I Want to Tell You a Story...

Another purpose of this blog is to express our anger at the daily instances of incompetency that affect veterans and surviving spouses receiving VA benefits. In many situations this does not create any lasting hardship for our beneficiaries, yet there seems to be an increasing number of claims coming across my desk with errors that should not have occurred. Ever. So yes, this blog is to vent, but perhaps it can also help build awareness of how inefficient and incompetent the VA can be.

For our first example: A veteran applied for pension benefits in May 2007. We received all the information needed to process her claim. She was found to be entitled to pension and rated to receive an Aid & Attendance (A&A) benefit as well. We granted her pension, using her assisted living costs as a medical expense to give her the maximum pension rate (we can only use assisted living expenses if the veteran has been rated for A&A). We did not, however, grant her the A&A benefit on her award. It’s a simple mistake, the VSR just didn’t put an “X” in a certain field while using BDN, and it certainly should have been caught by the authorizer. It wasn’t. The end result? The veteran was receiving about half of the benefits she was entitled to for close to two years.

The only reason we caught this was because the veteran’s son and daughter-in-law wrote us a letter stating that she was moving out of her assisted living facility and into a nursing home where she would be covered by Medicaid, and that she would need additional funds from us. In looking over her case, we realize what we did wrong previously and correct it, giving her a massive retroactive payment.

So it all ends well, right? Wrong! People are eligible for Medicaid when they do not have the financial means to pay for their own care at the nursing home. Medicaid takes all of the individual’s income (from Social Security, IRA disbursements, other retirement plans, and the VA to name a few), leaving the individual $45.00 each month for their own use. When this particular veteran received the nearly $20,000 payment to make up for what she was entitled to, she will be kicked off Medicaid for a few months, because she could then pay for her own nursing home care for two or three months.

The end result? Rather than receiving the VA funds she was entitled to when she was in the assisted living facility and could actually use them, now those funds must go to her nursing home care for three months until she again has no money, and will be eligible for Medicaid again.

Guess what is older than the internet, John McCain's political career, most Global War on Terror veterans, and Belize?

Did you know that over 90% of VA pension claims are processed with a program that was created in 1978?

To give you an idea of how old the Benefits Delivery Network (BDN) really is, we would like to point out a couple of its most admirable features:

1. When using BDN, the user cannot use a mouse to navigate the program because the mouse was not invented until 1981. That means that in order to use the program, the user can only use the keyboard to tab between different fields.

2. While only one of eleven computer programs a common Veterans Benefits Administration employee is expected to use on a daily basis, BDN is also the least user friendly. No historical record is created for any change made to a veteran's benefits, which means VA either makes mistakes or is forced to keep large paper records. And while there isn't anything necessarily wrong with keeping hard-copies, it becomes a pretty big problem when a veteran's claim for benefits is delayed by months because their folder is located at a different office thousands of miles away.

3. And lastly, BDN is arguably the best program the VA has. This isn't because of the several amazing reasons previously listed, but rather because it is the only reliable program. You see, much like every other government project, the creation of every support program at the Department of Veterans Affairs was assigned to the corporation of the lowest bidder. This means constant crashing, unreliable access, and inaccurate data collection.

What is the VA?

Did you know that the federal government spends more money on the Department of Veterans Affairs than on Education, Transportation, Science and Technology, Energy, Foreign Affairs, Administration of Justice, and Agriculture?

That's right! But the real question is: where does this $68 billion per year go? That is the purpose of this blog. We want to show you all of the government inefficiency, red tape, and ass-backwardsness that the 22 million American veterans and 250,000 VA employees deal with on a daily basis.

As a forewarning, we are not veterans, we are not Republicans or Democrats, and we do not have anything against veterans. We are simply angry about how the law, corporate culture, and government have changed a program designed to help those who fought our country's wars into the government agency in which the term "red tape" originated.