get it to them quickly."

GOP's Coburn Blocks Bill Disabled Vets Bill

Patti's Comments:  I just do not get it…

Excerpt from NPR: (click for entire article)

The Senate wants to provide $4 billion to help homecare providers for 6,800 disabled veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Leaders hoped the measure would sail through on the eve of Veterans Day by unanimous consent, but they got one no vote: Republican Tom Coburn. He says there is no budgeted money for the bill and that other programs should be cut to pay for it, and he isn't backing down.

Homeless on Veterans Day

Patti's Comments:  Our veterans deserve much better than this…

Excerpt from The New York Times: (click for entire article)

Gen. Eric Shinseki was famously shunned by the Bush administration for daring to state the true costs of occupying Iraq. As President Obama’s secretary of veterans affairs, he is, thankfully, no less candid about the grinding problems veterans face at home. They lead the nation in depression, suicide, substance abuse and homelessness, according to data that Mr. Shineski is delivering in salvos in his current role.

About one-third of all adult homeless men are veterans, and an average night finds an estimated 131,000 of them from five decades bedding down on streets and in charity sanctuaries. About 3 in 100 of them are back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem of homelessness for Vietnam veterans is, shamefully, well known. But the men and women in this growing cohort took just 18 months to find rock bottom, compared with the five years-plus of the previous generation’s veterans.

General Shinseki has promised to galvanize the Department of Veterans Affairs to lead a national drive to end veteran homelessness in the next five years. Is that anywhere near possible? “Unless I put an ambitious target on the table, I don’t know how we’ll start,” the secretary told a forum of wounded veterans.

Elder News - 11 November 2009 - Happy Veterans Day!

Patti's Comments:  Love this blog and everything in this post… Happy Veterans Day all!

Excerpt from Time Goes By: (click for entire post)

Several items of interest to elders today, and let's start with the holiday – it is Veterans' Day, the time we set aside to honor the men and women who put their lives at risk in combat for the rest of us. Given the frightful nature of what they do, one day doesn't seem enough and there are some people in Bangor, Maine, who have been making every day Veterans Day since the Iraq War began.

Syracuse University expands Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for veterans

Excerpt from Syracuse.com: (click for entire article)

The Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities will expand to a sixth university, the University of Connecticut’s School of Business, enabling the program to increase annual enrollment from 125 to 150 veterans, said Mike Haynie, executive director of the program and assistant professor of entrepreneurship at SU’s Whitman School of Management.

Already participating in the program are SU’s Whitman School of Management, Mays Business School at Texas A&M, UCLA Anderson School of Management, Florida State University’s College of Business and the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University.

The program also will offer small-business training to the spouses and other family members of severely wounded service members, starting with about 25 spouses this summer, Haynie said. The Ernst & Young accounting firm is donating $50,000 to help include family members.

Haynie said the spouses of seriously wounded service members often become the economic head of their families. But they also must take on the role of main caregiver, along with their other parental responsibilities, often making it difficult for them to hold down a job working for someone else, he said.

PTSD: The Haunting Effect of War, Part 1

From Michigan News Overviews: (click for video)

Thirty percent of Vietnam Vets suffer from PTSD, more than any other war over the last 40 years.

Family settles vet's VA lawsuit

Excerpt from The Detroit News: (click for entire article)

The federal government has agreed to pay $218,500 to settle a lawsuit over the fatal drug overdose of a young Michigan veteran who served as a U.S. Marine in Iraq.

Randen Harvey died of an overdose in 2006 at his father's home in Farmington Hills. His family sued the Department of Veterans Affairs, accusing it of failing to keep him in a hospital or commit him to a mental health facility.

The settlement was reached just a few days before trial in federal court in Detroit. "The experience in Iraq was horrific for this young fellow," Thomas Campbell, a lawyer for Harvey's estate, said Tuesday.

Harvey, 24, was honorably discharged as a lance corporal in November 2005. Five months later, according to the lawsuit, he attempted suicide and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In June 2006, Harvey was found on the roof of the VA Medical Center in Ann Arbor. The lawsuit says he was discharged from a hospital program because of alcohol use and told to wait for substance-abuse treatment. He died three days later.

Homeless on Veterans Day

Excerpt from The New York Times: (click for entire article)

Gen. Eric Shinseki was famously shunned by the Bush administration for daring to state the true costs of occupying Iraq. As President Obama’s secretary of veterans affairs, he is, thankfully, no less candid about the grinding problems veterans face at home. They lead the nation in depression, suicide, substance abuse and homelessness, according to data that Mr. Shineski is delivering in salvos in his current role.

About one-third of all adult homeless men are veterans, and an average night finds an estimated 131,000 of them from five decades bedding down on streets and in charity sanctuaries. About 3 in 100 of them are back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem of homelessness for Vietnam veterans is, shamefully, well known. But the men and women in this growing cohort took just 18 months to find rock bottom, compared with the five years-plus of the previous generation’s veterans.

General Shinseki has promised to galvanize the Department of Veterans Affairs to lead a national drive to end veteran homelessness in the next five years. Is that anywhere near possible? “Unless I put an ambitious target on the table, I don’t know how we’ll start,” the secretary told a forum of wounded veterans.

He has also pledged $3.2 billion to bolster housing, education, job and medical programs to help troubled veterans before they hit the streets. The new G.I. Bill, for example, offers tuition help, but the secretary says more immediate vocational training will also be available. Similarly, he promises more beds for transition programs, including those intended to help the 40,000 veterans released each year from prisons.

This is an especially tall order for an unwieldy bureaucracy, one with a notorious backlog of 400,000 disability claims. General Shinseki says a renewed Veterans Affairs Department must, and will, address that problem.

VA pays to settle lawsuit over suicide of Farmington Hills veteran

Excerpt from The Oakland Press: (click for entire article)

The federal government has agreed to pay nearly $220,000 to settle a lawsuit over the suicide of a U.S. Marine from Michigan.

Randen Harvey’s family had accused the Department of Veterans Affairs of failing to keep him in a hospital or commit him to a mental-health facility.

The 24-year-old Harvey served two tours in Iraq. He died of a drug overdose at his father’s home in Farmington Hills in 2006.

Thomas Campbell, a lawyer for Harvey’s estate, says the lawsuit was settled last week, a few days before trial in federal court.

Iraq, Afghanistan veterans need more help at home

Excerpt from The Los Angeles Times: (click for entire article)

Floyd Meshad, Vietnam vet, was in a Ralphs supermarket in Westchester when his cellphone rang at 9 o'clock one evening not long ago.

It was Meshad's suicide hotline, and a soldier was being patched through.

Meshad, a psychiatric social worker, walked outside the store so he could concentrate while trying to talk the soldier out of killing himself. He gets lots of calls like this from all over the country, more now than ever, and he knew one thing:

This soldier, calling from Florida, was serious.

"He was an Iraq vet being sent back for his fourth tour, his wife had left him after the third tour . . . his house was being foreclosed on, he had two kids," said Meshad, who runs the crisis line as part of his National Veterans Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit with a full menu of services for soldiers and vets.

You don't tell a desperate soldier you understand, Meshad told me, or he'll jump all over that. He'd want to know how you could understand a nightmare you're not living.