Yale University Seeks C-123 Veterans To Discuss Agent Orange Claims – Westover, Pittsburgh & Rickenbacker

This is the veterans law clinic at Yale University and they want to hear from every single one of us who is a C-123 veteran, who did not serve in Vietnam, and who has or may have an Agent Orange illness. Yale's lead on the project to help us is Mr. Daniel Townsend at daniel.townsend@clinics.yale.edu

Now would be good. And it won't cost anybody anything. Its what they do. Help veterans expertly and for free. Pro bono, in Latin. I've worked my bottom off for four years to get C-123 veterans in this position and now I want you to do this for yourself and for all the rest of us. Aerial Port, AME, maintainers, Life Support and aircrew...get your name and telephone in to me. So far, only 30 names have been collected.

Yale Law = C-123 Veterans' Support - pro bono!

This is the agency which argued Dick Matte's claim (all their helping us is pro bono, of course) through the Boston VA Decision Review Officer and won that recent award. This is the superb law school which challenged VA head-on, explaining in great detail with their report how our Agent Orange exposures are covered under the law. These are the folks, under supervision of the dean of Yale's law school Michael Wishnie, who want hear from you.

Any questions just contact me.  Pilots LtCol John Harris and Col Arch Battista (he's also a retired attorney) and other Westover leaders have worked with these folks in the Dick Matte effort. Now we need your help on Yale's pro bono project involving all of us. Involving YOU!

Email them at daniel.townsend@clinics.yale.edu

Homeless Veterans Hotline Failing Terribly

A Department of Veterans Affairs hotline established to help homeless veterans missed thousands ofopportunities to help at-risk vets last year,

The VA’s National Call Center for Homeless Veterans, launched in mid-2012, didn’t consistently ensure that veterans who called the hotline received access to support services, according to findings released Wednesday.

“This is a huge national problem, our veterans deserve to have the phone answered when they call for help,” Rep. Jackie Walorski (R., Ind.), a member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said in an interviewThursday.

Ms. Walorski said this isn’t a one-off issue at the VA, but shows the depth of problems that face VA Secretary Robert McDonald , who has been at the helm since the end of July. “I think it’s symptomatic and we have a long way to go,” Ms. Walorski said.

Of the nearly 80,000 calls made to the hotline in fiscal-year 2013, more than 21,000 went to an answering machine because counselors weren’t available, and 13,000 calls weren’t returned because messages were inaudible or callers didn’t leave contact information, the inspector general said. And none of the more than 50,000 referrals made by the call center were monitored or followed up for quality control.

“Everyone is pretty disappointed in the execution of the call center,” said Baylee Crone, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. “The use of the voice-mail system should never have happened. ”

The inspector general found counselors “often did not log in or did not spend the entire day logged into the call center telephone system,” and records were inadequate so inspectors couldn't account for time not spent taking calls. Staffing at peak periods was inadequate, and many calls went to an answering machine rather than being handled by a counselor.

“In our opinion, the majority of these calls could have been answered by counselors, instead of the answering machine,” the report said. An inspector-general spokeswoman said the center had 60 workers at the time of the audit.

The VA concurred with the report’s findings and agreed to eliminate the use of answering machines, develop new training for counselors, and establish a system to measure employee performance—all things targeted for completion in early 2015. The VA is also in the middle of an overhaul known as the MyVA program, which includes streamlining the agency and improving customer service.

“As VA undergoes a major transformation to better serve Veterans thorough the MyVA initiative, we will be looking at how call centers like the National Call Center for Homeless Veterans and others can be organized to make it easier for Veterans to take advantage of the services and benefits that Veterans have earned and deserve,” the VA said.

“Their plan is pretty ambitious,” said a spokeswoman for the inspector general’s office, who said the most pressing concern—that veterans are pushed into voice-mail queues—hasn't necessarily been addressed. “We’re not sure that if we called today that we wouldn’t get sent to an answering machine,” she said. The inspectors will check back with the VA in three months to check on progress of fixes.

In 2009, then-VA Secretary Eric Shinseki announced a goal of ending veteran homelessness by 2015. The number of homeless vets fell by 33% since 2010 to just under 50,000 in January 2014, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Mr. Shinseki resigned in April, amid a scandal after whistleblowers exposed systemic problems at the department.including employees who routinely misreported patient wait times to make it seem as if benchmarks were being met. Long patient wait times didn’t directly cause patient deaths, but did contribute to them, according to inspectors.

Congress passed a more-than $16 billion emergency funding bill to help VA fill staffing gaps and speed treatment to vets who had been waiting for appointments.

In July, Mr. McDonald, former CEO of Procter & Gamble Co. was named new secretary and immediately embarked on a nationwide tour of VA facilities and kicked off an effort to revamp the VA.

Write to Ben Kesling at benjamin.kesling@wsj.com

Wall Street Journal Carries C-123 Veterans' Response to Their Editorial

Last month, former Secretary of Veterans Affairs submitted an editorial which ran in the Wall Street Journal. Principi attacked the VA policies of providing medical care to all eligible veterans, and he suggested coverage is best restricted only to more recently wounded personnel.

The Wall Street Journal kindly published our brief response challenging his editorial:

The VA, in any response to Mr. Principi's article, must realize that many of the Agent Orange-related illnesses strike in a veteran's later years. In the case of highly aggressive prostate cancer, for instance, the rate among older veterans exposed to Agent Orange is double that for other men and clearly related to their earlier military exposures.

Maj. Wesley T. Carter, USAF (Ret.) McMinnville, Ore.

To emphasize his point about the supposed injustice of lines of deserving combat veterans having to wait behind undeserving and uncaring old guys who don't notice the suffering behind them, a cartoon was provided (below)

Although a veteran himself, Principi suggests that not a single man ahead of this veteran on crutches would fail to move aside. Principi seems not to realize that today's combat veterans are offered a virtually seamless integration from DoD care to the tender mercies of the VA. Principi seems not to realize that everybody in the line cares deeply about everyone else...and especially that last guy.

In other words, former Secretary Principi's op-ed attacks a problem which doesn't exist. The real problem, is delaying care for too many veterans not brought into VA channels via Dod. These "older" veterans face years of delay in normal processing of disability claims. Given the VA's determination to deny, deny, deny, these veterans then face three to five years of waiting for action by the Board of Veterans Affairs...and even more if the claim is simply routed back to the regional board for reconsideration rather than a decision being made by the BVA.

Why the Secretary's article, then? Simple...he encourages VA to save money by denying veterans' claims, by delaying veterans' claims, by denying veterans' benefits earned through honorable service. 

Benefits promised by a grateful nation to those who have borne the burden. Though a dedicated public servant, Anthony Principi is simply wrong-headed and a slave to VA's anti-veteran policies!

C-123 Veterans' Response to Secretary Principi - Wall Street Journal, August 28

 (this is our Association's response to former VA Secretary Anthony Principi's Wall Street Journal editorial, in which he argued for greater restrictions on veterans disability claims)
C-123 Veterans' Response to Secretary Principi:

Mr. Principi's suggestion that one group of veterans (in his editorial, Vietnam veterans) should step away from the VA's benefits application line as the solution to make room for another, more current group of veterans is ridiculous. The solution instead is to move that application line along faster, easier and less expensively than the VA does today. The

solution most definitely is NOT to deny any one group of veterans their earned benefits in favor of another group equally worthy.

Secretary Principi is correct that that veterans may turn to the VA for what could be diseases of age, but as the IOM and studies by researchers like Dr. Mark Garzotto MD (VA Portland OR) continue to show, diseases like highly aggressive prostate cancer are directly linked to doubling the rate among Agent Orange-exposed veterans as they age....clearly a situation deserving of VA attention regardless of a veteran's age when care becomes needed. And there are other similar situations surfacing only in later life.

Very fortunately, the VA and the Department of Defense have recently overhauled the separation of troops who are ill or injured, arranging their disability ratings before separation and also packaging essential care such as years of extended medical care and a wonderfully conceived "wounded warrior" program. Thus, troops leaving active duty don't face the desperate years of VA claims process addressed by the Secretary's article.

The Secretary shows yet another example of the VA mindset determined to resolve budget and other issues on the back of the veterans who earned these protections the hard way..not by being in the line, but by being On The Line!

------Wes Carter