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 Qualifier:
If you are a real person you will be glad to see that something is being done. If you are a newly disabled vet ... this country will never help you. When "Army strong" breaks ... it stays broken. Dig in....  And Oh yeah... Never forget, when the jets kamikazed into the twin towers... a guy was getting a blow job at his desk and HE'S the fucking hero, with a widow who got a multi-million dollar settlement. If that's not Uncle Sam flippin you the bird what the fuck is it?

FTW


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The Veterans Administration gets another confirmed kill.


Veteran takes his own life over VA error
By Sharon Woods Harris
Published: Friday, August 1, 2008 10:29 AM CDT


Times staff writer

PEKIN - The walls of Thomas Dale Harrison's meager apartment on Sheridan Road in Pekin were covered with reminders of the years he spent as a Green Beret with the U.S. Army in the Panama Canal region during the Vietnam War era.

Pekin Police detective Rick Von Rohr said Harrison was very proud of his service to his country. His living room was covered in memorabilia and prized possessions from his service.

Times had been tough for Harrison over the past several years. Often, he could barely afford to put food on the table with the small Veteran's Administration benefits he received. He had no other income. Harrison was a diabetic who suffered from high blood pressure, so he could not work.

Even with all that, Harrison, 59, was living a happy life until the first letter came, said Tazewell County Coroner Dennis Conover said, recounting an earlier conversation with Harrison's sister.

The VA letter demanded the repayment of $43,000 from Harrison that the VA alleged he was overpaid. Ironically, the letter told the man (who spent part of his life defending the nation) that he could pay by cash, check or credit card.

Eventually the VA cut off his veteran's benefits, said Conover, but the letters kept coming.

That, said Harrison's brother-in-law, Bill Maquet of Manito, was the “last straw” for Harrison.

Harrison spent his last moments of his life writing three notes - one to his sister, and two to the Veterans Administration on the back of two letters from the VA demanding payment.

The notes were found next to his body June 3.

“(Expletive) you, you can't get money from a dead man,” said one of the notes to the VA.

The other note simply said, “Zero income - thanks a lot, dumb ass.”

The note to his sister asked that he be cremated and buried at the foot of his grandfather's grave because he had no insurance for burial.

Harrison then took a .22 caliber handgun, put it to his forehead and fired.

“I'm not happy with (the VA),” said Maquet, who came to an inquest into the cause and manner of Harrison's death Thursday at the Tazewell County Coroner's Office. “It was the last straw - I'm not happy.”

Maquet said he asked his wife to stay home because he didn't know how in depth the inquest would be, so he came to be there for Harrison.

“It takes a while to grieve this out,” he said.

The coroner's jury ruled that Harrison's cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head and the manner of death was suicide. There were no legal or illegal drugs in his system.

Conover said the sad thing is that Harrison's family was working with the VA and believed they were close to a resolution of the situation.

“I think this is one of the bigger tragedies for a man who loved doing his military duty as much as he did,” said Conover. “It was clearly his only claim to fame.

“‘You can pay by check, money order or credit card'?

“This man hardly had enough money to put food on the table and they cut off his benefits.”

http://www.pekintimes.com/articles/2008/08/01/news/new936.txt


‘Involuntary discharge’ may have caused veteran’s death

M. Scott Carter
CNHI News Service

TECUMSEH — The Norman Veterans Center’s policy of “involuntary discharge” for some residents may have led to the death of one of those men, state records show.

While disabled veteran Mike Simmons fights his own June 1 “involuntary discharge” from the center, documents show another veteran — evicted from the facility because his health “improved so that he no longer needed the services provided” — died a short time later of the same medical problems he had received treatment for from the center.

According to an Oct. 13, 2008, memo from Department of Veterans Affairs executive director Martha Spear, the Oklahoma Veterans Center at Norman — known as the Norman Veterans Center — involuntarily discharged six residents over the past 36-month period.

The five-page memo, addressed to state Veterans Affairs Secretary Norman Lamb, detailed “involuntary discharges at the (state) centers for the past thirty-six months” and included details on veterans centers in Norman, Lawton, Claremore, Ardmore, Clinton, Sulphur and Talihina.

According to the memo, two of the residents at the Norman Veterans Center were removed for previous sex-related crimes, but a third resident was removed because of his improved health. That resident, identified as “R.B.” on Spear’s memo, was evicted from the center because “resident’s health improved so that he no longer needed the services provided by our facility.”

The veteran, Spear noted, was “discharged to live independently” and “was offered placement in a group home but turned it down, found his own place to live.”

Documents obtained by The Transcript have identified “R.B.” as 58-year-old Roger Allen Butts, a disabled Army veteran from Nebraska who suffered from severe seizures and Hepatitis C. Butts was a resident at the Norman Veterans Center for about a year.

Butts’ sister, Tecumseh resident Beverly Channel, said her brother went to live at the center after returning to Oklahoma.

“He went to the Norman Veterans Center, when he came back home from Nebraska,” she said. “Everything was working out.”

Channel said her bother had returned to Oklahoma after their mother died, but then struggled to make a living due to a seizure disorder and several major injuries. Eventually, she said, he received help from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and was accepted as a resident in the Norman Veterans Center.

“He liked it there,” she said. “He worked with other people and was just always taking care of others at the center.”

But while Butts was popular with many of the center’s other residents, Channel said he clashed with then-administrator Bob Weeks. “Bob Weeks didn’t like Roger. Roger had grand mal seizures,” she said. “And he had Hepatitis C, but Bob Weeks said Roger was too healthy to be there.”

Channel said the two men locked horns until Feb. 16, 2007, when Weeks sent Butts a letter saying he was being involuntarily discharged because he had “violated the center’s work place violence policy” and because Butts’ health had “improved so that he no longer needed the services provided.”

Channel said her brother wasn’t violent and continued to suffer from severe health problems.

“He never hit anyone, he was not violent,” she said. “And, as long as he was there, they never said anything about violent behavior until his discharge letter.”

She said Butts took the antiepileptic drug Dilantin and suffered from memory loss.

“Roger took three tablets a day. He had serious grand mal seizures and he had major health problems,” she said.

Channel also questioned the center’s lack of oversight with her brother. She said Butts had a seizure during eye surgery at the center. “They didn’t bother to check his medical record and he had a seizure while they were operating,” she said.

Eventually, she said, he was evicted.

After Butts was forced out of the center, Channel said he “wandered around,” living with friends and relatives and, eventually, in Tecumseh.

Two months later Butts died alone at the Range Motel in Tecumseh.

According to a report by the state medical examiner, Butts’ body was found about 4:30 p.m. by Tecumseh’s Assistant Chief of Police, Billy Crow. Butts’ body was cyanotic and had no trauma, the report said. A laboratory analysis of Butts’ blood was negative for ethyl alcohol.

Channel said Butts died because he was alone when he had a seizure and suffocated.

“Being forced out of the center caused his death,” she said. “I definitely know it did; he had all these medical problems and they took away his help.”

The state medical examiner’s reports supports Channel’s claim.

The three-page report by medical examiner Chai S. Choi lists Butts’ probable cause of death as a “seizure disorder, NOS.” The document also notes Butts had Hepatitis C, a “significant medical condition.”

Channel said Butts’ poor health and the lack of medical attention contributed to his death. “His health was terrible. He needed help,” she said. “His memory was very poor and he didn’t have his Dilantin. So he had a seizure and died.”

Had Butts been allowed to stay at the center, Channel said, he would have lived.

“I believe he would not have had a seizure and suffocated had he been there,” she said. “I think they evicted him because Bob Weeks wanted him out.”

Veterans affairs officials and those with the Norman Veterans Center remain closed-mouthed about the incident.

Despite a week’s worth of telephone calls to both agencies, none were returned. On several occasions receptionists at the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs said executive director Martha Spear was unavailable or in a meeting. Additionally, over the past four days, the telephone for agency spokesman Scott Clymer went immediately to voice-mail.

Since then neither Clymer or Spear has returned calls.

Behavior at the Norman Veterans Center was similar.

Over the past week, numerous telephone calls to executive director Mike Walters went unreturned. A receptionist referred reporters to Walters’ voice mail. However, as of press time, Walters has failed to return any of those calls.

Channel said she’s not surprised.

“Since my brother’s death, I’ve learned a lot more about these places and how they are not helping like they claim to be,” she said.

And while Channel acknowledged that many staff and workers “did everything they could” to assist her brother, she said she held Weeks responsible for her brother’s eviction.

“I think he was responsible,” she said. “Roger was my brother. He was a good man. He was always helping people. Nobody needs to be treated like that. I know my brother wanted to do something and this is my way of honoring my brother. I will feel good that I did something to try and get this problem solved.”

M. SCOTT CARTER writes for The Norman Transcript and The Moore American, sister newspapers to The Edmond Sun. Carter may be reached at 366-3545 or via e-mail at www.mooreamerican.com.

 Crisis at the VA as Benefits Claims Backlog Nearly Tops One Million

Written by Jason Leopold  
Monday, 01 June 2009 00:00

By Jason Leopold

During the past four months, the Department of Veterans Affairs backlog of unfinished disability claims grew by more than 100,000, adding to an already mountainous backlog that is now close to topping one million.

The VA's claims backlog, which includes all benefits claims and all appeals at the Veterans Benefits Administration and the Board of Veterans Appeals at VA, was 803,000 on Jan. 5, 2009. The backlog hit 915,000 on May 4, 2009, a staggering 14 percent increase in four months.

The issue has become so dire that veterans now wait an average of six months to receive disability benefits and as long as four years for their appeals to be heard in cases where their benefits were denied.


Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., a member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said during a hearing in March that the VA is “almost criminally behind in processing claims.”
   
Overhauling the VA represents one of the most daunting challenges facing the Obama administration after years of mismanagement and neglect by the Bush administration who stacked the agency with political cronies that kept the agency underfunded, wrapped in bureaucratic red tape and placed the interests of veterans last on a list of priorities.

Indeed, one of the VA’s biggest failures during the Bush administration’s tenure was its inability to fully implement critical components of the Mental Health Strategic Plan (MHSP) at regional offices throughout the country.

The MHSP, unveiled in 2004, would have provided veterans who show signs of suicide or are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder with immediate mental health care and eliminated the waiting period for receiving treatment.

But according to a November 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), spending for the program was substantially less than what the VA had proposed  - leaving untreated tens of thousands of veterans who were at risk of suicide.

In June 2007, in response to a VA inspector general’s report that also criticized the VA’s failure to implement the MHSP, William Feeley, the VA’s undersecretary for health, operations and management, issued a memo requiring VA hospitals and outpatient treatment centers to provide urgent mental healthcare within 24 hours and non-urgent care to veterans within 14-days.

But Feeley, who was one of a handful of VA officials who received lucrative bonuses in 2006, admitted in a deposition last year that he never conducted any oversight to ensure his directives were being adhered to. In that deposition, Feeley said an uptick in veterans suicides and suicide attempts did not mean VA failed to provide proper care to veterans.

"A suicide does not mean negligence on the part of a medical center director or a network director," Feeley said. "Suicide occurs just like cancer occurs."

In his prior position as director of the Veterans Integrated Services Network in upstate New York, Feeley was required to implement several elements of the MHSP at the network's community-based outpatient clinics with a population of at least 1,500 veterans. But Feeley said in his deposition that he only read an executive summary of the MHSP after it was released in June 2004 and had no idea whether the clinics adopted the proposals.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki recently named Feeley, who veterans groups had have long demanded be fired, as the director of the VA’s West New York Healthcare System in Buffalo, New York, removing him from a top position in Washington, yet leaving him employed with VA due to his prior civil service career with the agency.

To date, beyond a suicide hotline set up last year and thousands of newly hired mental health employees, the VA has failed to adopt a comprehensive suicide prevention program as outlined in the Feeley memo and the VA’s 2004 MHSP.

In January and February, for the first time in military history, the number of battlefield suicides was higher than the number of combat deaths in the war zones, according to the Pentagon.

Last year, 140 U.S. soldiers committed suicide, a record high, and during the first four months of 2009, 64 U.S. soldiers have committed suicide. Military officials said a U.S. soldier is now more likely to commit suicide than a civilian and the Army has recently commissioned a $50 million study to explain the suicide epidemic.

It’s a “very disturbing” trend, said Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli during a recent conference call with reporters.

Chiarelli said trying to reduce suicides “is one of the hardest problems” he’s witnessed in his three-decade military career. He added, “There is no single solution…suicide is a multi-dimensional problem that requires a multi-disciplinary approach to tackle it.”

Chiarelli, and other Army officials, however, fail to address one of the obvious causes behind the spike in suicides: multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan are taking a toll on soldiers.

Chiarelli did say that he believed if soldiers had better access to mental health care providers it might reduce the number of suicides.

Although President Obama has proposed increasing the VA’s budget by 10 percent to $15 billion and as much as $113 billion for fiscal year 2010 as a way of meeting these challenges, the administration still lacks the manpower, data, and analysis to properly plan for the funding increase, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office.

Shinseki, a staunch advocate of veterans, promised recently that he would take “on the issue of the backlog," but he also admitted that he doesn’t understand how it turned into a full-blown crisis.

While veterans groups say they are pleased with Obama’s choice of Shinseki and other veterans’ advocates to lead the VA, they said they could no longer sit by and wait for relief.

Earlier this year, two veterans advocacy groups asked a federal appeals court to step in and force the VA to immediately tackle the massive benefits claims backlog and implement mental health care plans.

The organizations, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth, who represent the interests of more than 12,000 veterans, said in court documents filed May 1, with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that, in some cases, the VA’s failure to provide timely mental health care treatment for veterans “resulted in suicide.”

The problems persist because “VA has not implemented critical provisions, involving suicide prevention, required by its own plans, the veterans advocacy groups alleged in court papers. “As such, services to which VA acknowledges veterans are entitled are being unreasonably delayed, in some instances denied entirely because the delay leads to the death by suicide of individual veterans.

“An injunction compelling VA to implement its own directives is both appropriate and required,” the advocacy groups said in an appeal brief. “At a minimum, a remand is necessary to remedy the district court’s erroneous discovery rulings and ‘systemic’ evidentiary standard.”

Two years ago, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth sued the VA alleging some war veterans were turned away from VA hospitals after they sought care for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and later committed suicide.

The veterans groups sought a preliminary injunction to force the VA to immediately treat war veterans who showed signs of or were already suffering from PTSD. In addition, they wanted a federal judge to force the VA to overhaul its internal systems that handle benefits claims and medical services.

But U.S District Court Judge Samuel Conti ruled last summer that he lacked the legal authority to implement those measures. However, Conti did say in an 82-page ruling that it was “clear to the court” that “the VA may not be meeting all of the needs of the nation’s veterans.”

Conti wrote that the veterans groups should get “Congress, the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the adjudication system within the VA, and the Federal Circuit” to address the matter.

The veterans’ groups appeal to the 9th Circuit says Conti’s ruling was legally flawed and that he “erred in denying relief to remedy both VA’s mental health care delays and the lack of procedural safeguards to challenge those delays.”

Gordon Erspamer, a San Francisco attorney representing the veterans groups, said in an interview that the case is “odd” because Conti’s “findings of fact departed from his ultimate ruling.”

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said in an interview that the motivation for the appeal to the 9th Circuit was VA's failure to fully implement its Mental Health Strategic Plan and to conduct oversight of it. He said he has received reports about veterans packing parking lots to wait for medical care.

Internal VA memos that surfaced during the trial last year showed that VA officials were aware that more than 1,000 veterans had attempted suicide per month, which attorneys representing the veterans advocacy groups argued could have been avoided if the MHSP, which called for the development of a "national, systemic program for suicide prevention," was implemented.

“The VA has provided no documentation that they implemented any aspect of their strategic plan,” Sullivan said. “From our point of view, although it appears VA is taking some steps in the right direction VA’s system still remains in deep crisis.”

A VA spokesperson would not answer specific questions about claims made in the lawsuit, specifically, whether the agency has conducted any oversight to ensure its mental health directives are being followed by its healthcare facilities around the country.

Sullivan added that number of suicides and PTSD cases will likely increase “with the escalation in Afghanistan and the increasing use of multiple deployments.”

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said earlier this year the Pentagon would end the so-called “stop loss” program sometime in 2010 – the program that ordered soldiers to remain in the military for months, and in some cases longer, after their enlistment contract had expired. News reports said that 40 percent of the nearly two million U.S. service members sent to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have already been deployed twice or more.

Lawmakers have proposed several pieces of legislation aimed at streamlining the backlog of benefits claims associated with mental health diagnosis.

Rep. John Hall, chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs Subcommittee introduced one such bill, HR 952, the "Combat PTSD Act" in February. The legislation, which has 85 cosponsors, would streamline claims for post traumatic stress disorder, some of the most difficult and time-consuming claims VA processes.

In addition, Hall and House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Filner introduced and passed a comprehensive package of pilot programs to start repairing VA's broken claims system.

But without immediate intervention by Shinseki on the benefits claims backlog, the VA will continue to be mired in controversy.

“This is an unmitigated disaster, and grounds for the removal of top [Veterans Benefits Administration] and [Board of Veterans Appeals] officials,” Sullivan said. “President Obama and Secretary Shinseki need to clean house at the Veterans Benefits Administration now, before VA's claim system collapses. Although hiring more claims processors will help, VBA also desperately needs new leaders and new policies. 

“The wars and economic devastation continue to generate a flood of new patients and claims for VA. However, the Captain of the ship has changed at VA, and a new course has been plotted. Only time will tell if Secretary Shinseki can turn the ship around without additional damage to VA or harm to our veterans.”

Auditor blasts VA for poor IT management and oversight

By Bob Brewin 06/01/2009

The Veterans Affairs Department does not have the ability to manage and ensure effective oversight of its investments in information technology, which will total about $3.5 billion in fiscal 2010, the department's inspector general said in a report released on May 29.

Until the department's Office of Information and Technology develops procedures to better manage IT projects, VA will have little assurance that it has made the appropriate investment decisions and that it will make the best use of its IT dollars, the IG reported.

The report traced the management and oversight problems to 2006, when Robert McFarland, then the chief information officer at VA, changed the department's management of IT from a decentralized model to a centralized one. VA's IT budget decisions were brought under the leadership of the CIO, who also holds the title of assistant secretary for information and technology.

Under the old system, individual VA hospitals could, for example, change applications used in the Veterans Health Information System and Technology Architecture electronic health record system, making it difficult to build a system that worked across the department. Under the centralized system, changes are made and managed out of the CIO headquarters shop.

But the CIO office managed the transition to a centralized IT management model on an "ad hoc or on a trial-and-error basis, inadvertently creating an environment with relaxed management controls and inadequate oversight," the report said. Although the switch amounted to a "significant undertaking," the IG said the transition lacked a written plan.

But McFarland said the transition was backed up by a written plan developed in-house. IBM developed another plan under contract. The IG's criticism was a "silly, untrue and uninformed statement," he said, adding the auditor did not do adequate research before the release of the report.

The IG also criticized VA's management of individual IT projects. Poor management and oversight "substantially increased the risk" that key systems, such as the $167 million Replacement Scheduling Application, which will manage appointments in VA medical facilities, will not meet cost, schedule or performance goals, according to the report.

IT management is in such disarray that the Office of Information and Technology missed the Sept. 8, 2008, deadline to file a report on its fiscal 2010 IT capital investments and on its business cases for It projects, known as Exhibit 300s, the IG said. The report added that there was a 50 percent chance the department would be late in submitting its Exhibit 300s for fiscal 2011.

The CIO office should develop a written plan that sets measurable goals for centralized management of IT investments and establishes an IT governance plan, the IG recommended. The office also should meet the deadline to file Exhibit 300s.

Stephen Warren., principal deputy assistant secretary at VA, concurred with the recommendations and said the department has instituted an IT capital governance process that includes setting priorities for investments in, for example, health, benefits and financial systems.

Oversight of the Replacement Scheduling Application was not as "timely as it should have been," he said, but the project was finally "flagged as a risk" this January. The assertion that the Office of Information and Technology could miss the deadline for filing fiscal 2011 Exhibit 300s is "purely speculative" and the office wants to meet that deadline, Warren said. The report did not include the fact that the office had negotiated with the Office of Management and Budget an extension on filing of the fiscal 2010 documents.

John Weiler, executive director of the Interoperability Clearinghouse, a nonprofit in Alexandria, Va., that works with VA, said the problems with management and oversight of IT investments are endemic throughout the government and indicative of a disconnect between planning and execution of IT projects.

 Error Left 39,000 Retirees Out of Veterans' Administration Retro Pay Program

By Tom Philpott

As many as 39,000 disabled military retirees have been left out of the VA Retro Pay program by mistake, say officials at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) who are calculating the amount of money owed.

This latest and perhaps most serious gaffe in the problem-plagued VA Retro Pay project was uncovered after DFAS received a rising number of complaints from retirees. None of them had been screened for retroactive payment, but follow-up calculations confirmed that each had been underpaid.

VA Retro payments have ranged from a few hundred dollars to many thousands, depending on individual circumstance. All recipients have served in the military for 20 or more years and all have disabilities that qualified them for one of two relatively new entitlements: Combat-Related Special Compensation (CRSC), which began in 2003, or Concurrent Retirement and Disability Pay (CRDP), which started in 2004.

The VA Retro Pay project started made lump-sum back payments to retirees in September 2006. The project became necessary because of difficulties in calculating initial payments to retirees under CRSC and CRDP, complex programs voted by Congress to begin to lift the ban on concurrent receipt of both military retirement and disability compensation. First up were to be full-career retirees with combat-related injuries or severe disabilities.

Last July, DFAS officials announced they finally had eliminated a backlog of retroactive payments owed to an original pool of 133,000. That was months past the initial deadline of September 2007, but it had taken DFAS and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) longer than expected to calculate payments. Many of them had to be done by hand, not computer.

Chet Boutelle, deputy site director for DFAS operations in Cleveland, said in a phone interview Tuesday that the original group of Retro Pay recipients should have numbered 172,000.

So how were 39,000 retirees left out of that original pool?

"When you write computer scripts and ask them to search for certain criteria, if you don't get all the criteria, it won't pick certain people. So that's what happened here," said Boutelle. "It didn't pick all of the original people that it should have."

Boutelle said that by last December the pay files of about 20 retirees not in the original pool had been reviewed at their request. All were found to be eligible for retroactive payment just as they claimed.

"That's what started us going back to VA to have them re-check what was going on. We actually had more than 20, a couple hundred But the first 20 were the ones that made us stand up and say 'Something is wrong.' "

DFAS officials said the Department of Veterans Affairs, which jointly administers VA Retro Pay, did the computer runs that identified only 133,000 retirees as likely to be eligible for back pay. By April this year, Boutelle said, VA had identified the criteria left out of the computer program back in 2006.

"The cases most likely to be affected are veterans who have had little or no interaction with VBA [the Veterans Benefits Administration] in the last five years," said Lois Mittelstaedt, a senior VBA official. "The coding on these cases was not set in the same manner as cases processed in recent years."

Mittelstaedt said the pattern of missed retirees first was detected late last year.

"Over the last few months, DFAS and VA have worked to analyze and correct the logic for selecting retired veterans. After many testing exchanges, DFAS confirmed in March 2009 that the new file layout and content were valid. These changes, implemented in April, were made in a collaborative effort with the DFAS team."

She added, "VA has worked diligently to identify all retired veterans so that DFAS can determine their entitlement to retroactive payments under CRSC and CRDP. We continue to work closely with the DFAS team to meet the needs of veterans entitled to CRSC and CRDP."

Like the original batch, some of the 39,000 retirees are owed money from DFAS, some are owed money from the VA and some are owed money from both departments. Boutelle said it could be several more weeks before he can estimate the average amount to be repaid.

"But worst case, by the 15th of July, everybody will actually have a check in hand," he said.

DFAS officials said they had briefed Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) a few weeks ago on the mistake. Kucinich, as chairman of the subcommittee on domestic policy of the House Oversight and Government Reform, had held a hearing on VA Retro Pay last July where he skewered DFAS and its contractor, Lockheed Martin, for sending "no pay due" letters to some CRSC and CRDP retirees who, it turned out, actually were owed money.

DFAS agreed at the time to conduct a new review of about 25,000 pay files from the original 133,000. Last fall, Kucinich announced that the review found about 1900 "no pay due" letter recipients were owed on average about $1800. More than 2500 others, however, had received overpayments in excess of $2,500, Kucinich complained in a letter to DFAS.

"Errors of that magnitude are disgraceful," he wrote.

Kucinich has not commented publicly yet on the 39,000 retirees mistakenly passed over for VA Retro Pay since 2006. More information on these retirees will be posted soon on the DFAS Web site atdfas.mil.

The VA Retro Pay help line is (877) 327-4457.

To comment, e-mail milupdate@aol.com; write to Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, VA, 20120-1111; or visit: militaryupdate.com.



By Nate Morabito
Reporter / WJHL
Published: May 29, 2009

A former Mountain Home Veterans Affairs therapist accused of sexual misconduct by one of his patients has several other victims, according to Knoxville attorney John Lawhorn. Lawhorn represents James, a veteran who says his therapist at the James H. Quillen Veterans Affairs Medical Center crossed the line late last year during a therapy session. Since James says he is the victim of a sex crime, we are not revealing his identity.

“(The therapist) stood about three foot to the right of me and dropped his pants to his ankles,“ James told us earlier this month. “He kept telling me to look…for three or four minutes, face level, I was sitting down, he was standing. He was excited…he was coming on to me sexually.“

“He asked me if I was bisexual, homosexual, or straight, and at that point, I bluntly said, ‘straight,’“ James added. “He went a little further and said, ‘So you have never been with a member of the same sex sexually?’ and I bluntly stated, ‘No.’“

Although James says the man never physically touched him, he says he still felt violated. James’ attorney says he is now in the process of filing claim documents against the VA and therapist in question on behalf of James and “several” other clients.

Lawhorn says the VA now has six months to respond. The attorney says after that response, if there is no resolution, a lawsuit will follow.

We are continuing to withhold the name of the therapist in question. Earlier this month, James H. Quillen VAMC Public Affairs Officer Judy Fowler-Argo said the VA handed the case against the therapist over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Greeneville. That office has yet to return our emails or phone calls regarding the federal investigation. Earlier this month, Fowler-Argo confirmed the therapist in question no longer works for the VA.

Memorial grows at spot of soldier's suicide
By CATHY KELLY
Posted: 05/27/2009 01:30:57 AM PDT
Updated: 05/27/2009 09:04:43 AM PDT


SANTA CRUZ -- Red, white and blue flowers now mark the oceanfront spot where a soldier shot himself Friday, as people paid tribute to the accomplished infantryman.

Cards and notes at the scenic spot along West Cliff Drive thank Army Pfc. Roy Brooks Mason Jr. for his service to the country and convey condolences to his family.

Mason, 28, of Fairfield, was a decorated soldier who had been deployed to Iraq twice.

He was stationed at Fort Carson, Colo., and was reported missing from there Tuesday.

About 1:15 p.m. Friday, Mason called emergency dispatchers from a call box near West Cliff Drive and Stockton Avenue and told a dispatcher a dead body would be in a red Chevrolet Cobalt there, a car he had recently rented in Colorado. He asked that someone "clean up the area" before children saw anything.

Tuesday, those who had heard about Mason's death struggled to make sense of it.

One man parked near the overlook said he wasn't surprised to hear of the loss, as he had served in the Marine Corps and knew that "soldiers go through a lot."

Ingrid Smith of Santa Cruz stopped and took a moment to straighten a story about Mason that had partially fallen off a bench.

Smith said hearing about Mason's death angered her, as she believes the military needs to change the way it deals with those who need help.

"This needs to be a wake-up call; the military needs to do more," she said. "... And the fact that he did it in plain view,
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in such a super-populated area makes me think it was a message, even if there wasn't any note.

"He was obviously a good soldier and knew if he went back, he would be penalized."

Mason's suicide is evidence of a problem Army officials acknowledge.

Last week, the Army released a statement saying that the service's suicide rate, of 19 per 100,000 soldiers, rose last year and is now nearly double the rate recorded before the invasion of Iraq.

The Army is taking steps to combat that pattern, said Lt. Col. Leo Ruth, who is part of a suicide prevention task force formed in March and based in Arlington, Va.

The task force is taking a holistic approach to an issue that is not easy to pin down, Ruth said.

"It's more than just suicide prevention," he said. "It's also promoting health and fomenting the idea that there is no reason not to seek help. At some point we all reach our breaking point."

The Army's research has not shown any correlation between suicide and deployment, he said, admitting that was a surprise to him and others. But, he said, triggers can be any number of factors exacerbated by deployment -- such as relationship problems, drug and alcohol abuse and financial challenges.

"The causes run the gamut," Ruth said. "And sometimes you may never know."

The Army has the longest deployments and the highest suicide rates amongst the military branches, he said.

Army soldiers are deployed for 12 to 15 months, versus four to six months for those in the Air Force and six to nine months in the Marine Corps.

The Army is considering adding more behavioral health and substance abuse counselors as well as chaplains, he said, and is battling a long-standing stigma against admitting the need for counseling.

"The senior leadership has said that they will no longer tolerate that type of stigma against another solider," Ruth said. "But it may be needed the most at the buddy level; they will be the ones to see it."

Mason had been in the Warrior Transition Unit at Fort Carson for less than two months, a fort representative said.

The units are new to the Army, Ruth said, and employ mental health counselors, physicians and others who seek to help soldiers reintegrate to military or civilian life.

Active duty soldiers are sometimes referred to a Veterans Administration facility for mental health counseling, said Kerri Childress, a spokeswoman for the administration's Palo Alto system.

And there is help available for active military personnel and retired veterans, she said.

They have inpatient and outpatient programs for post traumatic stress disorder, depression and other mental needs, Childress said.

The programs would get a boost under President Obama's 2010 budget for the Veterans Administration, Childress said.

Obama this month called for a 15.5 percent increase in spending for veterans' services, the largest increase in 30 years. Included is a 11 percent increase in health care funding.

"Our biggest challenge is getting them to come to us," Childress said. "There is still very much a stigma in our culture at large, but certainly in the military about mental health care."

Fear of promotion deters many soldiers from admitting they need help, she said, or fear of being released to go home. Others think they will feel better once they get home, only to find the pain is still there months later.

"I wish so much that these young men and women could hear some of our older Vietnam veterans who have dealt with post traumatic stress disorder," Childress said. "I wish I could hear them say, If only I had gotten help sooner.' We all know that nobody goes to combat and comes back unchanged. There is a readjustment for every single person, and depending upon what they witnessed or endured it can be almost impossible to deal with alone."

Childress stressed that it is up to everyone to encourage returning or active-duty veterans to get help if they appear to be suffering emotionally.

"These people belong to our community," she said. "And it works; I've seen people turn their lives around. Sometimes it just takes a friend or neighbor willing to take the time to sit and talk."

In Santa Cruz, as one person wrote on the West Cliff Drive memorial, "the war has come home."

And though the source of Mason's despair might well remain a mystery, officials who deal with suicide say the beauty of the coastline sometimes seems to be a draw for those considering ending their own life.

"I'm sure our suicide rate is no higher than other counties," coroner's Sgt. Alan Burt said. "But we seem to have a lot of people who come here to end their lives because they like to look at the beauty of the cliffs or they come back to where they have good memories."

Mason had been awarded the Army Good Conduct Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the Iraq Campaign Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, the Combat Infantry Badge, the Army Service Ribbon and the Overseas Service Ribbon.

Reach the Veterans Administration suicide prevention line at 800-273-TALK.

Sentinel correspondent Libor Jany contributed to this report.

Groups disagree about Gulf War illness research

Air Force Times
By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday May 20, 2009 19:02:24 EDT

The Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs say an Institute of Medicine study shows there is no Gulf War “syndrome,” and that there is nothing unique about the symptoms 1 in 4 Desert Storm veterans suffer.

But the congressionally mandated Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illness say that not only is there a series of symptoms that make up a definable illness, they know what caused that illness.

Those opposing views were on full display May 19 in the first of three congressional hearings about Gulf War Illness.

“We do believe that Gulf War illnesses are real — but there is no unique set of symptoms,” said Craig Postlewaite, deputy director of force readiness and health assurance under the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs.

He based that view on the IOM study that concluded veterans’ symptoms vary too much to be seen as unique and recommended no more epidemiological studies.

“We feel like their assessment is complete,” Postlewaite told the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs’ subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

The Gulf War advisory committee disagreed. “They have the same types and patterns of excess symptoms,” Lea Steele, immediate past scientific director of the committee, told lawmakers. “Our review provides a clear conclusion.”

She said the research shows that veterans who took the most pyridostigmine bromide — anti-nerve-agent pills — and used the most insect repellent, including flea collars, were most likely to suffer from the cluster of symptoms of known as Gulf War illness.

Victims of the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo as well as animal studies produced the same cluster of symptoms, she said. The pills, pesticides and nerve agent are similar chemicals, so it appears that troops essentially overdosed.

“Clearly, we need to get the research right,” said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. “And the need to get it right is urgent.”

James Bunker, who served as an artillery officer in the war, provided an example of why.

Bunker had a history of rushing through high school in three years, a great love of chess and an aptitude for math. But during the hearing, he stumbled over words and a piece of paper in his hands shook as he read his testimony. He no longer plays chess because he lacks the cognitive ability to plan out his moves.

After deploying with the 5th Field Artillery Regiment, he said his unit’s chemical alarms sounded. Soon after, he developed breathing problems, muscle twitches, leg cramps, vomiting and convulsing. He was given an antidote for nerve agent and sent home to a hospital.

Now, he has nerve problems in his right leg and has lost the use of his right arm. He suffers headaches, cognitive dysfunction, gastric reflux disease, fibromyalgia, mouth sores, skin rashes and sinusitis.

“It’s hard to live a life where you can be talking to someone normally one minute and the next you can’t make a sentence to save your life,” Bunker said. “Often, VA tells me this is all in my head or it’s depression.”

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said sick veterans want to know why they’re sick, where they can get treatment, and that their healthcare and benefits will be paid for by the country that sent them to war.

“VA should publicly recognize our illnesses,” he said.

Sullivan asked that VA be investigated to see if the IOM study was properly conducted. Congress mandated that study, but VA limited its scope to exclude animal studies and research where exposure dosage was unknown.

That defines much of the available research; no one kept track of how much anti-nerve agent troops took or measured the amount of sarin they were exposed to when the military blew up a massive Iraqi chemical depot just after the 1991 war, making it impossible to document exposure dosages.

In its work, the Gulf War illness advisory committee did include animal studies and research where the dosage was unknown.

Steele said about half of troops who deployed for the 1991 war took anti-nerve agent pills and used personal pesticides such as DEET, and were also exposed to sarin.

“We have no indication that any of them experienced any acute symptoms of exposure,” Postlewaite said.

“What about Bunker?” asked Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn.

“As you know, there are many reasons for seizures,” Postlewaite said, noting that current troops would again be given anti-nerve agent pills if battlefield commanders determined a need for them.

Sullivan also asked for training so VA doctors would be familiar with Gulf War illness — and that they be told it’s not a mental health condition.

Richard Weidman, executive director for policy and government affairs for Vietnam Veterans of America, asked that the government keep track of where current service members are located in the combat zones, and that VA include in their medical records a query of where veterans were located when they were deployed.

As it stands, there’s no way to look for patterns, he said. For example, if 30 veterans who all served in Baghdad develop brain cancer, VA would have no way to know whether this was a group that might have been exposed to a particular toxin.

“This is nuts,” Weidman said.

In one medical unit, he said, seven out of 150 people developed multiple sclerosis after serving in Desert Storm. “It’s astronomical. It doesn’t happen by chance.”

And it’s almost impossible to spot if no one keeps track of who served where, he said.

“If you don’t have the stats, you don’t have a problem,” Weidman said, implying that VA doesn’t want to know if there’s a problem.

“We have been and continue to be very concerned about these veterans’ health issues,” insisted Lawrence Deyton, chief public health and environmental hazards officer for VA’s Veterans Health Administration.

Deyton said Gulf War veterans experience symptoms at a rate 25 percent higher than veterans of that era who did not deploy.

But he acknowledged that VA could do better and said new VA Secretary Eric Shinseki has begin efforts to develop a simpler procedure for veterans to quickly and easily get benefits for service-connected ailments.

Congress decided to hold the series of hearings because of the new reports from the IOM and the research advisory committee, as well as the change in VA leadership.

Rep. Harry Mitchell, D-Ariz., chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs oversight and investigations panel, said many questions still need to be answered.

In the end, Mitchell said, “We still don’t know how to respond to Gulf War veterans who ask: ‘Why am I sick? Will I get well again?’ ”

Mom Furious After Vet Son Released From Hospital In Gown

Posted: 3:28 pm EDT May 12, 2009Updated: 4:22 pm EDT May 12, 2009

PITTSBURGH -- A mother is up in arms after her son, a Vietnam veteran, is returned home from the hospital still wearing a gown and IV needle in his arm.

L. Coleman Bey is an Army veteran of the Vietnam War who receives medical treatment at the Veteran Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System. He was admitted Thursday because of low blood pressure and returned home Monday night by van service.

“(He was wearing) a night gown, a pair of footies they put on your feet,” said Bey’s mother Marion Smith. “The needle, IV needle in his arm.”

Smith asked the VA Hospital why they would release Bey, who cannot speak for himself, in that condition. Before calling her an ambulance to return her son to the hospital, she sent for neighbors to see how Bey had been returned home.

The VA Hospital didn’t respond to Smith until Channel 11 News started asking questions, as well. The hospital did not comment to Channel 11, but Smith received an apology from the hospital.

“They were apologizing, saying they had no business to send him out like that,” Smith said.

Now Smith said she will have to keep a closer eye on the care her son receives.

“I have to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to,” she said.

Copyright 2009 by WPXI.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Veterans Affairs doctor makes aspirin expensive

By Bob LaMendola | South Florida Sun-Sentinel
    May 11, 2009

A doctor at the Veterans Affairs outpatient center in Sunrise has my father take baby aspirin for his heart. But the doctor wrote it up as a prescription, so my father was charged the VA co-pay of $24 for a three-month supply of 90 pills. We could buy that many at the store for a few dollars. We protested, but the VA renewed the script and will charge us another $24. — Jim Stryder, Davie

Here's a case where bureaucracy and process may have trumped common sense.

Stryder's family moved to South Florida last year and he brought his father, Rayburn Stryder, to the VA clinic in December. The father, a Purple Heart recipient, had been taking baby-sized aspirin for years while seeing other VA doctors and had been buying it himself at the drugstore.

But for reasons that are unclear, Stryder's VA doctor in Sunrise put the 81-mg aspirins on a list of drugs Stryder takes regularly and that are mailed to him every three months.

Because the aspirin is on the doctor's list, the VA treats it like a prescription and bills Stryder the normal VA co-pay of $8 a month, or $24 for a three-month supply, said Marjorie Valdes, a spokeswoman for the VA in Miami, which runs the clinic.

It's not a lot of money, but Stryder is outraged. The distributor of the generic aspirin, Marlex Pharmaceuticals, sells a 100-pill bottle for $2. The VA charge is more than 12 times higher.

"That would [be] considered way above price gouging," Stryder said.

After the family's first protest, VA officials told them the doctor can put any drug on the mail-order list — even an over-the-counter drug — if the doctor believes patients have a physical or mental obstacle to getting it on their own. Stryder said his father lives with him and is fine.

A VA patient advocate previously told Stryder there was little or no chance of getting a refund of the first $24. Valdes said last week she would have the advocate call back to look into the second one.

Bob LaMendola can be reached at blamendola@SunSentinel.com or 954-356-4526 or 561-243-6600, ext. 4526.


Man to government: I'm not dead yet

VA: 5th HIV case linked to unsterile hospital equipment; 7 more test positive for hepatitis

By LISA ORKIN EMMANUEL , Associated Press
Last update: May 1, 2009 - 8:40 PM

MIAMI - A fifth patient has tested positive for HIV, and seven more tested positive for hepatitis after being exposed to contaminated medical equipment at three Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, the agency said Friday.

That brings the total who have tested positive for hepatitis to 33.

They are among thousands tested because they were treated with endoscopic equipment that wasn't properly sterilized between patients and exposed them to the body fluids of others. The equipment is often used in colonoscopies and ear, nose and throat procedures.

Nearly 11,000 former sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines could have been exposed at the hospitals in Miami, Murfreesboro, Tenn., and Augusta, Ga. The agency said 6,687 patients have been notified of their test results so far.

VA spokeswoman Katie Roberts said the new HIV case was found in the Miami hospital. The agency said in a news release the positive tests were "not necessarily linked to any endoscopy issues."

"It's very disturbing that anybody would contract it, of course. I am pleased that the VA has agreed to treat all the veterans regardless of where they may have contracted it," said Alexander Kovac, a veterans' advocate who was stationed in Korea in the 1960s.

The VA has said the problems with the endoscopic equipment had gone on for years, but were discovered in December when officials learned the Murfreesboro facility wasn't following cleaning procedures the manufacturer recommended. It issued an internal alert for hospitals to check procedures, and the problem at Augusta was discovered in January.

On Feb. 9, the VA announced a nationwide safety check of endoscopic equipment used in colonoscopies and ear, nose and throat treatments. The procedure involves a narrow, flexible tube fitted with a fiber-optic device such as a telescope or magnifying lens that is inserted into the body.

VA, Radio Station Clash Over Interview

Executives and lawyers for WAMU radio are demanding an apology from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the immediate return of a reporter’s recording equipment following an incident during a public forum earlier this week at the VA Hospital in Washington.

The station contends the action was a violation of the reporter's first amendment right to gather news. The department claims the reporter did not properly identify himself nor followed necessary procedures for interviewing VA patients while at the event.

Reporter David Schultz attended the meeting Tuesday night in the hospital’s auditorium after learning about it from a VA press release. Members of the VA’s Advisory Committee on Minority Veterans organized the event to meet with concerned veterans and hear comments about care and treatment for minorities.

Army veteran Tommie Canady told the committee he had received poor treatment from the Washington hospital, according to Schultz. Intrigued by his comments, Schultz invited the veteran out into the hallway for a recorded interview.

Moments later, hospital public affairs officer Gloria Hairston approached the pair, telling Schultz he could not conduct an interview with Canady until they both signed consent forms. She summoned hospital security guards and demanded that Schultz hand over all of his equipment. After a conversation, Schultz eventually gave Hairston the flash card of his digital recorder after calling and consulting with WAMU news director Jim Asendio. He left the hospital moments later.

Schultz never properly identified himself nor obtained the consent forms necessary before speaking with Canady, according to VA spokeswoman Katie Roberts.

"We have procedures and policies in place, so that our patients can make informed decisions about what information they feel comfortable releasing or discussing with the public. That is why before we permit one-on-one interviews to be filmed or videotaped on our premises we request written consent." A reporter with American Urban Radio and a photographer with Vaughn Enterprises also attended the town hall meeting, signed consent forms and were able to interview patients, Robert said.

Anyone entering the hospital had to show personal identification and sign in with their name and phone number, Schultz said. He did not have a formal press identification badge or business cards, because he is a part-time employee of the public radio station, owned and operated by American University. Regardless, the WAMU logo appears on his bag and headphones and his recording equipment should have made his intent obvious, he said.

In a letter to the VA, WAMU General Manager Caryn G. Mathes called the VA's actions "clearly unconstitutional," stating that "Mr. Schultz's newsgathering activities and the product of his work not only are protected by the First Amendment, but he was attending a public meeting at which the VA had encouraged public discussion on the treatment it gives to minority veterans."

Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, agrees with Mathes. "The seizure by the government of newsgathering equipment is the kind of thing we sometimes see in dictatorships, not in the United States. For a government official to take a reporter’s equipment away while he is conducting an interview amounts to the kind of prior restraint that has been repeatedly found unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court," she wrote in a letter to VA Secretary Eric Shinseki.

The VA says Schultz can get the flash card back once he signs the necessary consent forms. But Asendio – through the advice of American University lawyers – refuses to do so. He would prefer to focus instead on the story Schultz wanted to report: the care and treatment of minority veterans. Schultz has filed three reports on the incident and Canady’s experiences with the VA.

“The story really is about him and about why the VA doesn’t want him to talk and why the VA is trying to suppress his story,” Schultz said. “I also really want my sound card back. It not only has the tape of the interview I did with Tommie Canady and the tape of Gloria telling me you can’t talk. But it also has interviews I did for other stories.”

By washingtonpost.com Editors  |  April 10, 2009; 4:20 PM ET  |


Virginia Funeral Home Allegedly Abuses Bodies of Arlington-Bound Veterans
Service Corporation International facility accused of letting bodies rot in unrefrigerated storage

By Truman Lewis
ConsumerAffairs.com

April 5, 2009
The bodies of veterans headed for burial at Arlington National Cemetery were often left to rot in unrefrigerated garages and hallways of a Northern Virginia funeral home
operated by Houston-based Service Corporation International (SCI), the nation's largest chain of funeral homes, The Washington Post reported.

National Funeral Home in Falls Church, Va., acts as a regional clearing house for four other SCI-owned funeral homes in Virginia and Maryland. The facility is so overwhelmed that bodies brought there for embalming, cosmetic treatment and storage are often stacked and left in hallways, unrefrigerated storage rooms, a garage and other inappropriate storage areas, according to a former employee who complained to state officials and reporters.

Former trooper Steven Napper complained for months to his employers about conditions at the funeral home. He documented his complaints with photos and detailed notes, eventually turning to state authorities and the Post when SCI failed to act, the newspaper reports said.

Napper said that at times, as many as 200 leaking, decomposing corpses were left in makeshift quarters, an account substantiated by the son of a retired Army colonel who insisted on accompanying his deceased father's corpse to the funeral home.

Ronald Federici, 53, a child neuropsychologist, said he followed a removal van carrying his father's body and was surprised by the "horrific stench" of decomposition that wafted out from a garage door behind the funeral home.

"Bodies were lying buck naked all over the place. There was no dignity whatsoever. It was disgusting, degrading and humiliating," Federici told the Post.

The driver of the van Federici followed was Keith Stringfield, 36, a licensed funeral director. Stringfield told the Post he and other drivers were instructed to leave bodies in the garage if the coolers were full. Stringfield said he has spoken to state investigators about conditions at the facility.

"You don't leave a body uncovered. You don't let a body leak. You don't leave a body on a stretcher in the garage," Stringfield said in the Post report.

Arlington National Cemetery refuses to accept coffins for burial if they are emitting an odor or leaking fluids, but Napper said the funeral home got around the problem by covering bodies with an industrial-strength deodorant. What was happening "just wasn't right," said Napper, who has since found a job at a locally-owned funeral home.

A spokeswoman for the Virginia Board of Funeral Directors said the agency could not confirm that it was conducting an investigation and could not discuss specific allegations.

It would not be the first state investigation of the facility. In June 2008, it was cited for keeping inadequate records and an unsanitary preparation room, and for operating without a license or manager, according to the Virginia Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers' Web site. The funeral home was fined $13,000 and placed on probation for three years.

An SCI spokesman said the company's policies call for the "highest standards and professional behavior" and "would not tolerate" the kind of behavior Napper and others described.
SCI

In a 2001 class action lawsuit in Florida, relatives of three people buried in Jewish cemeteries accused SCI of desecrating remains -- breaking open burial vaults and dumping the contents in the woods, crushing vaults to make room for others, mixing body parts from different individuals and digging up and reburying remains in locations other than the plots purchased.

The lawyer handling the case for the families, Neal Hirschfeld, said he had heard from hundreds of other families who were concerned about their deceased relatives' treatment in five South Florida cemeteries controlled by SCI.

"We've already heard from more than 500 other families who are wondering what might have happened to their loved ones," Mr. Hirschfeld told The New York Times. "It's hard to describe how painful and difficult it has been for families to hear that they scooped up remnants of people whose spaces they needed and tossed them in the woods."

In one case cited in the lawsuit, a former gravedigger at a West Palm Beach SCI cemetery said he had been told to dig up the grave of Hyman Cohen and to throw anything he dug up in the woods in back of the cemetery. Among the remains found in the woods have been bones, a burial shroud and a Star of David necklace. The plot was then used for the burial of Frances Gold, the gravedigger said.

The lawsuit was blamed for the apparent suicide of an SCI funeral home manager, Peter Hartmann, 45, found slumped over in his company-owned car in his parents
' garage in December 2001. Hartmann's wife said he was distraught over the lawsuit and the alleged mishandling of remains by his employer.
Decreased competition

In 1999, SCI agreed to sell three of its Jewish funeral homes in New York City after the state attorney general charged that the company dominated the market for Jewish funeral services.

SCI had been acquiring independently owned Jewish funeral parlors in the city for nearly 30 years, and as competition has decreased because of its acquisitions, has been charging higher fees for services and caskets
, then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer said.

"It's difficult enough to bury a loved one without having to pay unfairly high prices on top of it," Spitzer said.

Founded in 1962, SCI operates 1,500 funeral homes and 400 cemeteries in 46 states, eight Canadian provinces and Pureto Rico. Its Web site boasts of "robust cash flows" that it says have enabled the company to provide "North America's finest death care services."


By Victor Whitman
Times Herald-Record
Posted: April 04, 2009 - 2:00 AM

GLEN SPEY — Michael Mulhern is blind and paralyzed, but he is not dead.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, however, recently deemed him so. The feds sent a letter to his wife dated March 3, expressing their condolences.

"We are sorry to learn of the death of Michael J. Mulhern and wish to express our sympathy," the letter says.

As a result of this apparent clerical error, the Glen Spey veteran has lost his benefits and says while this is being cleared up he's so strapped for cash that he recently borrowed money from a friend to buy milk.

He keeps leaving messages with the VA that he's still alive and breathing, but is having a hard time getting through.

"It's a bitch getting off the death list," Mulhern said Friday. "I want to be resurrected."

In 1977, Mulhern, 54, an honorably discharged Navy veteran from the Vietnam era, was shot by a drunk, off-duty New York City police officer, leaving him paralyzed and blind. He's had several well-documented fights with the county over his medical care. Last year, he gathered reporters around him to oppose Gov. David Paterson's proposed cut in the blind veteran's annuity, which was never passed.

Mulhern says maybe with all the news coverage he angered a federal bureaucrat, who might have purposely slipped up.

"I feel like I have been blackballed, but that is my opinion," Mulhern said. "I have tried to fight for blind veterans' rights and because of that I feel I was put on the death list. I am not naming names. It is awfully coincidental."

Mulhern has contacted county, state and federal representatives for help in bringing him back to life.

"It's pretty scary," said Sullivan County Legislator Kathy LaBuda, who along with the county's Veterans Service Agency, is trying to exhume Mulhern from the federal bureaucracy.

"We're working on this as fast as we can and, hopefully, in the next two weeks he'll have his money," said LaBuda.

This new problem has left him poor.

One of his benefits, for "aid and attendance," which Mulhern has received for years, goes directly into his bank account. That $846 wasn't deposited in April, leaving him with no money to pay the mortgage.

"It is easy for them to make a mistake, but it is a Herculean task to correct it when you are dealing with the VA," Mulhern said.

Attempts to reach a spokesman in the VA's New York regional office failed. Two VA representatives in other offices indicated that sometimes the agency makes clerical errors. These can take up two months to fix.

vwhitman@th-record.com

VA program to schedule patient appointments on verge of collapse

By Bob Brewin 03/31/2009

An eight-year-old, $167 million project to develop a core computer application to schedule patient appointments at hospitals run by the Veterans Affairs Department has all but collapsed, and senior executives are worried about the repercussions it could cause on the Hill and in the White House, according to an internal memo obtained by Nextgov.

The Replacement Scheduling Application Development Program, which VA began building in 2001, "still has not developed a single scheduling capability it can provide to the field, nor is there any expectation of delivery in the near future," wrote Dr. Michael Kussman, undersecretary for health at the Veterans Health Administration, in a March 20 memo to Stephen Warren, acting assistant secretary for information and technology.

The scheduling application is a core piece of VA's new HealtheVet, a vast medical platform that will include patient enrollment and scheduling systems, a data repository, electronic health records, a pharmacy system, a workload management system, and a way for patients to manage their medical records and personal information. VA plans to use the system to replace its aging Veterans Health Information System and Technology Architecture (VistA), the Government Accountability Office reported on June 20, 2008.

The botched effort comes on the heels of another scheduling program -- a five-year, $75 million failed project started in 2001. That program, the Scheduling Replacement Project, was started by IT staffs in the VA healthcare regions serving Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Texas, but after five years of work they failed to develop a usable product. Top VA management then transferred development in November 2006 to a new centralized VA IT operation. Kussman said the failure of the Scheduling Replacement Project precipitated a decision by then VA Chief Information Officer Robert McFarland to centralize all IT development in the Office of Information and Technology in the department's headquarters.

A pilot version of the scheduling program was supposed to be installed at the VA Medical Center in Muskogee, Okla., in the summer of 2008, Dr. Paul Tibbits, head of the Office of Enterprise Development at the Office of Information and Technology, told a House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing in 2007. He also said he anticipated the program would be in use in all VA hospitals by January 2011.

But Kussman's memo detailed a series of "significant test failures" with a beta version of the scheduling system, which had less functionality than originally envisioned. In February, VA terminated its contract with the schedule application developer, Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio. A spokeswoman for the organization did not return a call for comment by deadline.

Kussman added his office was not notified until March 18 that the problems with the scheduling applications were so significant that the program has been suspended.

The suspension is "significant and likely to generate intense congressional and Office of Management of Budget interest," Kussman said. "This is also of concern . . . because of the numerous representations of clear progress we have been making, not only to Congress and OMB, but more importantly to our health care providers, who are eagerly waiting for this capability."

The patient scheduling project has "floundered under VHA's leadership since 1998," Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind., the ranking member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said in a statement. He added the current failure exemplifies the need for VA to develop a professional cadre of contracting officers and program managers.

Buyer said VA must make significant management changes to improve its effort to centralize IT development. "Stovepiped management within the existing VA organization and hidden pockets of application dollars continue to challenge this consolidation," he said. "Bureaucratic backroom skirmishes that occur on a regular basis are hamstringing successful and disciplined development of new IT systems and applications and wasting taxpayer dollars."

VA needs the scheduling application to manage a forecasted sharp increase in the number of veterans seeking care at its medical facilities during the next several years, said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense. He said VA will soon be hit by a "tidal wave" of veterans and predicted the number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will jump from 400,000 in September 2008 to 600,000 in September 2010.

"VA has a decade-long history of initiating IT programs, only to experience extensive delays and major cost overruns," said Gerald Manar, deputy director of the National Veterans Service at the Veterans of Foreign Wars. "The fact that VA has frittered away eight years and millions of dollars in developing the RSA, with no viable results and no end in sight, is extremely disappointing but, based on its track record, not surprising."

Adrian Atizado, assistant national legislative director for the Disabled American Veterans group, urged VHA to take control of its IT programs to avoid problems such as suspension of the scheduling application. VHA "should regain its authority for planning, programming, operating and budgeting information technology matters that directly affect delivery of health care to enrolled veterans in coordination with the VA chief information officer."

VA Dept. Overpaid For Supplies, Says Audit
Audit Finds State Cardholders Didn't Attend Required Training
Reported By Marc Stewart

POSTED: 3:50 pm CDT April 2, 2009
UPDATED: 11:10 am CDT April 3, 2009

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- A recent report released on Thursday questions the amount of money the state Department of Veterans Affairs is spending on cleaning supplies.

In one case, the audit said the VA paid nine times more than it needed to.
According to state auditors, between January 2005 and August 2007, the cemetery administrator used a Florida company to buy cleaning supplies when it would have been cheaper to buy from the state.

For example, an all-purpose cleaner that was purchased for $78 a gallon could have been purchased in Tennessee for $8 a gallon.

"It's waste and abuse, as far as I'm concerned," said Herb Kraycirik, Tennessee state auditor and CPA. "The taxpayer, you know, deserves the best deal for their money."

Another concern is state credit cards.

"At that department, they chose to ignore those procedures, and evidently they got through the approval process," Kraycirik said.

Investigators said cardholders did not attend required training and often failed to fill out necessary paperwork. They said the Department of Veterans Affairs did not put procedures in place that would lower the risk of fraud.

"The taxpayer, of course, especially the ones losing their job, they certainly don't want to see their tax dollars wasted," said Kraycirik.

The Department of Veterans Affairs said management concurs with the findings, noting that changes are already being made.

Copyright 2009 by WSMV.com. All rights reserved.

More data links anti-smoking drug, suicide

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Mar 11, 2009 16:25:30 EDT

A new study from the Food and Drug Administration appears to back up claims that a smoking-cessation drug used by service members and veterans may put them at risk for suicidal thoughts.

In fiscal 2007, some 67,580 service members had prescriptions for the medication, according to the Defense Department.

The study, published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, linked varenicline with 19 deaths and 112 serious incidents involving injury, hospitalization or emergency intervention after people took the drug to help them stop smoking.

The FDA called a link between suicidal ideation and the drug “likely” — even for those with no prior history of mental health issues — and said it’s important for physicians to monitor patients who take the drug.

“Continued reports of crashes and other serious adverse events among patients taking this drug also have raised concerns about other possible risks,” the JAMA article stated.

The FDA also found similar problems for Bupropion, which was linked to 46 reports of suicidal ideation between May 2006 and November 2007 and 29 reports of suicidal behavior, with about one-third resulting in death.

The FDA also found 988 reports of serious injury in the last three months of 2007, “more reports to the FDA’s adverse report system than for any other drug,” JAMA said. Problems have included car accidents, skin reactions, cardiac problems and diabetes-related symptoms.

Varenicline has changed its label to include a warning about potential mood changes and to advise patients who experience such effects to quit taking the medication immediately.

In June, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. S. Ward Casscells issued a safety notice about varenicline that encouraged service members to seek help immediately if they have an adverse reaction to the drug. He said the Defense Department does not include the drug in its formulary, but many military health care beneficiaries have prescriptions for it.

A Defense Department safety notice issued last May advises pilots and other operators of heavy machinery not to take the medication.

“Based on reports of sudden loss of consciousness, seizures, muscle spasms, vision disturbances, hallucinations, paranoia and psychosis, we believe varenicline may not be safe to use in these settings,” the safety notice states. “The extent to which varenicline has already contributed to accidental death and injury has not yet been investigated because these adverse effects had not been previously reported.”

The drug first made headlines when the Washington Times newspaper reported that the Veterans Affairs Department gave it to veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder to help them stop smoking, leading two lawmakers to ask for an investigation.

A recent study by a Navy physician who embedded with Marines and sailors in Hadithah, Iraq, found that almost two-thirds of the more than 400 troops he surveyed in the war zone use some kind of tobacco, and that about three-quarters wanted to quit.

Unopened claims letters hidden at VA offices  Unopened claims letters hidden at VA offices
 By RICK MAZE
 March 03, 2009
 A new report about Veterans Affairs Department employees squirreling away tens of thousands of unopened letters related to benefits claims is sparking fresh concerns that veterans and their survivors are being cheated out of money.
 VA officials acknowledge further credibility problems based on a new report of a previously undisclosed 2007 incident in which workers at a Detroit regional office turned in 16,000 pieces of unprocessed mail and 717 documents turned up in New York in December during amnesty periods in which workers were promised no one would be penalized.
 “Veterans have lost trust in VA,” Michael Walcoff, VA’s under secretary for benefits, said at a hearing Tuesday. “That loss of trust is understandable, and winning back that trust will not be easy.”
 Unprocessed and unopened mail was just one problem in VA claims processing mentioned by Belinda Finn, VA’s assistant inspector general for auditing, in testimony before the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee.
   Auditors also found that the dates recorded for receiving claims, which in many cases determine the effective date for benefits payments, are wrong in many cases because of intentional and unintentional errors, Finn said.
 The worst case uncovered by auditors involved the New York regional office, where employees testified that managers told staff to put later dates on claims to make it appear claims were being processed faster. A review found that 56 percent of claims had incorrect dates, although no evidence was found of incorrect or delayed benefits payments. Finn said workers reported that this practice had been used for years.
 The new report comes as VA is trying to resolve an earlier controversy involving documents essential to the claims process that were discovered in bins awaiting shredding at several regional offices, which raised questions about how many past claims had been delayed or denied because of intentional or unintentional destruction of documentation.
 ‘It is impossible not to be shocked’
 Kathryn Witt of Gold Star Wives of America said survivors trying to receive VA benefits have long complained about problems getting accurate information and missing claims. “When they call to check on the status of the claim, they are often told that the VA has no record of their claim and that they should resubmit their paperwork,” she said.
 In one case, a woman claimed she had to submit paperwork to VA three times to prove she was married and had three children, Witt said.
 And having to resubmit the same claim, she added, does nothing to reduce the backlog that already forces survivors to wait six to nine months for simple claims to be approved.
 “It is impossible not to be shocked by the numbers from Detroit,” said Rep. Harry Mitchell, D-Ariz., who chairs the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee’s oversight and investigations panel. “Shredding documents or burying them in the bottom drawer is a breach of trust. Whether that breach of trust comes as a consequence of inadequate training or negligent or deliberate behavior, Congress must not and will not tolerate it.”
 It is unclear, however, whether there is any short-term fix.
 A permanent solution is to have a fully electronic claims process to establish a record of when documents are received and their status as they move through the process. A fully electronic system will not be in place before 2011, VA officials said.
 Kerry Baker of Disabled American Veterans said a short-term answer could be to scan all documents related to claims into computer systems. Baker, DAV’s assistant national legislative director, said this could be done at one or more large-scale imaging centers that would transform paper into electronic records.
 “A large section of the veterans community and representatives of the community have long felt that the Veterans Benefits Administration operates in such a way that stalls the claims process until frustrated claimants either give up or die,” Baker said.
 He said that although he doesn’t believe that is true, something must be done.
 “Denying earned benefits by illegally destroying records should serve as the proverbial wake-up call that signals the urgency of this overdue transformation,” he said.
 Geneva Moore, a senior veterans service representative from Winston-Salem, N.C., who testified on behalf of the American Federation of Government Employees, a union that counts about 160,000 VA workers among its members, said backdating claims and document shredding are signs of a claims system under stress.
 “Clearly, if the disability claims process were already paperless, many of the problems being considered at this hearing today would no longer exist,” she said.

 Bush claims he “provided unprecedented resources for veterans” over the past eight years and provided “the highest level of support for veterans in American history.”


By Jason Leopold
January 6, 2009

It’s not uncommon for Presidents to embellish their accomplishments upon leaving office, but George W. Bush, who will exit the White House leaving the country in the worst shape since Herbert Hoover, has gone a step further, moving past exaggeration into outright lying.

Last month, trying to change the emerging historical consensus about a failed presidency, the White House published two lengthy reports, “Highlights of Accomplishments and Results of the Administration of George W. Bush,” and “100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record.”

One of the surprising claims that stood out among the combined 90 pages of so-called accomplishments was the White House’s glowing assessment of Bush’s record on veterans’ issues. Bush claims he “provided unprecedented resources for veterans” over the past eight years and provided “the highest level of support for veterans in American history.”

“The President also increased the benefits available to those who have served our Nation and transformed the veterans health care system to better serve those who have sacrificed for our freedom,” both reports claim, adding that he “instituted reforms for the care of wounded warriors ... and dramatically expanded resources for mental health services.”

The White House made these claims in the face of what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might have called a “known known” – that the treatment of veterans returning from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan has been a national disgrace, highlighted most dramatically by the neglect and substandard care given wounded troops at Walter Reed and other military hospitals.

The budget increases that have occurred mostly were enacted over Bush’s opposition or related to the fact that injuries from the Iraq War far exceeded the administration’s rosy projections in early 2003. The Bush team especially underestimated how many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder to anticipate as well as the number of brain injuries, which have been endemic to the Iraq War where insurgents made effective use of “improvised explosive devices,” or IEDs.

Before Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, documents released by the Department of Veterans Affairs said it expected a maximum of 8,000 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder.

However, according to a study released last year by the RAND Institute, there are more than 320,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars suffering from major depression, PTSD and/or traumatic brain injury. The report found that the VA has been and continues to be ill-equipped to deal with these cases when soldiers return from combat, especially after multiple tours.

An Army task force last year also found major flaws in the way the VA treated and cared for veterans suffering from traumatic brain injuries.

Bush’s Record on VA Funding

For his part, Bush stacked the VA with political cronies, such as former Republican National Committee chairman Jim Nicholson, who as VA Secretary defended a budget measure that sought major cuts in staffing for healthcare and at the Board of Veterans Appeals; slashed funding for nursing home care; and blocked four legislative measures aimed at streamlining the backlog of veterans benefits claims.

Of the 84,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by VA, only half, about 42,000, had their disability claim approved by VA. Instead of expediting PTSD claims, Bush's political appointees at VA actively fought against mental health claims.

Bush's appointees also obstructed scientific research into the causes of Gulf War illnesses dating back 18 years to Operation Desert Storm and opposed medical research on treatment for 210,000 of those veterans.

As for funding, Bush proposed a 0.5 percent budget increase for the VA for fiscal year 2006, which amounted to a “cruel mockery” of Bush’s promises to do everything to support veterans and soldiers, Rep. Lane Evans, D-Illinois, said at the time.

Evans called Bush’s proposed budget increase for the VA “grossly inadequate,” saying it would force the VA to “ration” healthcare to veterans.
 VA officials had testified in 2005 that the agency needed at least a 13 percent increase to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of war veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and others who needed long-term mental health care.

In early 2007, the Washington Post put a spotlight on the human consequences resulting from the combination of Bush’s wars and the budget squeeze.

The Post published a series of articles documenting the substandard conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which is located only 4.7 miles from the White House. Wounded vets were housed in rooms with moldy walls, leaky plumage and an infestation of vermin, underscoring how out of touch Bush had become regarding the nation’s veterans.

In response to complaints that some veterans under VA care were being neglected, Nicholson said in March 2007 that such cases were “anecdotal exceptions.”

“When you are treating so many people there is always going to be a linen towel left somewhere,” he said.
 
In May 2007, the AP revealed that while Nicholson was pinching pennies on treatment costs and coping with a $1.3 billion budget shortfall, he awarded “$3.8 million in bonuses to top executives in fiscal 2006″ — many as much as $33,000.

Simultaneously, Bush was resisting congressional efforts to beef up the VA’s budget. In May 2007, Bush threatened to veto legislation that sought a 10 percent—$3.2 billion—increase, calling it too expensive. Bush proposed a 2 percent increase, far below what lawmakers and VA officials said was needed to treat a dramatic increase in traumatic brain injury and PTSD cases.

After Congress passed the legislation with the higher VA spending, Bush backed down on his veto threat but that was largely due to the fact that every Republican in the Senate with the exception of Jim DeMint of South Carolina, supported the measure.

Amid the growing scandals about substandard VA treatment and inept management, Nicholson resigned in July 2007.

Suicide Epidemic

Even after Nicholson’s resignation, the Department of Veterans Affairs continued to be buffeted by scandals, including a cover-up in an epidemic of veterans’ suicides and attempted suicides.

Last year, internal VA e-mails surfaced that showed how top agency officials tried to conceal the information from the public about the sudden increase in suicides and attempted suicides among veterans that were treated or sought help at VA hospitals around the country.

And last November, internal watchdogs discovered 500 benefits claims in shredding bins at the 41 of the 57 regional VA offices around the country.

Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, a veterans’ advocacy group that sued the VA in federal court, said attempts by the White House to portray Bush as an advocate for veterans is beyond shameful.

“Bush is the worst failure for our veterans since Hoover,” Sullivan said, expressing shock that the President “would shamefully continue his legacy of lies to the American people as he and his political cronies are forced to leave office on Jan. 20.”

Sullivan disputed some of Bush’s claims as misleading, such as the assertion that he doubled funding for the VA. “However, President Bush failed to disclose that the number of veterans seeking VA healthcare doubled, from 2.7 million to 5.5 million, and that rising healthcare inflation actually resulted in a net decrease in spending per veteran by VA during the past eight years,” he said.

“If not for the intervention of Congress to substantially increase VA funding beyond Bush's inadequate budget requests, especially in the past two years, the situation would have deteriorated from a serious crisis to a catastrophe at VA.”

Sullivan, who worked at the VA for five years as a project manager, said Bush failed to the implement the VA’s proposed Mental Health Strategic Plan, a program aimed at identifying and quickly treating veterans suffering from major depression and were on the verge of suicide.

“Without implementation, funding, and oversight of the plan, several suicidal Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans were illegally refused emergency medical care by VA,” Sullivan said. “Veterans for Common Sense brought this issue to the attention of VA, and VA refused to act.

“Therefore, VCS sued VA for turning away suicidal veterans. After we filed our lawsuit, and only after we filed our lawsuit, the VA began a suicide prevention hotline. In the first 15 months of operation, the hotline received 85,000 calls and rescued more than 2,100 suicidal veterans.”

As of September 2008, 330,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have filed disability claims to the VA, according to the agency. Yet, 54,000 are still waiting for the VA to confirm their claims were received. The average wait for a disability claim is more than six months.

Additionally, according to VA's Inspector General, 25 percent of the VA's 5.5 million patients have to wait more than 30 days for a doctor’s appointment.

As costly as the treatment of Iraq and Afghan war veterans already has become, Bush is leaving an even greater budget hole for his successors.

In the book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, authors Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes wrote that future treatment of veterans would continue adding to the total cost of Bush’s conflicts and would put extraordinary stresses on the VA.

“Even in 2000, before the war,” they wrote, the VA was the subject of numerous Government Accountability Office studies that “identified long-standing problems, including large backlogs of pending claims, lengthy processing time for initial claims, high rates of error in processing claims, and inconsistency across regional offices.”

But the problems only have grown worse. “In a 2005 study,” Stiglitz and Blimes wrote, “the GAO found that the time to complete a veteran’s claim varied from 99 days at the Salt Lake City Office to 237 days in Honolulu. In a 2006 study, GAO found that 12 percent of claims were inaccurate.”

Homeless Veterans

The White House reports on Bush’s so-called accomplishments also claimed that Bush “reduced the number of homeless veterans by nearly 40 percent from 2001 to 2007. Established VA homeless-specific programs, which constitute one of the largest integrated networks of homeless treatment and assistance services in the country.”

That statement rankled Aaron Glantz, a journalist, author and the Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism at the Carter Center.

“What kind of President pats himself on the back with 200,000 veterans sleeping homeless on the street every night?” Glantz said in an interview. “What kind of administration puts out self-congratulatory press releases while over 6,000 veterans commit suicide every year?

“We can only hope that President elect Barack Obama takes a very different course once he's in office. Otherwise, our government will repeat the shameful disgrace that was its treatment of wounded veterans returning home from Vietnam.”

Glantz spent three years in Iraq reporting on the war and recently published The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle against America's Veterans, which documents the heart-wrenching stories of homeless Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and the plight of other veterans who, upon returning home, have been neglected by the country they served.

Last week, Glantz published a report, “Did You Know 200,000 Vets Are Sleeping on the Streets?,” that contradicts the Bush self-congratulations about veterans’ homelessness.

On his transition Web site, change.gov, Obama said he intends to “Fix the Benefits Bureaucracy: Hire additional claims workers, and improve training and accountability so that VA benefit decisions are rated fairly and consistently. Transform the paper benefit claims process to an electronic one to reduce errors and improve timeliness.”

To meet that challenge, Obama tapped retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, a Vietnam War veteran who sustained combat-related injuries, to lead the VA. Shinseki made headlines back in February 2003 when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and predicted that several hundred thousand soldiers would likely be needed to maintain order in post-invasion Iraq.

After facing public criticism from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, Shinseki was forced into early retirement. His judgment has since been vindicated, both in regard to likely ethnic strife in Iraq and on the costliness of the war.

Yet, Bush’s White House is now hoping that its last-minute propaganda barrage will, if nothing else, cloud some of the memories about its failures and misjudgments. Bush’s critics, however, are not willing to so easily forget.

“Contrary to his Administration's latest spin, George W. Bush's legacy on veterans is one of shameful neglect,” author Glantz said. “Rather than care for the tens of thousands of American service members wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush Administration has thrown up a series of barriers to prevent veterans from getting the care they need.”

Simply put – White House propaganda aside – veterans’ healthcare has become worse, not better, under Bush’s leadership.

Jason Leopold has launched his own Web site, The Public Record, at www.pubrecord.org.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/010609b.html

VA Slammed for Recovering Benefits From Widows


CQ TODAY MIDDAY UPDATE
Dec. 12, 2008 – 1:30 p.m.

The Veterans Affairs Department has been wrongfully recovering money from widows of deceased veterans over the last 12 years by demanding reimbursement for final benefits checks in violation of federal law.

Sen. Daniel K. Akaka , D-Hawaii, the chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, confronted the department last week about the problem, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of senior citizens losing pension and disability money received during the month of their spouse’s death.

“This flawed practice has caused serious hardship for many widows,” Akaka said. “I suspect that the improper procedures have harmed thousands of widows and widowers over the last 12 years.”

Congress granted veterans’ spouses the right to keep their partner’s final month of benefits when it passed the Veterans’ Benefits Improvements Act of 1996. The law instructed the department to treat disability and pension checks issued during the month of a veteran’s death “as being payable to a surviving spouse.”

But the department never adjusted its systems to follow the law. As a result, the department has routinely either refused to send checks or taken active measures to retrieve money already sent, including collection actions.

Akaka brought up the issue in a Dec. 5 letter to Secretary James B. Peake, asking him to immediately take steps to identify all the spouses affected, pay them their missing benefits, and fix the system.

Akaka’s press secretary, Jesse Broder Van Dyke, said there was no evidence officials intentionally withheld any money. “It was something that slipped through the cracks,” he said. “They’re using an automated system, so they needed to go and change the program, but they never did.”

Peake responded Thursday with a tentative action plan to fix the benefits problem over the coming months, saying “I agree that this problem must be fixed.”

$2.5 million spent and not a single veteran has been studied or benefited.


COMMENTARY
Van Boven: Help for injured veterans could vanish
Dr. Robert Van Boven, LOCAL CONTRIBUTOR
Monday, December 08, 2008

There is new bureaucratic bumbling to address the mismanagement and
waste at the new traumatic brain injury research program at Central
Texas Veterans Health Care System. The system has spent nearly $2.5
million in more than two years on salaries, supplies and MRI scanner
time — and not a single veteran has been studied or benefited from the
expenditures.

Rather than holding managers accountable for serious transgressions,
including literal suppression of, and inaction to, disclosures of
fraud, waste, and invalid human research, according to Tim Shea, a
regional director of the Veterans Integrated Service Network , the
Veterans Administration is considering the closure of one of a few
centers in the nation dedicated to testing new imaging and treatments
for brain injury.

It appears that the VA is contemplating to "throw the baby out and
leave the bath water." Traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic
stress disorder are often connected. Estimates are that about 40,000
returning troops suffer brain injuries and 300,000 are afflicted with
post trauma stress. A recent Institute of Medicine report concluded
that evidence is inadequate for nearly all treatments for PTSD and
that no effective treatments are proven for mild to moderate TBI.

On Thursday, the Institute of Medicine also released a report that
forebodes the frightening long-term consequences of brain injury for
those who risked their lives for us in battle, including dementia,
depression and socio-economic decline . We as a nation are in
desperate need of answers and effective solutions. The Brain Imaging
and Recovery Laboratory held an open house on Jan. 17, 2007, to
announce war on this affliction.

This sorely needed scientific initiative has been subsequently blindly
thwarted by a culture of insulated bureaucrats without vision. The
chief of staff of the Central Texas VA System admitted he "only had
the fuzziest notion of what it (the BIRL) was." Nonetheless, he
authorized funding of scientifically invalid work despite knowledge of
allegations of fraudulent billing, admitting to his knowledge and
inaction "that the consultant could be padding his hours, and a bunch
of things."

Despite more than $200,000 of resources, the VA Office of the
Inspector General found that after seven months of "research," the
investigator did not collect and record data. It concluded that such
blatant omission of a basic principle of scientific methods "could
interfere with the ability of the study to contribute to
generalizeable knowledge, which is the definition of research."

The OIG then held its punch and — incredibly — claimed that, though it
did not study scientific merit — the essential element to justify
research funding — that the research funding was appropriate in
exchange for administrative duties. This conclusion was made in the
face of five outside, expert reviews all panning the research and the
lack of original research experience or qualifications by the
administrator/clinician. Shea failed to hold management accountable
for inaction and suppression of disclosures and instead has discussed
closing the BIRL outright, thereby "burying" the mistakes and
misconduct.

The great promise of diagnostic and treatment breakthroughs to be born
here in Texas for combat victims and civilians alike may also quietly
fade away as well. This is a grave disservice to our wounded heroes
and the 1.5 million children and adult civilians who sustain brain
injuries every year.

Van Boven is a physician-scientist specializing in mechanisms of
recovery after injury to the brain and nervous system.

    Critics of Plan to Destroy Historic, Black Neighborhood Blocked from State Legislators


By: Christopher Tidmore, Contributing Writer
Posted: Monday, December 8, 2008 1:20 pm

It had been only five days since a press conference confirmed what many residents of an historic, predominantly African-American neighborhood in Mid-City had long feared, the leveling of their homes in favor of a new Veterans Administration hospital complex built in partnership with LSU.   
  
A new medical complex creating a new teaching hospital successor to Big Charity would sweep away their homes, but critics of the nearly $2 billion proposal had suggested that a far cheaper and faster alternative existed-renovate Big Charity itself.
 
So when news came that members of the legislature, specifically the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Health and Human Services would be touring Big Charity to access its viability on Tuesday, several of the critics of the LSU/VA deal showed up.
 
The executive vice chairwoman of the Foundation for Historical Louisiana and an architect who reviewed the condition of the hospital arrived that morning, data in hand, ready to show the assembled State Representatives that renovating Big Charity would cost a fourth of the proposed price of the proposed complex.  The architect was on hand to point out that only the basement of Charity had flooded during Katrina, and the building itself was still viable.
 
They never had a chance to make their case to the legislators. These  
opponents of LSU's plans to build a new public hospital in New Orleans, rather than renovate the hospital wrecked by Hurricane Katrina, were blocked from a legislative tour of the damaged facilities along with cameras from a local New Orleans television station.
 
None were allowed to join the legislators on the tour, a move appears to violate Louisiana's public meetings law. Tuesday's tour had been advertised as a public meeting of a legislative health care subcommittee in a press release sent over a week before from Melissa Silva, the Secretary of the House Committee on Appropriations.
 
More than a dozen lawmakers, legislative staff, LSU officials and others did walk through Big Charity, yet LSU officials and Rep. Jim Fannin, who organized the tour, disagree over who decided to bar entrance to the hospital to those who were left outside according to the AP.
 
The inability to make the case against ripping down 260 residential homes in Mid-City was particularly galling to Westley Bayas III, Director of Community Outreach & Development for the organization fighting to save the 19th Century Neighborhood bordered by Tulane Ave., Canal Street, South Rocheblave, and Claiborne Ave, The Phoenix of New Orleans.
 
In an interview with The Louisiana Weekly, Bayas explained that the VA/LSU target zone is not an unoccupied area of abandoned and dilapidated houses, but a living neighborhood.  It received very little flood during Hurricane Katrina, and was bouncing back before talk of eminent domain slowed down the recovery.
 
Bayas pointed out to this newspaper, "Out of the 260 residential homes in the Lower Mid City Neighborhood, nearly 150 buildings are occupied. With many of the homes being either doubled, small apartment complexes or holding more then one family, we estimated that over 225 households are present in the footprint."
 
There would have been even more residents, he maintained, if the fear of the VA/LSU development had not been present.  "The last official survey we conducted in December 2006 showed that 40 percent of the homes were occupied. In our observation of the neighborhood in the two years since, there was a a push during 2007 for homeowners to get back in their homes. Unfortunately, in November 2007 the New Orleans City Council placed a memorandum on building permits within the LSU/VA footprint. We have fielded numerous calls from citizens who looked for us for assistance, only to be told that rebuilding was not allowed."
 
Put simply, Bayas contended, "The neighborhood is abandoned due to the building restrictions placed on the area by the City Council. This year, many of the Road Home awards were finally disbursed to residents who could not use the funds due to the aforementioned restrictions. Bobbi Rogers is one of the main residents fighting against the hospital. She helped to organize residents within the footprint to fight for some type of representation in the evaluation process."
 
As Rogers, who lives in the VA target area on Palmyra, noted in this newspaper last week, "We think the VA is good for the city, but they don't need to tear down these houses. City Hall's attitude is, 'There is nothing we can do about it. The VA had special conditions and this was the only land that worked for them.' They also keep saying they cannot tear down Charity because it's an historic building. But what about tearing down 200 historic houses?"
 
For Rogers, the loss is intensely personal, not only because of the house she is restoring-which she says "took a lot of time to fall in love with" because of the damage-but because of her volunteer work here. She and her husband, Kevin Krause, came to New Orleans from Phoenix in March 2006 on a six-week volunteer stint. They fell in love with the neighborhood and the people and decided to "put our money where our mouth was." They spent a year with Americorps, working with hundreds of other volunteers restoring the blocks that LSU and the VA now want to demolish.
 
Rogers and other residents have wondered throughout the VA/LSU planning process why their side of Tulane Ave. was targeted instead of the other side of the street.  It is a multi-square block region of empty parking lots, abandoned warehouses, and burned out motels. Few, in any, homes rest on the property, yet LSU remains adamant to rip down the residential Lower Mid-City Neighborhood instead.
 
Bayas himself asked state officials why that should be so, and he was told that the LSU Medical Center had future plans for that land. "According to the Greater New Orleans Biomedical Economic Development District (GNOBEDD), their development plans calls for the open area between Tulane and Gravier to become another phase of the Biomedical build out."
 
"According to the general master plan that GNOBEDD has created, they expect to take up a vast majority of the area between Poydras, Claiborne, Canal/Bienville, and Broad. To answer your question about the VA setback, the space they are acquiring has already accounted for the needed setback to comply with federal regulations."
 
"There was no further explanation given other then the need to have the hospital(s) as close to downtown as possible."
 
Development that would come years after the 2012 completion date of the proposed VA/LSU complex.
 
Nor is there any great guarantee that the historic properties in the area will be saved from the wrecking ball.  As Bayas noted, "The signed agreement confirmed that properties that have historic value will be moved. The discrepancy comes from which homes will be considered for historic value."
 
Homes under reconstruction, or built even in the first years of 20th Century are not considered worthy of relocation.
 
Ironically, for a while it seemed that the Federal Veterans Administration wanted to avoid a fight with the neighborhood, and appeared to be leaning in favor of redeveloping the old Lindy Boggs Hospital and its surrounding warehouses, an area up for sale and able to accommodate the proposed two hospital complex without any residential relocation.  Bayas was magnanimous as to the federal agency's motive in changing its mind, "I believe the VA just wanted to find the best place to provide health care for its constituency, but were persuaded by other ideals," mainly saving a neighborhood which dates to the Nineteenth Century.
 
Amongst the buildings targeted for destruction is the historic Deuchaus Haus, center of yearly Octoberfests and weekly cultural events, and foreign movie nights.  Its membership has posted "Save the Haus" signs across the city, and their efforts have, in Bayas' view, kept public attention on the debate. "The Deuchaus Haus has played an significant roll to save Lower Mid City by participating in the NEPA Assessment and rallying support for their building from across the city."
 
The Phoenix Director does acknowledge that a new medical center will help post-Katrina recovery, but at a price. "I believe it helps New Orleans overall by provide two world class hospitals where our resident/veterans can receive help care, but it is very discouraging that 60+ acres of historic neighborhoods will be torn down in the process."
 
More information on Phoenix New Orleans can be found at www.pnola.org.

Christopher Tidmore is on the radio every weekday morning, from 7-9 a.m. Call in your responses to this article toll free, 1-877-622-1190 at that time.

This article was originally published in the December 8, 2008 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper


COMMENTARY
Van Boven: Help for injured veterans could vanish
Dr. Robert Van Boven, LOCAL CONTRIBUTOR
Monday, December 08, 2008

There is new bureaucratic bumbling to address the mismanagement and waste at the new traumatic brain injury research program at Central Texas Veterans Health Care System. The system has spent nearly $2.5 million in more than two years on salaries, supplies and MRI scanner time ? and not a single veteran has been studied or benefited from the expenditures.

Rather than holding managers accountable for serious transgressions, including literal suppression of, and inaction to, disclosures of fraud, waste, and invalid human research, according to Tim Shea, a regional director of the Veterans Integrated Service Network , the Veterans Administration is considering the closure of one of a few centers in the nation dedicated to testing new imaging and treatments for brain injury.

It appears that the VA is contemplating to "throw the baby out and leave the bath water." Traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder are often connected. Estimates are that about 40,000 returning troops suffer brain injuries and 300,000 are afflicted with post trauma stress. A recent Institute of Medicine report concluded that evidence is inadequate for nearly all treatments for PTSD and that no effective treatments are proven for mild to moderate TBI.

On Thursday, the Institute of Medicine also released a report that forebodes the frightening long-term consequences of brain injury for those who risked their lives for us in battle, including dementia, depression and socio-economic decline . We as a nation are in desperate need of answers and effective solutions. The Brain Imaging and Recovery Laboratory held an open house on Jan. 17, 2007, to announce war on this affliction.

This sorely needed scientific initiative has been subsequently blindly thwarted by a culture of insulated bureaucrats without vision. The chief of staff of the Central Texas VA System admitted he "only had the fuzziest notion of what it (the BIRL) was." Nonetheless, he authorized funding of scientifically invalid work despite knowledge of allegations of fraudulent billing, admitting to his knowledge and inaction "that the consultant could be padding his hours, and a bunch of things."

Despite more than $200,000 of resources, the VA Office of the Inspector General found that after seven months of "research," the investigator did not collect and record data. It concluded that such blatant omission of a basic principle of scientific methods "could interfere with the ability of the study to contribute to generalizeable knowledge, which is the definition of research."

The OIG then held its punch and ? incredibly ? claimed that, though it did not study scientific merit ? the essential element to justify research funding ? that the research funding was appropriate in exchange for administrative duties. This conclusion was made in the face of five outside, expert reviews all panning the research and the lack of original research experience or qualifications by the administrator/clinician. Shea failed to hold management accountable for inaction and suppression of disclosures and instead has discussed closing the BIRL outright, thereby "burying" the mistakes and misconduct.

The great promise of diagnostic and treatment breakthroughs to be born here in Texas for combat victims and civilians alike may also quietly fade away as well. This is a grave disservice to our wounded heroes and the 1.5 million children and adult civilians who sustain brain injuries every year.

Van Boven is a physician-scientist specializing in mechanisms of recovery after injury to the brain and nervous system.




Hospital released vet who refused study
Widow sees priority as research, not care
Audrey Hudson (Contact)
Friday, August 22, 2008

An Army veteran seeking treatment for his sudden loss of motor skills was turned away from a veterans hospital in the Bronx, N.Y., in May 2007 after he refused to participate in a human subject experiment on Alzheimer's disease.

Joe Fitzgerald, 74, died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - the human form of mad cow disease - less than a month after being dismissed without diagnosis from James J. Peters VA Medical Center.

His widow is demanding answers from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as to whether human research testing is taking a priority over the health care of veterans at its hospitals.

"I want them to be held accountable for this, to prevent this from happening to someone else," Aimee Fitzgerald said. "Nothing could have saved Joe, but the care there was hateful and incompetent."

Mrs. Fitzgerald said the research study doctor, Christine Bergmann, told the family that her husband's participation in the study would enable researchers to make a quicker diagnosis of his condition.

But VA officials said Dr. Bergmann did not have the authority to offer a diagnosis.

"[The study] has very little to do with their diagnosis, and it is not consistent with what occurred," said MaryAnn Musumeci, director of the Bronx hospital.

"That's mind-boggling. That's not true," Mrs. Fitzgerald said. "Dr. Bergmann made it very clear to us that the benefit of signing up for the study would be that she would develop an individual profile of Joe that would help them to arrive at a diagnosis faster."

The VA made several officials available for comment, but not Dr. Bergmann.

VA officials and the Fitzgerald family also differ over the circumstances of Mr. Fitzgerald's discharge and whether the hospital provided care.

Continues ...

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/aug/22/hospital-released-vet-who-refused-study/


Veterans deserve military honors at their burials


I participated in a funeral at the old Maine Veterans Cemetery recently as a member of the Kennebec County Veterans Honor Guard.

I was disturbed to see that the military was not present to give a much-deserved military honors for the World War II veteran. The funeral representative didn't know why the military was not present.

He also said the family was not asked if they wanted the military honors, adding that was the responsibility of the veteran's American Legion Post 5.

I reminded him that it was the military's responsibility, not that of veterans' organizations. The son of the deceased told me he didn't know about this policy and that no one had asked him. Funeral directors are supposed to notify the family about this policy and federal law requires the military to furnish the detail if the family desires.

I went to the Armory in Augusta and those in charge of the honors detail told me they were not notified. I also asked them to get in touch with this funeral home and remind them of their duty.

We of the Kennebec County Veterans Honor Guard performed the service although not as well as the military. I played taps from my Lincoln limousine. The son praised us and said the taps brought tears to his eyes. I hope all funeral directors see this and act on it.

I will not rest when I see a veteran not given the proper honors.

By the way, we do our part in conjunction with the military at no cost to anyone.

Larry Dearborn

Retired army sergeant first class

Richmond

dearbornlarry@verizon.net

http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/view/letters/5295058.html



Are you shitting me


By Mike Aiken

Miner and News

Reservists serving in Afghanistan should get the same compensation as members of the regular forces, said Kenora MP Roger Valley Thursday.

Valley referred to the findings of a recent Senate report, which noted part-time members who lose a limb only get half the amount of full-time soldiers, even though their fulfilling the same roles.

“Many of the things they say in the report are exactly true,” he said, having recently returned from a trip to the front lines.

“You’d think they’d have nothing but the best,” he added, noting there are some gaps in service within the district.

One of the main issues for soldiers who suffer from such severe injuries is that they are no longer deemed fit for service. As a result, they’re retired from service and lose some of the top-notch care servicemen are entitled to receive.

Members of the local reserve unit, the 116th Independent Field Battery, have been called upon to support the mission and many have served overseas, which makes it a local issue for Valley, who also sits on the House of Commons committee for Veterans Affairs.

“We can’t function in Afghanistan without reservists, yet we treat them differently,” he said, emphasizing the disparity.

He noted many veterans these days are in their mid-thirties when they leave the service, and they’re well educated on their rights. Valley also recalled the strong deputations from retired general Romeo Dallaire, as well as the recent chief of defence staff, Rick Hillier.

However, he wanted to know how the new chief of defence was going to treat the issue, noting the issue of health care for reservists would be treated as an internal decision by the military rather than a political decision for the Minister of Defence, Peter McKay.

Prentice to visit Kenora

Industry Minister Jim Prentice, considered to be the second-in-command in the federal Conservative government, will be visiting Kenora next weekend.

He’s scheduled to meet with small business leaders Aug. 23, before meeting with party faithful for a boat cruise.

Prentice, who represents a Calgary riding, has also served as the Minister for Indian Affairs.

Liberal executives gather

Members of the national executive for the opposition party will also soon be in town. They’re scheduled to gather over the Labour Day weekend as incumbent MP Roger Valley gives them a tour of Lake of the Woods.

The visit may serve as a precursor to a fall election as speculation mounts for a vote. It would be the third federal campaign within four years.
Article ID# 1159220

http://www.kenoradailyminerandnews.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1159220


Violations rife in hospital's studies on veterans
Inspector general finds consent forms, death reports missing
Audrey Hudson (Contact)
Tuesday, August 5, 2008

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/aug/05/
violations-rife-in-hospitals-studies-on-veterans/


Vets say VA service is ‘hard to get into’

Jessica Holthaus
jholthaus@bryancountynews.net
Posted: Aug. 1, 2008  6:13 p.m.
Updated: Aug. 2, 2008 1 a.m.

How long does it take for a disabled veteran to apply for the Independent Living Program as part of the Veteran Affairs Vocational Rehabilitation?

Well, it depends on who you ask.

Ruth Fanning, director of Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment Service (VRES), said the average application process should take about 107 days.

But Richmond Hill resident Donald Singleton has been trying for more than 15 months and Bruce McCartney, of Midway, spent four years working to get his application processed.

"They don’t advertise this benefit – it doesn’t make sense to me," Singleton said. "If it were this hard to get into the military as it is to get serviced on VA, there wouldn’t be any military."

Singleton applied for ILP in April 2007, qualified in January and was told in March his paperwork had been submitted. That’s the last thing he heard. But he described ILP as "a good program."

ILP is aimed at veterans with service-related disabilities who are unable to pursue an employment goal, to make sure they are able to live independently. Services can include assistive technology, specialized medical or rehabilitation services, and connections with community-based support services – such as ergonomic furniture, for example.

"When a veteran applies, they are applying for employment assistance," Fanning said. "If there is an employment handicap, it’s our goal to help them ultimately be employable in the future."

McCartney became a veteran after nearly 18 years in the Army. He began his application process in 2003, keeping a diary of his process and in 2007, had 150 pages of documentation. He found out his application was approved in 2006 – but he said it sat on a desk for a year before anyone got around to telling him.

As far as why it took so long, Fanning said McCartney was not at fault. She also said the Atlanta VA office will look into Singleton’s case.

"Once we determine someone is in need of Independent Living, we do a detailed assessment…that does take some time," she said. "In (McCartney’s) case, I think there were errors that were made and those are unfortunate. I know the Atlanta office has put mechanisms in place – as we have nationally – to determine the status of cases and take appropriate action for those that are taking too long."

McCartney estimates roughly 700 disabled veterans in Bryan, Chatham and Liberty counties.

"I bet there aren’t even 70 who have ever heard of it," he said. "This is about the thousands of Georgian who paid for this program with their bodies and souls. I’m trying to get the word out."

Fanning listed several ways to apply, or check the status of an application and recommended calling a counselor and asking to speak to the manager if things are taking too long. Visit www.va.gov ; download a form at www.va.gov/vaforms/form_detail.asp?FormNo=28-1900 and mail it in; go into a field office, Savannah’s is on Montgomery Crossroads, 921-3744.; visit www.VetSuccess.gov ; or call 1-800-827-1000.

"We’re getting information out through the website and we do aggressive outreach," Fanning said. "Although this is a smaller portion of our program, it’s extremely important and we definitely want the word to get out. One case that takes too long is too many. We want to prevent what happened to Mr. McCartney from happening to anyone else."

Now that he is in the program, McCartney said good things about it, noting it’s "improved his quality of life." He received a greenhouse through ILP, which he said has helped him get re-involved with the community.

"I’m doing hydroponics and just recently had my granddaughter’s 4-H club visit," he said. "And once a week, I give my tomatoes away to everyone in the community."

To reach McCartney, email popz@coastalnow.net with "ILP" in the subject line.

http://www.bryancountynews.net/news/article/3103/


 Govt loves its cars, all 642,233 of 'em

By JENNIFER KERR

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans love their cars, and so apparently does Uncle Sam — who's got 642,233 of them.
Operating those vehicles — maintenance, leases and fuel — cost taxpayers a whopping $3.4 billion last year, according General Services Administration data obtained and analyzed by The Associated Press.
While Cabinet and other officials say they need the vehicles to do their jobs, watchdogs say mismanagement of the government fleet is costing millions of dollars a year in wasteful spending.
For example:
_ At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, fuel consumption and inventory are down, yet overall costs have increased significantly. Officials there can't figure out why.
_ The Interior Department was told by its own watchdog that it should cut its inventory, but it's added hundreds of vehicles.
_ The VA has some cars that are barely driven. One just disappeared.
Add to that the cost of drivers, a perk given to high-level government officials.
Transportation Secretary Mary Peters has two drivers. Their salaries totaled more than $128,000 last year.
The driver for Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt earns about $90,000 a year. That's more than double the average salary of an office manager or accountant, and about $35,000 more than a registered nurse earns, according to a salary calculator provided by CareerBuilder.com.
The government owns or leases sedans, SUVs, trucks, limousines and ambulances for more than three dozen agencies, the U.S. military and the Postal Service. Are they all really necessary?
"This is one bleeding part of a budget and not just in one department but in a lot of departments," says Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a longtime foe of what he considers wasteful federal spending. "When you have something bleeding like this, there can be a lot of money saved."
Saving taxpayer dollars should be a priority, says Washington-based Citizens Against Government Waste.
"From a management standpoint, this is something that can easily be handled," said Tom Schatz, president of the group. "It's critical use or necessary use versus 'well, we've got the money, let's go out and buy some more cars.'"
The Department of Housing and Urban Development admits problems with its fleet of about 450 vehicles.
According to an AP analysis, fleet costs at HUD have soared nearly 70 percent since 2004, to more than $2.1 million last year. But during the same period, the agency trimmed its fleet and overall fuel consumption. While gas prices have increased since 2004, the period AP analyzed came well before today's record-high prices.
"Where that spike in overall costs came from, I have no idea," said Bradley Jewitt, director of HUD's facilities management division. Agency spokesman Jerry Brown added, "We can't explain it."
Jewitt, who came to HUD late last year, promised more accountability and oversight. The agency has begun a thorough review of its vehicles, how they are being used and whether each is justified.
HUD has cars for employees who conduct fair housing and mortgage fraud investigations and housing inspections across the country. At the Interior Department, cars and trucks are used by workers who help manage some 500 million acres of public lands. The Agriculture Department has tens of thousands of vehicles for conservationists, scientists, farm loan specialists and the Forest Service.
Federal agencies also have dedicated cars and drivers for senior officials.
In addition to the salaries for the two drivers for Transportation Secretary Peters, her car, fuel and maintenance cost $11,500 last year. Most agency chiefs have one driver.
The department says Peters needs two because the "cost of paying one driver overtime to cover both weekday shifts and weekends would be prohibitive." A spokesman said a driver has to be on duty or available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for Peters.
The Veterans Affairs Department has five sedans assigned to Secretary James Peake, the deputy secretary and the three top officials for the health office, benefits office and national cemetery administration. Total cost for the five cars and drivers: $353,470 a year.
Salaries for government drivers ranged from $46,000 for the driver for Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Naomi Earp to about $90,000 for Leavitt's driver at HHS.
The latest report available from the Government Accountability Office, from 2004, looked at the fleets of five departments including Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security and the Navy. It found a number of instances where agencies were keeping vehicles they didn't need. Ditching those cars, the report said, could save the government millions of dollars.
The Interior Department was another agency singled out for wasteful spending. In a 2004 report, the agency's inspector general found a significant portion of department vehicles weren't being driven much. Eliminating them could save $34 million a year.
Interior cut more than 600 vehicles before the report was released, but its overall fleet has increased by more than 1,500 vehicles since then, according to an AP analysis of GSA data.
Interior ranks fourth among civilian agencies in the size of its fleet, but it spends the most money — more than $241 million last year on vehicles, maintenance and fuel. Agriculture has the largest fleet but spends far less, about $150 million.
Debra Sonderman, director of the office of acquisition and property management at Interior, says the department has a large number of trucks, nearly 25,000, that are costly to maintain and burn a lot of fuel.
Managers at each of the agency's bureaus review inventories annually, she said. But when pressed about who has oversight of the bureaus to ensure that fleet money is spent wisely, Sonderman hesitated, only to add, "Well, there's a budget for one thing."
Translation: If the money's there, spend it.
"Kind of a rule of thumb is the more cars you control, the more powerful you are, and so that sort of attitude of kingdom building is part of the problem here," Sen. Grassley said in an AP interview.
Only a handful of agencies said they have conducted annual audits to ensure their fleets are the right size. The Department of Homeland Security said it hasn't conducted a department-wide audit since the agency was created five years ago. The agency said it is "working toward that end" but doesn't yet have the resources to analyze its 41,000-vehicle fleet.
At Veterans Affairs, an audit last year by the inspector general's office found potential savings of about $83,000 for underutilized vehicles, but it looked at only three VA medical centers. The VA has more than 150 centers, raising the prospect of additional underused cars and more savings.
In the case of a Cleveland VA medical center, a government-leased vehicle was driven only 16 times in nearly a year; another was driven only twice in the three months after it arrived. One sedan at the center was missing and apparently hadn't been seen in months.
All agencies are supposed to report their annual fleet numbers to the General Services Administration. However, the cost and inventory estimates in the GSA's annual report do not include Congress, which isn't required to report to GSA on its fleet.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iBPhfDHhJmYSwZhwB6O1kmoM7sKAD928TB480


VA error cost Iraq veterans outreach
Agency thought 37,000 ineligible for benefit packages
By McClatchy Newspapers
 WASHINGTON - The Department of Veterans Affairs failed to send benefit packages to nearly 37,000 National Guard and Reserve members who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan because it mistakenly thought they were ineligible.
http://wvgazette.com/News/200807230671

And dead men tell no tales.

Rockland finally gets vets' names - a 20-foot list
BY LAURA INCALCATERRA
THE JOURNAL NEWS • JULY 19, 2008
 
 
NEW CITY - More than a year after beginning the effort, the Rockland Veterans Service Agency has finally succeeded in obtaining the names of returning war veterans.
Jerry Donnellan, director of the county agency, said yesterday that although the state never came through with the information, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs had provided the names and addresses of local men and women who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We got the list," Donnellan said.
He isn't kidding.
The VA literally sent Donnellan a computer printout of mailing labels that measures about 20 feet long, he said. He isn't sure how many veterans are listed, because he hasn't had a chance to count the names.
He'll next try to get an electronic form of the list, or create a database himself, Donnellan said.
More than a year ago, Donnellan asked the state Department of Veterans Affairs to provide the contact information.
He wants to encourage veterans to sign up for their benefits, even if they don't think they need or want to take advantage of them right now.
Some of the benefits have sign-up deadlines, and if veterans miss the eligibility period, they may not be able to tap into medical, educational and other benefits in the months or years ahead.
Donnellan wants to write to each veteran to provide information about benefits and to say he is available to discuss those benefits or just have a cup of coffee.
Donnellan served in the Army in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded.
The state has so far declined to provide the information, citing the federal Privacy Act, even though Donnellan determined that several other states release the information to their county veterans service agencies.
Under then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer this year, the state sent out information packets to veterans that contained general letters from the governor and Donnellan.
Donnellan said he received few responses.
Meanwhile, the county launched two efforts this year that helped it connect with veterans.
The Vets FAVOR program, which stands for Find and Assist Vets of Rockland, allows any veteran to sign up and obtain discounts from local merchants.
It is sponsored by the County Executive's Office and the Rockland County Clerk's Office.
The Public Service Medal was created to honor those who served in Afghanistan or Iraq, or as part of the global war on terrorism.
More than 50 veterans have already received the award, which is sponsored by the County Executive's Office and the Veterans Service Agency.
After getting nowhere with the state, Donnellan reached out to the federal Veterans Affairs Department, where he was lucky enough to connect with "a decent soul," he said.
"I laid it all out for him," Donnellan said.
He had to agree to certain privacy rules, including not providing the list to third parties, to prevent solicitors from obtaining the veterans' contact information.
He'll have to reapply for the contact information every March, so the list won't ever be up-to-date, but Donnellan said the information that is available will go a long way to reaching the veterans.
County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef, who has supported Donnellan's efforts, agreed that the list would help matters.
"Receiving this list will help us to reach out to those who have served us so well and make sure they know about the services we can now offer them in return," Vanderhoef said.
Andrew Komonchak, who served in the Army in Iraq, where he was stationed for 13 months, praised Donnellan for continuing to fight for the contact information.
"It's obviously great," Komonchak said. "If you don't know what's available to you, then you're not going to get what you deserve for going through what you went through."
Komonchak said there were veterans who just wanted to put the war behind them, adding that they were not seeking out their benefits as a result.
But he encouraged veterans to sign up now, in case they want to use any benefits in the future.
As of March, 854 Rockland residents have served or are serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, Donnellan said.
His next task is to write notes to several veterans each day until he has reached out to everyone on the 20-foot-long list, he said.
"I think they'll be more responsive to a letter like that than something that just came just as a printout," Donnellan said. "This is going to be a good outreach tool."
Reach Laura Incalcaterra at lincalca@lohud.com or 845-578-2486.


 By Amy Macavinta
Deseret News
Published: Thursday, July 17, 2008 12:04 a.m. MDT

At a glance, the group of young men boating at Jordanelle Reservoir on Tuesday were just your average guys, out for a good time. But they all know it was so much more than that.

This particular group was made up of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They all carry some mark that notes their willing service in the U.S. military on their bodies — and on their hearts and souls.

The Wounded Warrior Project brought nearly two dozen veterans to Park City this week as a Project Odyssey event, where they spent several days at the National Ability Center. They spent the days hiking, horseback riding, boating and water skiing. And at night, they gathered around a campfire, in a "circle of trust," sharing the kind of ghost stories that only they would understand.

Juan Arredondo, San Antonio, is working with Wounded Warrior Project now, but there was a day when he was the one lying in a hospital bed after being injured in Iraq. He lost his left hand to the blast of an improvised explosive and had severe flesh wounds on both legs.

While he was in the hospital, he received a backpack full of clothing, toiletries and other items that brought a bit of comfort at what was perhaps the lowest point of his life.

Story continues below
"It made me feel more at ease," Arredondo said.

Since then, Arredondo has gone on to mentor his fellow soldiers.

John Roberts, one of the founders of Wounded Warrior Project, is himself a veteran who survived a helicopter crash in Somalia in 1992.

He said the organization's mission is best signified by its logo — one warrior, carrying an injured warrior over his shoulder. Veterans have mentors who help them through the healing process, with hopes that they will in turn reach out to another veteran in need, just as Arredondo did.

Wounded Warrior Project is a nonprofit organization based in Jacksonville, Fla. Roberts said that soldiers injured in combat are flown to hospitals with nothing but what they had on them, if that.

However, as the word spread and donations kept pouring in, Wounded Warrior Project has grown to include programs like Project Odyssey and Warriors to Work, a program to help veterans seek employment outside of the military. And the organization has also been able to obtain funding for a disability insurance program to help families cover expenses while their loved one is hospitalized.

"It is the American public that makes this happen," Roberts said.

This week's event is the second time Project Odyssey has been to Park City. The National Ability Center's basic belief is that recreation is as important to people who have disabilities as it is for anyone else. Outreach manager Ryan Jensen said the NAC supports a wide variety of veterans' organizations.

E-mail: amackavinta@desnews.com
http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,700243682,00.html


Veterans who donated their bodies to get military burial

Monica Rodriguez, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 07/16/2008 11:02:54 PM PDT

POMONA - Ni a McCoy made phone calls and mailed letters as part of her search for the relatives of nine men who had donated their bodies to Western University of Health Sciences' Willed Body Program.

McCoy, the director of the program, found disconnected phone numbers.

Her letters were returned.

When she ran out of leads, she began to research who these men were and found they were all veterans.

"They served our country in uniform," McCoy said Wednesday. "Then they made the last contribution they could by donating their bodies for medical education."

The cremated remains of the nine men - five of them veterans of World War II - will be laid to rest with military honors during a ceremony starting at 2:45 p.m. Aug. 6 at Riverside National Cemetery, 22495 Van Buren Blvd., Riverside. The ceremony will take place at Shelter G. Members of the public are welcome.

"Who can you think of who deserves more (of) an honorable ceremony?" McCoy asked.

The Willed Body Program allows people to donate their bodies to the university for research and the education of medical professionals, she said. As part of the agreement between the donor and the university, their identity is kept confidential.

After about two years of study, the bodies are cremated and it's up to McCoy to receive them and return them to the family or have them scattered at sea, depending on the wishes of the donor, McCoy said.

McCoy said every donor and every family she works with is important to her, but there is something a little different about veterans.

"I have a really, really soft spot for veterans," she said.

Her father, an Army Ranger, served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, where he was killed. Her husband served in the military, and she has other family members serving now.

McCoy and several veterans organizations are involved in organizing the ceremony for the nine donors. Among them is the Missing in America Project.

The Missing in America Project is a volunteer organization that is working with funeral homes, cremation facilities, state hospitals and other institutions to identify cremains that have not been claimed by families and determine whether they are those of veterans.

Volunteers help track down families, said Fred Salanti, founder and executive director of the organization, which has its headquarters in Redding.

If family members aren't found, the organization works to make arrangements to have the cremains interred in a state or national cemetery, he said.

Around the country the cremated remains of veterans, as well as those of many non-veterans, are being stored in vaults because they haven't been claimed by families, Salanti said.

This will be the first ceremony in Southern California that the Missing in America Project has been involved in, Salanti said.

"This is a big step for us to have our first mission" in Southern California, he said.

It could help raise awareness of the problem and possibly encourage more organizations to allow the group to help identify the remains of veterans, he said.

http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/sanbernardinocounty/ci_9904156


Cross County to be site of new veterans cemetery

Published: July 15, 2008


Ninety-nine acres of land in the Birdeye area of Cross County will become the fifth veterans cemetery in Arkansas.
Gov. Mike Beebe received the deed recently during a special ceremony.
Currently, there are national veterans cemeteries in Little Rock, Fort Smith and Fayetteville and a state veterans cemetery in North Little Rock. Little Rock National Cemetery is full and no longer accepts burials.
The veterans cemetery in Cross County will be a state cemetery.
According to the governor’s Web site, the Arkansas Department of Veterans Affairs will oversee a committee to select the design for the new cemetery and the United States Veterans Administration will have final approval. Depending on when federal funding is approved, the East Arkansas cemetery is anticipated to open in 2011. The site is expected to accommodate between 125 and 150 years of burials.
“This cemetery has long been needed for our veterans in East Arkansas,” Beebe was quoted as saying. “This will make it easier for families and friends to pay their respects when we bestow the final honor upon those who have served our country.”
Also quoted was Arkansas Department of Veterans Affairs Director David Fletcher.
“We strive not just to provide services to our veterans, but to do so in the most convenient way possible for them,” Fletcher said. “East Arkansas needs this facility, especially with the advancing age of our vets.”
According to the Associated Press, Fletcher also said there is a large pool of World War II veterans in the region.
The AP also reported that Jerry Bowen of Jonesboro, a former undersecretary in the federal Veterans Affairs Department, said that of all veterans in the state, 46 percent live in central Arkansas, 34 percent in northwest Arkansas, 16 percent in northeast Arkansas 4 percent in southeast Arkansas and 5 percent in southwest Arkansas.
The land was sold to the state by the family of Maurice Smith, a veteran and former director of the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, for $150,000. The cemetery will be established and operated by the state, but primary funding, including more than $5 million in construction costs, will still come from the federal government. The effort to obtain that funding as quickly as possible will be led by U.S. Representative Marion Berry and Arkansas’s congressional delegation.
   © Copyright Times-Herald Publishing Co. Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.thnews.com/article.php?id=5935



Lottery to release games that benefit veterans

Associated Press 
4:30 AM CDT, July 14, 2008
 
DES MOINES, Iowa - Officials from the Iowa Lottery and Iowa Department of Veterans Affairs are touting new lottery games that are supposed to benefit veterans' causes.

They plan to unveil the games at a news conference on Monday. They'll also detail how the proceeds from the games will support the Iowa Veterans Trust Fund.

In March, Gov. Chet Culver signed into law a bill that authorizes the lottery to create two instant-scratch games and two pull tab games each year. All the proceeds must support the Iowa Veterans Trust Fund.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-ia-lottery-veterans,0,7743832.story

Helping Veterans with ALS

posted 10:53 pm Mon July 14, 2008 - Mt. Pleasant, SC
 reporter: Shawn Smetana      posted by: Brian Heins

For years, only veterans of the Gulf War suffering from ALS were provided maximum benefits from the department of Veterans Affairs. That all changed Monday, now all veterans suffering from Lou Gehrigs disease will receive full disability thanks in large part to the efforts of retired Brigadier General Tom Mikolajcik, battling the terminal disease himself.
 
 During a conference call Monday afternoon with VA secretary James Peake, the retired Brigadier General found out his battle to bring light to this disease and its effect on veterans ended with victory.
 
 Diagnosed in October 2003 with Lou Gehrig’s disease, General Tom Mikolajcik vowed to never quit, never give up.
 
 "Some doctors are reluctant to tell people they have ALS cause it's a death sentence, no cause, no cure," said Mikolajcik.
 
 Unlike his battles on front lines in the Gulf and Vietnam, this mission would take him to Washington D.C. facing a house sub-committee on Veteran's Affairs. He, like all veterans face a greater risk of developing ALS than the general public.
 
 "Nobody knows why that is, that's why we need more awareness, more research," said Mikolajcik.
 
 In 2001, the VA decided to offer ALS care to gulf war vets only. Mikolajcik's push resulted in policy change. Seven years later all veterans suffering from ALS, regardless of when they served, will receive all services the VA provides.
 
 "Everybody treats adversity in a different way, I could put my head on my stomach and cry or I could see what I could do to help," said Mikolajcik.
 
 Helping in so many ways, an ALS support group, and an ALS clinic all in Charleston. Now benefits for ALS veterans across the country.
 
 U.S. Representative Henry Brown, who also fought for this change says it's doubtful this could have been accomplished if not for the work of Tom Mikolajcik. His work not done, Mikolajcik says he plans on heading back to Washington D.C. to push for an ALS task force.

http://www.wciv.com/news/stories/0708/535840.html


Lawmakers want US-made flags

By LIBBY QUAID – 23 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The American flag has many labels: Stars and stripes. Old Glory. And sometimes, made in China.
Congress can't halt the flow of Chinese-made flags, but lawmakers can try to control where they are flown. The House declared Monday that any flag flown on federal property should be made in the U.S.A.
"It's not a major problem facing the nation," admitted Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif. "But it's an irritant."
Chinese-made flags seemed to pop up everywhere after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. People rushed to show their sense of patriotism by buying American flags, and U.S. manufacturers couldn't keep up with demand.
Foreign imports of American flags, worth around $1 million annually at the time, surged to nearly $52 million in the weeks that followed.
Then as demand subsided, lawmakers took action, requiring the Defense Department to buy American-made textiles and the Veterans Affairs Department to use American-made flags for burials.
And in the city where Congress meets, only U.S.-made flags fly over the nation's Capitol.
Still, more than 8,000 other federal buildings — courthouses, post offices, border stations, office buildings, among others — are under no such obligation.
Filner, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, wanted to force the government to buy only American-made flags. "But we were told that this mandatory stuff runs into trade agreements," the eight-term congressman said.
That is because the U.S. has gone to great pains to hammer out trade deals with other countries and can't impose new limits after the fact.
His solution was a nonbinding "sense of Congress" resolution that cleared the House on Monday. It doesn't have any teeth, he admitted, but it's a start.
In the meantime, state governments are beginning to weigh in. A new law in Minnesota says all flags sold in the state must be made in the U.S., with violations subject to a fine of up to $1,000 and jail time of up to 90 days. The industry says similar measures have cropped up in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida.
The country's flag makers can easily make enough flags for the government, said Michael Liberman, president of Valley Forge Flag Co. in Wyomissing, Pa.
"That would be a very, very small part of our domestic demand; there's no problem with that," he said. "Right after Sept. 11, the U.S. flag industry couldn't keep up with demand. But that only occurred for probably four or five months."
It's not just the government — several retail chains have decided to buy American-made flags. Liberman's company sells flags to Ace Hardware, Target and Lowe's. But he's had trouble selling flags to some retailers.
"Others have not had a problem selling flags saying they are made in China or made in Korea," he said. "We're constantly trying to convince them there is a difference in quality and usability."

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g6OMXJfpF0z9QTaW0pz2uc_jRDJwD91TSUQO0


Veterans Affairs Canada
 
   
Jul 14, 2008 12:12 ET
Media Advisory: Veterans Return From Anniversary Events in South Korea
OTTAWA, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - July 14, 2008) - Dozens of Veterans are returning home after an eight-day journey of remembrance in South Korea. Thirty-five of these Veterans either served during the Korean War or shortly thereafter to restore peace and stability to South Korea. The Veterans are part of the official Government of Canada delegation led by the Honourable Greg Thompson, Minister of Veterans Affairs. They participated in commemorative events marking the 55th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice.
 
Media are invited to cover the delegation's return home, scheduled at 11:00 a.m., July 15 at the Vancouver International Airport. Please keep in touch with the Veterans Affairs Canada contact listed below to confirm the arrival time as it is subject to change.
 
While in South Korea, the delegation participated in ceremonies of remembrance at the Republic of Korea National Cemetery in Seoul, the Korean War Memorial to the Armed Forces of the British Commonwealth in Gapyeong, the Canadian Korean War Memorial Garden in Naechon, and the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Korea in Busan.
 
For more information on the Korean War, photos of the delegation's experiences in South Korea or details on events in Canada, visit the Veterans Affairs Canada Web site at www.vac-acc.gc.ca.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Veterans-Affairs-Canada-878604.html


VA Official Scolded for Ties to Advocacy Group

"Washington Watchdogs," a periodic feature of the Post's Investigations blog, looks at the findings of the federal government's official investigators.
(Updated at 3:49 p.m. to include information from Disabled American Veterans)
A top Department of Veterans Affairs official has been scolded by the government agency for his involvement with a prominent lobbying organization, a group that helps disabled veterans get benefits that the official is charged with dispersing.
The official, Robert T. Reynolds, became a member of the Cold Spring, Ky.-based Disabled American Veterans before he began working for the Veterans Affairs Department, he said. But audtiors said the situation is "fraught with possibilities for running afoul" of department ethics policies and he will have his activities "closely monitored" and be instructed on what "matters may require his recusal," according to a government audit obtained by Watchdogs this week through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The audit, while redacted, references Disabled American Veterans (DAV), which has 1.4 million members, on page five of the report and, indirectly, Reynolds, the organization's national commander who also serves as the executive management officer for the Veterans Benefits Administration in Washington, D.C.
A photo of Reynolds is prominently displayed on the organization's Web site. Reynolds was elected national commander during the organization's national convention in August 2006 in New Orleans.
 
During his introductory speech, Reynolds "proclaimed the DAV the undisputed service organization for veterans and reaffirmed the organization's mission to build better lives for America's disabled veterans and their families through the finest advocacy and service programs in existence."
Reynolds, 42, a disabled veteran from Arlington, Va., served in the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division from 1984 to 1990. He was injured in a parachute accident while assigned to a U.S. Army Special Forces unit; the injury required two years years of multiple surgeries before he was honorably discharged.
Larry Scott, founder and editor of VA Watchdog, an online magazine that focuses on veterans issues, said top positions at so-called veterans services organizations are often reserved for government workers such as Reynolds.
"What we find is that people who are politically motivated, not partisan per se, but politcally motivated, use VSOs as a stepping stone to Washington," said Scott, referencing politicians like  Gordon H. Mansfield, the deputy sectetary of Veterans Affairs and a Bush appointee who served as executive director of the Paralyzed Veterans of America.
A former executive director of DAV, the late Jesse Brown, served as secretary of Veterans Affairs in the Clinton administration.
Scott, who is also a member of DAV, said he asked members of the national disabled veterans organization about Reynolds' potential conflict of interest when the government worker was elected president of the disability organization nearly two years ago.
"They said that, 'We don't see him doing anything wrong. He's very careful,'" Scott said. "This is how things have been done. This how things will be done. This is the way business is done.'"
Reynolds, reached at his Washington office this morning, said he had yet to read the report. David W. Gorman, executive director of DAV, read a copy of the report provided by Watchdogs, calling it a "waste of valuable government resources"
"We're in this game together, the game being how do we best take care of disabled veterans," Gorman said. "Personally, I don't see any conflict."
Gorman added that officials are aware of the sensitive nature of Reynolds' dual roles and that Reynolds had been "kept clean" from advising or influencing DAV's positions and policies.
Investigators did not find specific examples of wrongdoing but Reynolds told auditors he "stood for both VA and DAV and that the missions were one and the same."
"He clearly could not distinguish between these two distinct organizations which, at times, have adversarial or opposing viewpoints," the audit said.
-- Derek Kravitz

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/washingtonpostinvestigations
/2008/07/officials_political_ties_promp.html


New Iowa Veterans Cemetery is dedicated

Associated Press 
4:31 PM CDT, July 4, 2008
 
DES MOINES, Iowa - A new Iowa Veterans Cemetery located west of Des Moines on Interstate 80 has been dedicated.

Patrick Palmersheim is the executive director of the Iowa Department of Veterans Affairs. He says the cemetery will honor all men and woman who defended and restored freedom around the world.

The cemetery project has been awarded $7.6 million in federal funding. The land was donated.

Officials say up to 80,000 people could eventually be buried at the 100-acre site, which is next to the Van Meter Exit on Interstate 80.


REMEMBERING A SOLDIER

Veteran's legacy written in stone
New grave marker gives final salute to Georgia soldier wounded in World War II

By MONI BASU
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/04/08

A round stainless steel pin marked his grave: "17-A-6," it said.

That's how he has been known since the 19th day of March, when he was put in the ground at Lakeside Memorial Gardens.

Only this week was his grave in Palmetto adorned with a headstone bearing his name.

He died Dec. 11, 2007, and his body was kept in the county morgue for three months while investigators at the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office tried to piece together his life and find his next of kin.

His friend, Barry Wiener, an Atlanta attorney, says the man had no family. Mike Alsip, of the medical examiner's office, says no one stepped forward. He was buried in a pauper's grave.

Wiener was there that March day, distressed that the man he knew as a lawyer and a veteran would lie unnamed, unrecognized.

A short obituary in last month's Georgia Bar Journal held the spare details of a life of 83 years:

He was born in Evans in 1924. He graduated from high school in Augusta and served as a private in the U.S. Army. He fought in France during World War II. In December 1944, his body was shredded by shrapnel from a Nazi grenade, and he was sent back to recuperate in the Veterans Administration hospital on Clairmont Road. He was an outpatient for the rest of his life.

He graduated with an engineering degree from Georgia Tech, then earned his law degree from the now-defunct Woodrow Wilson College of Law. He was admitted to the State Bar of Georgia in 1959. He practiced general law and represented veterans like himself, disabled.

He deserved to rest with dignity, to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Wiener says. Instead, he was interred in an unmarked grave in a Palmetto cemetery that has a county contract and 1,800 such graves.

Hundreds of veterans — many from the Vietnam War who recoiled from society after returning home — end up in unmarked graves, according to the Georgia Department of Veterans Services But Wiener refused to let his friend remain one of them.

He contacted local veterans organizations, and ultimately the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs issued a standard granite marker, 2 feet long, 1 foot wide and 4 inches deep.

On Monday, the new marker was unveiled at a memorial ceremony at the cemetery. Wiener, a few veterans and state Sen. John Douglas (R-Social Circle) laid roses on the headstone, etched with a Star of David.

A rabbi prayed. A bugler sounded taps, and then a hush fell over the green fields lined with tall pines. A flag was unfurled over the grave, and a man who served his nation and lay unknown for all these months finally regained his identity: Jean William Levy.
NOTE:  Because of this man and many many many others ... I have the right to say " Fuck you  G.W. Bush. And every mother-fucker that thinks like you or supports you! I have the right to freely say without persecution EAT SHIT AND LIVE!   ( In Toledo,Oh. these are offenses that a county prosecuter will back every dirty filthy move their boys and girls in blue can come up with just to point out that "You have no rights!" And shut the fuck up. )      - Mutant




Thompson veterans bill prompts hearing
By Star Staff
Thursday, July 03, 2008

Legislation introduced by Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena to help veterans who were unknowingly tested with chemical and biological weapons in the 1960s and ‘70s, recently prompted a House of Representatives subcommittee meeting.

The House Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs held a hearing on a bill introduced by Thompson and Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., that would give these veterans health benefits and compensation for illnesses resulting from “Project 112” weapons tests. In a statement, Thompson said he hopes the hearing will ultimately push his bill toward consideration by the House.

Project 112, which included ship-based Project SHAD, was conducted between 1963 and 1973 by the Department of Defense and other federal agencies. The DoD now admits that during these projects, unknowing military personnel were involved a number of chemical weapon tests, such as VX nerve gas and Sarin nerve gas and were exposed to biological weapons such as E. coli, tularemia (rabbit fever), and Q fever.

“First the government denied the tests existed. Then they said the tests happened but were harmless. Now they admit dangerous substances were used on our military personnel, yet they still refuse to give them care for their illnesses,” said Thompson. “We can’t change the past, but we can begin to right this wrong by giving these men the proper health care and compensation they earned.”
After the DoD admitted to Thompson that the tests did exist and included harmful agents, they released more than 6,000 names of military personnel used in the tests. However, the GAO reported in February that the DoD had halted their efforts to disclose additional names and many veterans remain unaware that they were even involved. Thompson’s legislation would require the DoD to hand over all the names to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which must then notify the veterans.

http://www.sthelenastar.com/articles/2008/07/03/
news/local/doc486bebb0537f1480731104.txt



VA denies hypertension claims linked to herbicides
By Chris Roberts / El Paso Times
Article Launched: 07/03/2008 12:00:00 AM MDT

Copyright 2008

The Veterans Administration will not grant disability claims for hypertension related to Agent Orange or other herbicide exposure, according to Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake, who decided existing research doesn't clearly establish a link between the two.

"The science didn't support it," Mark Brown, director of VA's Environmental Agents Service, said Tuesday.
However, Peake agreed to allow AL amyloidosis -- a rare incurable disease that can lead to organ failure and death -- as a service-connected illness related to herbicide exposure, Brown said.
El Paso-area veterans advocates said they weren't surprised by the denial of hypertension because it is a relatively widespread condition.

"I can tell you very simply (why Peake denied the hypertension claims), it's one word and it's five letters long -- money," said Jeri Elena Mark, an El Paso advocate who also suffers from hypertension and was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, where she served on a Hawk missile crew. "I think it's a load of bull."

Mark and other veterans advocates point to numerous studies they say support the connection, including a long-term study of a 1976 accident in Italy referred to by Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt in a 1990 report commissioned by the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Zum walt's report also mentions hypertension developed by agricultural workers exposed to herbicides.
The study of the accident in Italy, updated earlier this year in an Advertisement American Journal of Epidemiology article, lists hypertension as a contributing cause to deaths of people exposed to dioxins,
which are used in the herbicides.

Brown, a toxicologist, said Peake's decision was based on a broad review of existing research done by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, which veterans advocates have criticized for a lack of objectivity.
However, Brown said the review -- which Congress requires every two years, the most recent of which was released about a year ago -- examined about 25 studies, and was "very exhaustively thorough."
The Institute of Medicine does not make recommendations to the VA on policy, said Christine Stencel, an institute spokeswoman.

"There are scientific studies of adequate quality that have yielded information that points to a possible statistical link or plausible biological means, by which exposure to Agent Orange, the herbicides, the dioxins that contaminated them could result in the increased risk of developing hypertension," Stencel said.
"But at the same time, it's not clear-cut. There are contradictory results from other studies." On June 10, Peake sent a letter notifying the veterans affairs committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate that he would not allow the "service-connected" status for hypertension. "It's ambiguous," Brown said, "which is, in some ways, the worst situation."

Brown said recommendations from the team Peake formed to look at the issue didn't mention cost. He also points to type 2 diabetes, an illness he said is very costly to treat and fairly common, which was recently added to the list.
"I would argue that, really, the decision was driven by the science," Brown said. When the Institute of Medicine released its review in July 2007 with a finding of "limited or suggestive evidence" linking hypertension to herbicide exposure, the VA was required by law to determine whether it should be listed as "service-connected," according to an internal agency document obtained by the El Paso Times.

The document -- called a "fast letter" and distributed to all VA regional offices and centers -- states that a decision was expected by Sept. 1. Veterans who served during certain time periods in Vietnam, in vessels off the shore of Vietnam, and in Korea along the Demilitarized Zone would have been eligible for the benefit if Peake had approved it, according to the document.

It concludes that, if the service connection is not warranted, "we will not, of our own initiative, take any additional action on this issue."

AL amyloidosis was added to the list because it was very similar to a type of cancer linked to herbicide exposure and "it made sense to make a service connection," Brown said.

In the past, it has taken about six months between approval of a new illness for service-connected status and new regulations being issued that allow claims to be processed, he said. Part of the reason veterans exposed to the herbicides are angry is that their cases were more extreme than those of most people exposed in non-military situations.

The Zumwalt report quotes Dr. James R. Clary: "When we (military scientists) initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the 'military' formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the 'civilian' version due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture. However, because the material was to be used on the 'enemy,' none of us were overly concerned.

"We never considered a scenario in which our own personnel would become contaminated with the herbicide. And if we had, we would have expected our own government to give assistance to veterans so contaminated."
Although there are no lack of studies on hypertension's relation to herbicide exposure, Brown said, there also has been nothing definitive -- either way. "This could change, of course," Brown said. "We had a similar situation with pro state cancer. ... There were new developments and new scientific studies and we had to reconsider that position. This is not static."

Chris Roberts may be reached at chrisr@elpasotimes.com; 546-6136.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_9771350




The following is from an MRC press release calling out the liberal mainstream media for covering up House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) recent remarks chalking up the success of the U.S. military in Iraq to the "goodwill of the Iranians." 

Alexandria, VA-- Last Thursday, a collection of reporters and members of the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle sat down for a nearly 80-minute interview with Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California.

At the 62-minute mark, Pelosi slandered and demeaned the hard-won successes of our armed forces in Iraq, saying "Whatever the military success and progress that may have been made, the surge didn't accomplish its goal. And some of the success of the surge is that the goodwill of the Iranians -- they decided in Basra when the fighting would end, they negotiated that cessation of hostilities -- the Iranians."
No one at the Chronicle reported the Speaker's vicious slander. Nor did NBC, ABC or CBS, CNN or MSNBC deem it fit for broadcast, either Thursday evening or at any point on Friday. The vaunted New York Times likewise did not deem this fit to print.
L. Brent Bozell:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb-staff/2008/06/02/
liberal-media-cover-speaker-pelosis-slander-american-troops


By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: June 30, 2008

none


Years ago, when William Miller talked about being in the Vietnam War — if he talked about being in the Vietnam War — he would tell people he served on a Swift boat.

“It’s taken on the connotation of political sport versus honoring those that sacrificed everything.” FRED SHORT, Swift boat veteran who served with John Kerry

At least now they have heard of it. But not in the way he would like.

“I was proud of what I did, and all the guys I was with,” Mr. Miller said. “Now somebody says ‘Swift boat’ and it’s a whole different meaning. They don’t associate it with the guys we lost. That’s a shame.”

“Swift boat” has become the synonym for the nastiest of campaign smears, a shadow that hangs over the presidential race as pundits wait to proclaim that the Swiftboating has begun and candidates declare that they will not be Swiftboated.

Swift boat veterans — especially those who had nothing to do with the group that attacked Senator John Kerry’s military record in the 2004 election — want their good name back, and the good names of the men not lucky enough to come home alive.

“You would not hear the word ‘Swift boat’ and think of people that served their country and fought in Vietnam,” said Jim Newell, who spent a year as an officer in charge on one of the small Navy vessels in An Thoi and Qui Nhon. “You think about someone who was involved in a political attack on a member of a different party. It just comes across as negative. Everyone who is associated with a Swift boat is involved in political chicanery.”

Sure, Watergate will never be just the office complex. And the name Willie Horton will always refer to more than just a criminal. But for Swift boat veterans, the name theft is more personal. When they talk about Swift boats, they recall friends and crewmates killed, countless moments of sheer terror in their young lives, the pain of coming home to a country that offered less than a hero’s welcome.

“It’s completely inappropriate,” said Michael Bernique, a highly regarded Swift boat driver who led missions up a canal that became known as Bernique’s Creek. “The word should connote service with honor, which is what was conducted. Anything that demeans that honor is shameful.”

In an April column in Proceedings magazine of the United States Naval Institute, Harlan Ullman, a Swift boat driver in Vietnam and a Pentagon consultant known as a creator of the “shock and awe” concept, wrote: “It is time to ban a word that is at once offensive, demeaning and obscene both to and for anyone serving in the naval profession. That word is ‘Swiftboating.’ ”

This month, a group of veterans who served with Mr. Kerry took up the challenge by Boone Pickens, the billionaire Texas oilman who helped finance the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, that he would give $1 million to anyone who could disprove anything in the group’s campaign against Mr. Kerry.

“One of the prime reasons we’ve done this is the way it’s taken on the connotation of political sport versus honoring those that sacrificed everything,” said Fred Short, who was in the gun tub of a Swift boat during one of the firefights that the veterans group said Mr. Kerry had exaggerated.

Before 2004, Swift boats — also known as Patrol Craft Fast, or P.C.F.’s — were 50-foot aluminum boats, just big enough for an officer, five enlisted men and a Vietnamese interpreter. There were about 110 of them as part of the so-called brown water navy in Vietnam, boats agile enough to patrol the shallow waters near shores where the North Vietnamese were sending small craft filled with munitions and supplies. They conducted some of the most harrowing missions of the war.

“The bad guys shot you on the way up the river, and they knew you had to come back down,” said John Scholl, who served as an officer in charge from May 1968 to May 1969.

There was no room for politics.

“What you cared about was the five guys on the boat,” Mr. Scholl said. “You didn’t get involved in what Johnson was doing, you all just wanted to make sure you succeeded in the operation. I always say, ‘I was 24, and I was much older than I am now.’ ”

The Swifties, as they call themselves, were a fairly loose fraternity until the mid-1990s, when they gathered at the dedication of a refurbished boat in Washington. Now, the Swift Boat Sailors Association holds a reunion every two years.

On Swiftboats.net, Larry Wasikowski tends to a crew list, a history of the boats and even archives of newsletters that various crews sent home to their families from 1966 to 1969. Mr. Wasikowski and the sailors’ association grant the designation of “Swiftie” meticulously, requiring extensive official documentation from anyone who claims the title.

By the association’s count, about 3,600 men served aboard Swift boats in Vietnam, 600 officers and 3,000 enlisted. About 200 signed the letter that became the basis of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign in 2004. In advertisements, a best-selling book and extensive news media appearances, they accused Mr. Kerry of fabricating exploits to win his military decorations and a discharge just four months into a yearlong tour.

Navy documents contradicted many of their accusations, but the claims undermined what Democrats had hoped would be Mr. Kerry’s strength.

Regardless of what they thought of Mr. Kerry, many Swift boat veterans objected to the attacks.

“It was unconscionable,” said Stan Collier, who served as an officer in charge on a boat based in Qui Nhon. “I thought those boys struck a new low.”

Mr. Collier considers himself a conservative and did not agree with Mr. Kerry’s politics, but he voted for him to protest the Swift boat campaign. “We’ve all been attributed to the sleaziness that those guys assigned to Kerry,” he said. “I think we’ve all been demeaned.”

As Mr. Miller said, “People don’t know about us; they know about those few TV advertisements.”

Mr. Wasikowski, who signed the original letter, said some Swift boat veterans dropped out of the sailors’ association because they thought it was connected to the campaign against Mr. Kerry. And many former sailors watched with dismay as the noun became a verb.

“When someone’s Swiftboated, it’s like being waterboarded,” said Sandy Wilcox, who keeps a model of the Swift boat he skippered on the credenza in his office in Wisconsin.

The new meaning of Swift boat stings worst for the men who served with Mr. Kerry, who say that, by implication, the attacks tarnished their military decorations. “I don’t have a lot in this world — my service means a whole lot to me,” Mr. Short said. “It’s been besmirched, I guess would be a good word. Whether they meant it or not.”

Mr. Pickens refused to pay on his challenge, and he suggested that the Swift boat colleagues who submitted records and other materials in defense of Mr. Kerry take up their disagreement with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

For their part, group members say they take nothing back. “We didn’t back down,” Mr. Wasikowski said.

Still, even some Swift boat veterans associated with the anti-Kerry group say they do not like what “Swift boat” has become.

“It’s taken on a life of its own,” Mr. Wasikowski said. “The problem is, it’s on the wrong side. We would like to be remembered as the one operation in Vietnam that succeeded, totally.”

The Swift Boat Sailors Association has attached a disclaimer to its Web site disavowing any “express or implied” political ties.

Signing the association’s online guestbook in October, “Carlo” expressed his appreciation: “I think it’s disgraceful that a handful of people have managed to turn ‘Swift boat’ into a synonym for ‘To smear somebody with lies,’ ” he wrote. “I hope you guys can take the term back to connote bravery, courage and sacrifice, like it always has.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/us/politics/30swift.html?
pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp&adxnnlx=1214831036-OKwo4SmHH%20uqAbyr73Q88Q



Judge dismisses suit over veteran health care

none

By Jim Christie

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A U.S. judged dismissed on Wednesday a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that claimed the government was failing to meet the mental health needs of former troops, who have a rate of suicide far higher than the general population.

Two groups had sought a court order to require the department to improve the way it cares for veterans and processes benefits.

U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti said Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth were demanding an overhaul of the VA system, "something clearly outside this court's jurisdiction."

"Congress has specifically precluded district courts from reviewing veterans' benefits decisions and has entrusted decisions regarding veterans' medical care to the discretion of the VA Secretary," Conti wrote in his 82-page decision.

"The court can find no systemic violations system-wide that would compel district court intervention," he said.

Lawyers pressing the suit said in April that veterans commit suicide between three and 7.5 times more often than the national average.

That kind of evidence was used to bolster the argument that the VA has systemic problems treating mental health problems. But Conti disagreed.

"He adopted a definition of 'systemic' that is very, very limited," Gordon Erspamer, a lawyer with the firm Morrison & Foerster, said during a telephone conference call. "We think the bar was set too high."
The VA, which has come under fire for its care of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, said in a statement that it was "pleased with the decision."

'SHH!'

Conti cited a study by the RAND Corp that found 18.5 percent of U.S. service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan now have post-traumatic stress disorder, about half of those who need treatment for the condition seek it, and of those who get treatment, only slightly more than half get minimally adequate care.

The decision also referred to a December 2007 e-mail by a VA official saying that there were about 18 suicides per day among America's 25 million veterans, and that VA data showed four to five suicides per day among those who receive care through the system.

In a February e-mail, the VA official wrote, "Shh! Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?"

The head of one of the veteran groups said an appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco was planned.

"This ruling will only cause us to redouble our efforts and our pursuit of justice for our nation's veterans. We will not rest until our job is finished," Paul Sullivan, director of Veterans for Common Sense, said in a statement.

Arturo Gonzalez, another Morrison & Foerster attorney, told Reuters that lawyers for the veterans groups will ask the circuit court to back the kind of broad judicial powers Conti said he lacked.

"We believe a federal judge is obligated to act when confronted with facts as egregious as the ones in our case," Gonzalez said.

Additional reporting by Andrew Gray in Washington D.C)

(Reporting by Jim Christie; Editing by Mary Milliken and Xavier Briand)
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2527490520080626


Widows on warpath over lack of compensation

Published Wednesday June 25th, 2008
By MICHAEL STAPLES
 staples.michael@dailygleaner.com

The Lincoln woman and about 50 other widows are angry and fed up with the federal government in general and the Department of Veterans Affairs specifically.
They are demanding to be included in the $95.6-million compensation package announced by the federal government last fall for veterans and civilians affected by the U.S. military's spraying of Agent Orange at Canadian Forces Base Gagetown during the 1960s.
Those who qualify and meet a number of medical requirements are eligible for a one-time, $20,000 ex-gratia payment.
But payouts are only considered for primary caregivers of individuals who died on or after Feb. 6, 2006 - the date the government of Stephen Harper took office.
"I find that ludicrous," said Hudson, spokeswoman for the group called Military Widows on a War Path. "I am very disgusted with the government and the DVA in general and there is no need of it."
Hudson said her husband Sgt. Ralph Hudson, an artillery officer, was at CFB Gagetown from 1964 to 1966, the latter period covers the first spraying by the U.S. military of Agent Orange.
Ralph Hudson died of lung cancer in 2004 at the age of 64.
Like many other widows in a similar situation, Hudson said her husband had the misfortune of not dying within the parametres identified by the Tory government,
"This, even though he was out in the area slogging his way through Agent Orange and other chemicals.''
She said the letter of denial received from the Department of Veterans Affairs Canada acknowledged her husband was at Gagetown during the spraying, but wasn't in the right spot.
"It's not the money but the principle of the thing. Why would they do this? They knew who was dead before they set the date."
Hudson said her group, which includes members from around the province, intends to keep the pressure on the federal government to correct what it says is an injustice.
She said the government refuses to adopt a presumptive clause that, if accepted, would mean "if you were there, you would be compensated."
"We feel we deserve that $20,000," Hudson said.
"We don't begrudge the people who have received the money but our husbands have died. My God! Give us a break. What's the big problem?"
Hudson said she hopes membership will spread across the country and that government will get the message.
Veteran John Chisholm of Douglas, who sat on an advisory board for the Base Gagetown and Area Fact-Finders Project, said the women are wasting their time.
"The government would have to change its whole policy on how they awarded these claims," he said.
"I have been after the minister more times than enough to open up the qualifications on the claims. It (the compensation parametres) were established, it went through the House of Commons, was settled and that's all they are going to do. It's a dead issue."
Chisholm, who qualified and received the payment, said the best option for those left out of the compensation package is to become part of the ongoing class-action suit and take the government to court.
Lincoln's Wayne Cardinal, who served at Gagetown with the Black Watch Regiment during the spraying years, but didn't qualify for the compensation, said he doesn't want the widows to give up, although he doesn't know if they'll be successful.
"I think they stand a pretty good chance of getting them shook up," he said.
Updated figures on how many Canadians had received compensation under last fall's program wasn't available from the Department of Veterans Affairs on Tuesday afternoon.
As of last December, 861 individuals had completed applications, of which 350 have been approved.

http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/cityregion/article/336055


Inmates Maintain Grounds Of Vet Cemetaries...

   A new joint community works project underway by the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services and the Maryland Department of Veterans Affairs is providing an opportunity for inmates to give back to Maryland’s veterans and their memory by maintaining the grounds of the State veteran cemeteries. The first project is occurring at the Crownsville Veterans Cemetery in Anne Arundel County. Five days a week, a Division of Correction inmate crew assists in maintaining and improving the grounds, and performs general maintenance for the grave sites of over 15,000 men and women, and their dependents, who served this country. The cemetery detail is comprised of five to six inmates, who are themselves veterans, from the Brockbridge Correctional Facility, a minimum/pre-release institution in Jessup. To be considered for this duty, inmates must not have been dishonorably discharged from the service, and must be eligible for burial in a veteran cemetery as well. Their status is verified through the Maryland Department of Veterans Affairs. This pilot project is part of a DPSCS push to help Veterans Affairs maintain their five veterans cemeteries located across the state. The goal is to create and sustain a partnership between the two state agencies as a way for offenders to not only give back to surrounding communities, but to learn work skills that are transferable upon release. staff 06-25-08 4:30

http://www.wcbcradio.com/index.php?
option=com_content&task=view&id=11965&Itemid=35


VA execs get state's top federal bonuses

By THEO EMERY • Staff Writer • June 20, 2008


The largest bonuses for federal workers in Tennessee last year went to two Nashville-based executives in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, with each receiving amounts near the top tiers of bonuses given to VA employees nationwide.

Federal pay data shows that Michael A. Dusenbery, the southern area director for 11 regional offices of the Veterans Benefits Administration, received a $33,000 performance cash award last year, on top of his salary of $165,000.
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The Benefits Administration is the arm of the VA that processes and resolves claims from veterans.

Brian T. Corley, the Veterans Benefits Administration's regional office director, received $30,920 on top of his salary of $154,600. Both men are career service VA employees, and were given the bonus for being "meritorious executives."

Corley, who has been regional director for almost six years and with the VA for 35 years, said the award was due to the performance of the regional office in processing and resolving claims of veterans, a quality that he said has distinguished the office for many years.

"We were one of the highest quality offices in the nation last year, and we are this year, too," he said.

Dusenbery was on vacation, and could not be reached for comment.

The extra pay troubled Bill Hartley, 68, a Vietnam veteran and an officer with the Nashville chapter of Disabled Veterans of America.

Hartley praised the care that he has received from the VA in Nashville — he also has worked for the agency — but thought the awards were "out of proportion."

"When the crunch is on to cut everything else, and especially patient care and the number of patients that they're actually able to see because of that money crunch… I think that money should be poured into serving more and treating more veterans," he said.

The average per capita income in Tennessee in 2006 — the most recent year for which statistics were available — was $22,074, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Average bonus $363

While Dusenbery and Corley were among many federal workers in Tennessee who received some form of bonus in 2007, the amounts they received were by the far the biggest — the next largest for any of the state's 16,689 federal employees listed was $4,265. The average among the 1,720 who received extra pay was about $363.

The amounts stand out not just in Tennessee, but nationally. Among VA employees, Dusenbery's award was the fourth-largest sum nationally — only two other VA employees outside of Washington received higher amounts — and was the 36th largest among about 979,000 federal employees included in the data. Corley's was the seventh-largest among VA employees, and 85th among all the federal workers included.

In 2006, Corley received an $18,000 bonus from the VA on top of his base salary; that bonus was one of the three highest in the state that year.

The 2007 awards were made the same year that a VA review pointed out problems at the Nashville VA Medical Center and the Alvin C. York VA Medical Center in Murfreesboro, including "substandard cleanliness conditions" and a closed therapy pool at the Murfreesboro campus.

Hospital care is provided by the Veterans Health Administration, a separate arm of the VA from the Veterans Benefits Administration. Corley said that his work overseeing veterans claims was not connected to the VA's hospital care.

Chris Alexander, a spokesman for the VA's Tennessee Valley Healthcare System, said the therapy pool remained closed due to lack of funding, but every other finding in the report had been addressed or was in the process of being addressed.
Records exclude some

The pay records made public to Gannett News Service do not include employees involved in security work, such as the FBI, CIA, Department of Defense, or Internal Revenue Service. While most executive branch employees are included, it excludes the White House, Congress, the U.S. Postal Service and independent agencies and commissions.

The two VA executives received the cash awards after the U.S. Office of Personnel Management designated both in 2007 as winners of Presidential Rank Awards. The president "recognizes and celebrates a small group of career Senior Executives with the President's Rank Award for exceptional long-term accomplishments," according to the office Web site.

The award, which is for 20 percent of the base salary, was given to federal employees across numerous departments. A higher level award is for 35 percent of salary.

"Winners of this prestigious award are strong leaders, professionals, and scientists who achieve results and consistently demonstrate strength, integrity, industry, and a relentless commitment to excellence in public service," the site said.

The nominations come from the department head.

Leslie Paige, a spokeswoman for the government watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste, said that generally pay bonuses belong in the private sector, where benchmarks are clearer and there's more accountability.

"The government doesn't make widgets, and they don't have a bottom line, and they don't have shareholders, really, and the motivations that drive bureaucrats — it's not efficiency. So we're always a little leery" about bonuses, she said.

Corley dismissed that view, saying "everybody's got an opinion." "I think where performance is involved, wherever it is, it should be rewarded if it's excellent performance."
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID
=/20080620/NEWS02/806200423/1009/NEWS01
 

War 'Memory Project' threatened by Veterans Affairs

Giuseppe Valiante ,  Canwest News Service
Published: Friday, June 20, 2008

MONTREAL - Alexander Hall has lots of war stories - like the time in 1940, when British Defence Minister Winston Churchill was inspecting the troops on HMS Ganges and stopped to ask Hall his age.

When the young sailor from Glasgow said he was 19, Churchill scrunched his pudgy face in disbelief and exclaimed, "My God!"

"He didn't believe me. I looked twelve," said Hall, now 87.

For decades, Hall said, he refused to talk about the war, not even with his family. His wife, Helen, said he would wake up at night screaming.

All that changed when he started to visit elementary and high school classrooms as part of the Memory Project to share his experiences with students.

"It's not bottled up anymore," Hall said.

But the popular project's future might be in jeopardy.

Jeremy Diamond of the Dominion Institute, a charity dedicated to educating Canadians about history, said Veterans Affairs Canada, has not decided whether it will keep funding the program for the 2008-09 academic year.

"It's disappointing and frustrating on our side that it's taken a year of conversations . . . to still not know if they're able to come back as a (sponsor), and unfortunately we don't have the luxury of time," Diamond said.

The Memory Project co-ordinates speaking engagements for 1,500 volunteer veterans across the country. Since its inception in 2001, veterans have shared their stories with more than 150,000 students a year. Veterans Affairs is its primary sponsor.

A spokeswoman for Veterans Affairs Canada, Heather MacDonald, said the Dominion Institute's funding request is still under review and no decision has been made.

The ministry feels the Memory Project "is well established" with the $780,000 she said has been given to the project in the past five years, she said.

Diamond suggests that by not giving an answer, Veterans Affairs has effectively said no to more funding, at least for the next year.

Hall was a sailor in the Royal Navy from 1940 to 1946 on HMS Emma, an old Dutch passenger liner converted to transport troops and equipment to the front lines in France, Germany, Italy, North Africa and the Pacific. He helped train and transport Canadian troops to Dieppe.

Hall said he thought he was going to die many times at sea, especially when the craft he was on before the Emma was sunk by Italian aerial bombers in the Mediterranean.

His company lost 37 men and Hall spent the next four days on a lifeboat with 14 other sailors - he made slicing motions with his hand to describe the one piece of canned beef they were allowed per day.

The Dominion Institute says it's stories like these that help students understand the sacrifices older generations made, and the history of the world they live in.

Hall pulled out a bound volume of 50 letters from children that a teacher at Honore Mercier School compiled for him.

"Did you ever lose hope? Did you think of your family? Thank you for fighting for us," say some of the messages sent by the young students along with drawings and pictures.

"They asked him for autographs" and called him a hero, said Rocco Speranza, a spiritual and guidance councillor from the English Montreal School Board who has asked Hall to speak at several schools.

"People in Europe sometimes understand what Canadians did in the war more than actual Canadians. . . . I can't tell their story. To actually hear it from people who were there, that's what makes it comprehensible," Speranza said.

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=
eb56e5cf-7908-4b16-8b56-3459263c9556
© Montreal Gazette 2008


Chicoutimi crew exposed to toxic chemicals: report
Fire crippled submarine in 2004. But health risks 'slim to none,' navy insists
Richard Dooley, Canwest News Service
Published: Friday, June 20

HALIFAX - In a report on the fire aboard HMCS Chicoutimi, navy officials recommend that former crew members be monitored for unexpected health problems that could be linked to the fire that crippled the submarine almost four years ago.

The report concludes that smoke released during the fire contained a toxic soup of chemicals, including some cancer-causing agents, but there is likely no increased risk of illness as a result of the exposure.

In a private briefing Wednesday night to about 30 of the 57 crew members who were aboard the Chicoutimi on Oct. 5, 2004, naval health brass said they were recommending periodic monitoring of the crew's health.

"It's part of the due diligence we have to perform," Cmdr. Jeff Agnew said yesterday.

Agnew said the navy has also learned to communicate with its sailors better in the aftermath of the Chicoutimi fire.

Part of that is to appoint two of the submarine's officers as "champions for life" to act as

liaisons between the crew and navy headquarters and Veterans Affairs Canada.

"Our medical folks said we weren't doing a good job communicating with our sailors, but we are fixing that," Agnew said.

He said the report shows the chances of long-term health effects of inhaling smoke from the fire are "slim to none."

"But you can never say never," he said.

The fire aboard Chicoutimi happened in the mid-Atlantic when a rogue wave crashed through a conning tower hatch, causing a short circuit and electrical fire in the main electronics compartment.

The fire spread through a significant portion of the used former British submarine, effectively disabling it.

Lieut. Chris Saunders suffered severe smoke inhalation and died in an Irish hospital hours after the fire.

Several other crew members suffered various degrees of smoke inhalation while others among the 56 survivors reported illnesses over the last four years that they believe could be related to the smoke and toxic ash they lived in for days following the fire, while the submarine was towed to Faslane, Scotland.

The tests performed by the National Research Council concluded that significant amounts of carbon monoxide and other chemicals were released by the fire and that it is reasonable to conclude the crew was exposed to carcinogenic material in the smoke.


© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id
=5f3a01cd-b5d0-4005-bab7-c7dfddb69959


Norman Veterans Center Under Fire

The Norman Veterans Center is being investigated on various allegations including abuse, and a lack of care.  This week a public meeting was held, and the lines have been drawn throughout the community.  The United States Department of Veterans Affairs concluded their time in Norman this afternoon, while private investigator Gary Glover continued his search to see if workers at the facility are mistreating patients.

"We firmly believe that our employees are taking care of the residents there, but at the same time we're taking the allegations seriously," said Mark Beutler, the Director of Communications for the OPEA.

KSBI was allowed to tour the facility with permission from the center's director.  The Oklahoma Public Employees Association say its workers do the best job that they can.

"Our OPEA who work at the Norman vets center for the pay they could go to work somewhere in the private sector and make more money there, so it's their passion to take care of our war heroes, these men and women who served our country," Beutler described.

But State Representative Al Lindley has heard the voice of those being mistreated.

"I was distraught," Lindley, who represents district 93 said. "I was really concerned when i got that phone call and the fax."

With hopes that the problems will be uncovered.

"I would hope that maybe some policies would change, and maybe change some personnel," Lindley explained.

Officials will now compile the data and decide if action needs to be taken.

"Both from residents of the veterans center and those who work there, 90% of those people said they don't see problems there they're doing the best that they can," Beutler added.

"Each individual, whether they be male or female, deserves our utmost respect and care when they do come back injured and in need of permanent care," Lindley concluded.

The OPEA says the problem lies in the lack of funding, since there is a 96% turnover rate in the past year.  The US Veterans Affairs agency will release their findings in the next few weeks.  The Norman facility opened in November of 2006, with 300 beds.

http://www.ksbitv.com/news/20612389.html


Once-forgotten veterans buried in Oregon

6/20/2008, 1:21 a.m. PDT
The Associated Press        

EAGLE POINT, Ore. (AP) — Harry Fish was born in Ohio and served in the Army during World War I.

He married Mima Fish and died in Grants Pass on April 18, 1974 — 10 days after Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's home run record.

Little else is known about Fish, except that his ashes sat unclaimed for the past 34 years in a locker at a Grants Pass funeral home.

On Thursday, the remains of Fish and seven other forgotten servicemen were buried with full military honors at the Eagle Point National Cemetery.

The remains were discovered as part of the Missing in America Project, a 2-year-old group that finds, verifies and arranges burials with full military honors for veterans whose remains lie unclaimed in funeral homes.

Project volunteers have found and buried 175 veterans and are searching funeral homes in 44 states.

Though the project was born in Oregon, Thursday's service was the first in the state.

The group's president is Fred Salanti, disabled from the Vietnam War. He was volunteering on veterans issues in Grants Pass when his chapter of the Oregon Veterans Motorcycle Association started attending monthly services for forgotten veterans at Eagle Point National Cemetery.

Then he heard of unclaimed ashes at a funeral home in Idaho and a man there who found the veterans among them and arranged a proper burial. Then more forgotten veterans were found in a Nevada funeral home. That's when Salanti got the idea for the Missing in America Project.

"No country abandons its dead," said Salanti, who moved to Redding, Calif., last year. "You even let the enemy bury its dead on the battlefield."

Fish's remains were found by Bud Thieme, a Vietnam veteran who started visiting southern Oregon funeral homes in January 2007, informing funeral directors of the project and trying to persuade them to open their storage units and files.

Fish's remains were at Hull & Hull Funeral Directors in Grants Pass, which has cared for the dead in that city since the 1920s and has dozens of unclaimed cremains in basement lockers.

It took Thieme about a year to get permission to inspect the cremains; once inside, he painstakingly recorded the name, date of death and identification number from a cremain's cardboard box and checked each with the funeral home's file for clues to service records. If there was a hint that the cremains belonged to a veteran, Thieme would send a query to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs records office in St. Louis.
   
"It's interesting because you form an identity for that person; it becomes very personal," Thieme said.

His effort was honored when he was chosen Thursday to read the names of the 20 veterans who were buried in the past 30 days at Eagle Point. Each name was followed by a single ringing of a bell.

Besides Fish, the veterans whose unclaimed remains were buried Thursday included Carroll Pope, Bruce King, Robert Herr, Albert Lester, Herbert Heyer, Carl Reinhardt and Jack Hodges.



Sweeping new GI Bill plan gets final approval

By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Jun 20, 2008 6:35:44 EDT

A sweeping new veterans’ education package has been approved as part of the 2008 war budget.

The package is designed to fully cover the cost of completing four years of college — including tuition and fees, books and living expenses — and to let career troops share those benefits with dependents. The new “GI Bill for the 21st Century” will offer a benefit worth an average of $80,000, double the GI Bill’s current value.

The new benefit would pay up to the in-state rate for tuition and fees for the most expensive four-year public college or university in the state where a veteran attends school.

The package also includes a monthly living stipend, an annual book allowance, and money for tutorial assistance, along with many other features.

The House of Representatives passed the war funding bill Thursday night. The Senate is expected to follow suit next week. Benefits increases take effect as soon as the war funding bill is signed into law by President Bush, which will happen in the next few weeks. But veterans now in school will not get the higher amounts right away because lawmakers are giving the Veterans Affairs Department until Aug. 1, 2009, to calculate and pay amounts that will vary by state and by school. Retroactive payments will have to be made.

Also, anyone who had not previously enrolled in the GI Bill will have to wait until Aug. 1, 2009, to collect any payments.

Under the package’s new family transfer option will give active-duty, National Guard and reserve members the right to transfer benefits to spouses or children after meeting certain time-in-service milestones. No transfer rights would be available until regulations are issued by the Pentagon.

“It has been seven years since the 9/11 attacks, and the operating tempo and strain on the troops has not diminished,” said Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., the chief sponsor of the new GI Bill package.

“It is long past time to do this.”

Much more detail on the new GI Bill plan will be in next week’s Military Times newspapers.


Jury: Wachovia Mistreated Reservist

By EDMUND H. MAHONY | Courant Staff Writer
    2:28 PM EDT, June 18, 2008


A federal jury in New Haven has found that Wachovia Securities, one of the nation's leading investment houses, deliberately violated the law by denying a broker and U.S. Air Force reservist his former position after he had been called to active duty following the September 11 terror attacks.

After a four-day trial before U.S. District Judge Janet B. Arterton, the civil jury found that Wachovia's treatment of Michael Serricchio violated the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, a federal law enacted to encourage military service and protect veterans from being penalized as a result of that service.

The law requires employers to reinstate returning veterans within two weeks to their former positions, with no loss of salary, status or seniority.

Serricchio charged -- and the federal jury agreed -- that when he sought to recover his old position after a three year call up, Wachovia's salary and employment offer was so unsatisfactory that it amounted to an effective dismissal.

What's more, Serricchio charged in his lawsuit that while he was on active duty in Saudi Arabia and at Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts, his erstwhile Wachovia colleagues carved up his client list and the millions of dollars in investments that he managed.

Serricchio said in the suit that when clients asked for him specifically, Wachovia employees replied that he was on vacation or out sick.

Serricchio said in his suit that he was making about $200,000 a year in commissions when he was called to active duty in 2001. When he tried to return to work in 2003, Serricchio said Wachovia waited three months before offering him $2,000 a month and the opportunity to make cold calls to the owners of dormant investment accounts.

"I couldn't be any happier with the outcome," Serricchio said Wednesday, about the verdict. "There are still hundreds and hundreds of people over seas that are in the guard and reserves and there are more on the way. They are going to play a very big part and it is scary to come back and almost seem like you were punished as opposed to rewarded."

David Golub, Serricchio's lawyer, said the verdict has implications for veterans and employers around the country.

"This is not like Joe's mom and pop business down the street," Golub said. "This is a major national business that basically dumped an employee who was called to serve in the military. He was in the first wave of activations following 9/11. The implications of this case apply to all employers. Hopefully, other veterans and other employers will pay attention."

Because the jury found Wachovia willfully violated the law, Golub said Serricchio is entitled to double the amount of his back pay from Wachovia and reinstatment to his old job. Arterton is expected to award damages at an upcoming legal hearing.

Wachovia had no immediate comment.


http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/06/military_severance_061708w/

Vets group claims DoD violates severance law

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Jun 18, 2008 7:40:30 EDT

At the end of a boisterous House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing in which lawmakers lambasted Veterans Affairs Department and Pentagon officials for not meeting various deadlines for improving care for wounded combat troops, Disabled American Veterans dropped a quiet bombshell.

The Pentagon “knowingly violated the law and ignored the intent of Congress” in implementing a provision of the 2008 Defense Authorization Act that lawmakers designed to enhance disability severance pay for wounded and injured service members, wrote Kerry Baker, associate national legislative director for DAV.

Baker argued that Congress created Section 1646 of the 2008 Defense Authorization Act with the intent that service members injured in combat, in a combat zone, or performing tasks related to combat — such as training — would not have to pay back any disability retirement severance pay they receive from the Defense Department before becoming eligible for VA disability compensation, as has been the case under long-standing policy.

But Baker said David S.C. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, sent out a “directive-type memorandum” March 13 instructing that only those injured in a combat zone in the line of duty or as a direct result of armed conflict do not have to pay back their severance money.

“This action has intentionally read ‘hazardous service,’ ‘conditions simulating war,’ and ‘instrumentality of war’ completely out of the law,” Baker wrote.

Chu’s action, he wrote, “forces one to question his true resolve to care for those he sends into battle, or orders to train for battle.”

Baker said he believes the decision was purely monetary.

“We can think of no other conceivable reason … to circumvent the law as he has done here,” Baker wrote. “To answer the question of ‘why,’ Congress need only determine in whose budget the disability compensation is deposited once offset by VA. We believe the answer to that question is the [Defense Department] budget.”

Defense Department spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said that was not Chu’s intent.

“Rest assured that saving money was not the driver in the implementation,” she said in an e-mail. “The statutory intent of [the law] clearly and appropriately focuses the ‘enhanced disability severance’ to those service members where the unfitting condition is a result of direct participation and performance of duty in the war effort.”


http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/
jun/18/congress-demands-va-investigation/

Congress demands VA investigation
Obama, Pelosi, others hit drug testing
Audrey Hudson (Contact) and S.A. Miller (Contact)
Wednesday, June 18, 2008


Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama and congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle Tuesday called for investigations into the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) failure to inform in a timely manner veterans participating in medical tests that a drug they were taking has side effects that can lead to psychosis and suicide.

Responding to an investigative report published in The Washington Times Tuesday, Mr. Obama, a member of the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, said the VA's actions in sponsoring the drug tests were "outrageous" and "unacceptable."

"Our veterans - particularly those suffering from mental health injuries - should have the very best health care and support in the world, they should never be needlessly exposed to drugs without proper notification of the dangers involved or effective monitoring of the side effects," said Mr. Obama, Illinois Democrat.

Rep. Steve Buyer of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, sent a letter to the VA inspector general and the VA's chief research and development officer requesting an investigation.

"I am troubled by allegations that these safeguards may have not been in place for this study and I am requesting an immediate investigation into this matter and I asked that VA report back to me as soon as possible," he said.

A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, said Congress also will look into the matter.
For photos, multimedia and official FDA documents, visit the interactive Disposable Heroes investigative report site.


"This report raises many disturbing questions about the treatment of our veterans and the House Veterans' Affairs Committee will get to the bottom of this," said Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami. "We expect full and immediate cooperation from the VA."

The VA took three months to notify its patients about severe mental side effects of the anti-smoking drug Chantix, after the Food and Drug Administration issued an alert about side effects that could lead to psychosis and suicide.

The VA said notification letters were tied up in bureaucracy, but thought the three-month time frame was not unrealistic. The VA also said warnings about suicide were omitted from the letter notification because many veterans are elderly or have eyesight problems.

"This is the most pathetic excuse that can be dredged up; it's insulting," retired Marine Lt. Col. Roger Charles, editor of DefenseWatch, the Internet newsmagazine of Soldiers for the Truth, said Tuesday.

"And then to brag you got it done in three months because of a cumbersome bureaucracy? What if people's lives were at risk? Oh wait, they are," Col. Charles said.

The VA continues to test Chantix on veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), even as the Federal Aviation Administration has banned airline pilots and air traffic control personnel from taking the drug, citing the adverse side effects.

Arthur Caplan, one of the nation's premier medical ethicists, said the VA's behavior in the anti-smoking study violated basic protections for humans in medical experiments, The Times reported.

The White House on Tuesday defended the VA, saying the program is designed to help soldiers with PTSD.

"The VA is doing everything they can to be mindful of the safety of these veterans in all their programs and try to help them. This is the [VA], under wonderful leadership by [Secretary James B. Peake], who is interested in the health and safety of these veterans that are under his care, and every other member of that VA system is the same," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

"These are people who care for our veterans. They care for the troops that have been out there every day, fighting for this country. And they're interested in their safety," he said. "Remember, this is a program dealing with former soldiers with PTSD. And it's a smoking-cessation program. And they're interested in helping these veterans. So that's my reaction to it."

Nearly 1,000 veterans with PTSD were enrolled in the VA study to test methods of ending smoking, with 143 using Chantix. Twenty-one veterans reported adverse effects from the drug, including one who suffered suicidal thoughts, a three-month investigation by The Times and ABC News found.

"I was very concerned to read this morning's Washington Times and learn that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has yet again failed to take appropriate steps to safeguard the health and well-being of veterans participating in drug trials," Mr. Obama said in a letter Tuesday to Mr. Peake.

Mr. Obama cited a Government Accountability Office investigation of VA health care in Los Angeles that resulted in the suspension of all human testing because of numerous problems, including "failures to provide adequate information to subjects before they participated in research."

"Accordingly, I call on you to conduct a full and thorough investigation of the process by which VA conducts clinical trials and to take immediate corrective action to address the problems that were first identified by GAO eight years ago," he said in the letter.

Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also requested that Mr. Peake review the studies and identify everyone involved, as well as provide care "to any veterans who have undergone this testing and ensure that any unethical practices are immediately brought to a halt."

"Our wounded troops and veterans deserve the very best in care, but unfortunately, recent studies and incidents illustrate that some VA services have failed to live up to the standard of excellence that is expected," Mr. Cornyn said.

In addition, Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Daniel K. Akaka said his panel will question the ethics of the clinical trial involving the drug Chantix.

"The suggestion that VA researchers are not properly informing veterans about possible risks is troubling and deserves further investigation," the Hawaii Democrat said.

Sen. Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, ranking Republican on the Veterans' Affairs Committee, also is questioning the VA clinical trial - in particular the timing of notification to study participants.

"VA should make every effort to quickly inform participants of any new drug information," Burr spokesman Mark Williams said.

Added Kevin Bishop, spokesman for Sen. Lindsay Graham, South Carolina Republican: "Advances in medicine should not come at the expense of our troops."

Stephen Dinan and Jon Ward contributed to this report.


Veterans Affairs Tells Court It Can't Imagine Voter Registration Drives for Its Wounded Veterans and the Homeless

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted June 12, 2008.

An attorney for the Department of Veterans Affairs, which runs hospitals and homeless shelters for veterans, told a federal appeals court Thursday that the VA could not conceive of any circumstance where voter registration drives could occur at its facilities.

"This is an activity that could be seen as harming the appearance of the VA's neutrality," said Owen Martikan, assistant U.S. attorney representing the agency, adding voter registration drives would interfere with patient medical care and also violate the federal Hatch Act, which limits federal employees from participating in political campaign activities.

"If you cure the problem of overt partisanship, you are creating another problem," Martikan said. "Once you let in someone else, you are not being neutral unless you let everyone in."

But Scott Rafferty, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney who has spent several years arguing the VA must allow voter registration drives to help wounded former soldiers register and vote, disagreed.

"Integrating veterans into the communities that they live in is the highest honor we can award veterans," Rafferty told the court.

The issue before a federal appeals court in San Francisco is whether restrictions on voter registration drives at the VA's campus in nearby Menlo Park are unconstitutional.

The case has national significance. The VA has facilities across the country serving thousands of veterans. In 1994, then-President Bill Clinton ordered the VA to help register veterans. However, the VA ceased allowing voter registration drives during the Bush administration.

Several U.S. senators and California's secretary of state, all Democrats, have asked the VA to become a voter registration agency like motor vehicle departments. This spring, the VA issued a new policy saying it would help vets -- who asked for help -- to register and to vote. The VA also said it would allow nonpartisan voter registration drives, but then rescinded the policy on registration drives.

The suit before the federal appeals court is revisiting the question of whether Steve Preminger, chair of the Santa Clara County Democratic Central Committee -- where the Menlo Park facility is located -- has standing to question the constitutionality of the VA's policy.

On Thursday, judges from the three-judge panel asked the VA if there was any circumstance where it could conceive of a nonpartisan voter registration drive. One judge said students at her daughter's high school were given voter registration forms when they are 17-1/2 years old -- and asked why veterans cannot be given the same opportunity?

"It's a different environment than a school," Martikan said. "It means diverting resources from patient care."

Another judge laid out a scenario where anyone who would participate in voter registration efforts would not wear campaign buttons or say what party they belonged to. He asked if the VA would object to a voter registration drive if participants were told "no partisan activities."

That would not satify the VA, Martikan said, saying, the "VA has different interests."

Martikan said that Preminger and an associate came onto the VA campus in a car that had an "impeach Bush" bumper sticker. "They introduced themselves as members of the Democratic Party," he said, adding it was a fiction that registration drive participants could "pretend to be nonpartisan."

After the hearing, Preminger said his attempts to register voters were neither overtly partisan nor disruptive.

"I don't carry myself that way -- not at all," he said.

Preminger said Republican Party volunteers have been able to visit the Menlo Park facility to register voters.



Veterans from 1960s chemical tests press for help

By ERICA WERNER

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers and veterans of secret Cold War-era chemical and germ tests on military personnel demanded help from the Bush administration Thursday, but they got no satisfaction.

Officials from the Pentagon and Veterans Affairs Department said there was no need for legislation to guarantee health care and benefits to the veterans. Thousands of servicemembers were exposed, often without their knowledge, to real and simulated chemical and biological agents, including sarin and VX.

The tests were conducted at sea and above a half-dozen U.S. states from 1962-1973 to see how U.S. ships would withstand chemical and germ assaults and how such weapons would disperse.

"We were exposed to health hazards almost continuously," retired Navy Reserve Lt. Commander Jack Alderson told the House Veterans Affairs subcommittee on disability assistance.

Veterans who tried to get help from the V.A. were "shown the door," Alderson said, his voice loud and choked with emotion.

"I guess this is one of those times when someone should apologize to you on behalf of your country, so I will presume to do that," the panel's chairman, Democratic Rep. John Hall of New York, told Alderson.

Administration officials said there was no definitive link between the tests — called Project 112 and Project SHAD — and illnesses, including cancer and respiratory problems, now afflicting Alderson and others.

"DOD opposes this legislation. The scientific evidence does not support" it, Michael L. Dominguez, a principal deputy undersecretary of defense, said in written testimony to the panel.

The Pentagon did not send Dominguez or anyone else to testify in person. That aggravated Hall, who said the Defense Department backed out just last week after initially agreeing to attend.

"The nexus between DOD and V.A. is undeniable," Hall said as the hearing began. "Congress deserves the right to question the appropriate DOD personnel in person, not just in writing."

DOD spokeswoman Cynthia Smith defended the agency's no-show and said officials would respond to questions raised at the hearing.

"All V.A. issues are extremely important to the DOD," Smith said. "We decided the most effective and efficient way to handle this issue was to submit written testimony."

The V.A. witness echoed what DOD had to say. Bradley Mayes, the Veterans Affairs director of compensation and pensions, called legislation unnecessary because the agency was not "aware of evidence linking any disease to participation in project SHAD."

The bill under consideration is patterned after legislation passed in 1991 to help people exposed to Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant use used by U.S. forces in Vietnam that was linked to cancer and other ailments. Written by Reps. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., and Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., it would guarantee coverage and benefits to veterans of Projects 112 and SHAD without requiring them to prove a connection to their military service.

Thompson said it took DOD decades to admit the secret tests actually happened and he put no stock in their refusal to recognize health problems the tests may have caused.

A similar bill is scheduled for a vote in the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee later this month.

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.


County Veterans Assistance Fund can help local vets in emergencies

Published: June 11, 2008 10:00:00 AM
Updated: June 11, 2008 10:44:17 AM

The San Juan County Veterans Advisory Board announces the availability of the county Veterans Assistance Fund.

With an estimated 2,500 veterans in San Juan County, the County Council determined a need for an organized program to assist veterans and their dependents in time of need.

“Our (fund) has approximately $40,000 available each year to help our veterans when they’re experiencing difficulties,” Board Chairman Alan Lichter said.

“The Assistance Fund is ... intended to help with emergencies, such as rent, groceries, burial expense, car repair, transportation, and medically-related issues not covered by the VA.”

Applications for assistance are available at all San Juan County senior centers, American Legion posts, County Council offices and libraries.
Find this article at:
http://www.pnwlocalnews.com/sanjuans/jsj/opinion/19706894.html


http://www.kten.com/Global/story.asp?S=8452193

Norman Veterans Center probe planned
Associated Press - June 9, 2008 2:05 PM ET

NORMAN, Okla. (AP) - The state will investigate claims of inadequate care at the Norman Veterans Center. Veterans at the center say there's been a lack of care in several instances because of understaffing and improper health procedures. They also say they've been intimidated to keep them from filing grievances or complaints. The Norman Transcript reports that Oklahoma Secretary of Veterans Affairs Norman Lamb has told them an independent investigator from the state's Merit Protection Commission will examine their complaints. Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs Executive Director Phillip Driskill says the investigator will talk to former employees who've left the center within the last six months.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


The Hill Times, June 9th, 2008
LETTERS
When will public and media support Canada's disabled veterans? The recent decision by Federal Court Justice, Robert Barnes, to certify "Manuge vs. Her Majesty the Queen," in Halifax should be another red flag to Canadian citizens who claim to support the troops. What happens to that support when our uniforms come off and we try to reintegrate into civilian society? Where is your overt support towards those who need you here in Canada?
 
This class action on behalf of 4,286 disabled veterans is a last resort to end the SISIP-Manulife "clawback" of our Veterans Affairs disability pensions. The government, media, and citizens of Canada have left us on our own to fight this, our toughest battle, on our own soil. It is shameful that any veteran has to endure the "real process" of becoming injured, mentally, physically, and emotionally, and then being released from the military. Next we have to endure the absolute worst that Canada has to offer; bureaucracy, inefficiency, and no compassion from the three organizations that are supposedly there to assist, support, and help; DND, Veterans Affairs Canada, and SISIP-Manulife.
 
What is worse than the treatment from these God Like institutions, is that we see the cameo and yellow, "support the troops" signs, yet we walk alone with-out the power of public opinion and support that could have ended this issue many years ago. The print, television, and internet media are as much to blame.

Mr. Harper, Mr. MacKay, and Mr. Thompson, see you in court.
Dennis Manuge
Representative Plaintiff
Dartmouth, N.S.
http://www.thehilltimes.ca/html/
cover_index.php?display=story&full_path=/2008/
june/9/letter7/&c=1


Vet vows to continue pension battle

By RENATO GANDIA, SUN MEDIA
A 90-year-old Second World War veteran who says he's been "screwed by the government" is still battling with Veterans Affairs to backdate his disability pension. Former tank commander Stuart Lindop, an Edmonton resident, set his sights four years ago on a retroactive pension payment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but Veterans Affairs will only backdate it for four months. "I'm still battling it," said Lindop. Lindop served in France, Belgium and the Netherlands as a lieutenant before being shot through the right forearm. He had no idea when he was discharged from the army in June 1945 as unfit for service that he had PTSD, or psychoneurosis hysteria as it's called on his medical records. Lindop said he only became aware of PTSD in the fall of 2001 and sent away for his medical records. 
In May 2004, Veterans Affairs rejected Lindop's claim that the PTSD pension should be backdated three years. Instead it backdated the payments to February 2003, when he first applied for PTSD disability.  "How could I apply for something I didn't know I had?" he asked. "I didn't know because they didn't tell me back in 1945." 
Veterans Affairs couldn't be reached for comment yesterday but spokesman Janice Summerby told Sun Media in 2004 that the department's hands were tied.  Lindop said he's also appalled with the growing number of Canadian soldiers who served in Afghanistan who are fighting for a disability pension.  "Today's veterans are confronted with the same obstacles and blockage by Veterans Affairs to get their pensions right."  Edmonton's Sgt. Rob Brentnall said there are so many "hoops and loops" in the process that many sick and injured soldiers give up trying for compensation.  He said the payments aren't enough for a lifetime  of disability.  Brentnall suffered a neck injury in a 1992 parachuting exercise that led to chronic pain and depression.  Brentnall had a stroke two years ago and while he received a military pension based on 22 years of service, he worries for the younger injured troops.  "If you can jerk people around long enough, 90% of them will ... go away,"Brentnall said.  Lindop said he will keep fighting and he hopes the public becomes aware of how injured soldiers are being "screwed by the government."
 

Published: June 09, 2008
NaVOBA and VA to Honor Corporations for Commitment to Veteran-Owned Suppliers at VOBA Summit on Thursday

Enterprise (CVE, www.vetbiz.gov) will honor big companies doing the most for suppliers of "military" descent during the second annual Veteran-Owned Business Accountability Summit (VOBA Summit) to be held at the Renaissance Washington, DC hotel on Thursday, June 12.

The VOBA Summit, sponsored by DynCorp International, represents a rarely seen public / private effort put on by two of the chief advocate organizations for veterans in business. "The teaming of NaVOBA and the VA's CVE to put on this event represents a unifying step for the veteran business movement. CVE has long been the chief advocate for veteran business owners within the federal government and NaVOBA has done the most to propel the veteran business movement into corporate America," said Scott Denniston, director of the CVE.

CVE's corporate honorees at the VOBA Summit on Thursday include Booz Allen Hamilton, EDS, SAIC, SI International and Washington Group International. Big government contractors such as SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton made NaVOBA's list of honorees too, which is published in the June 2008 issue of Vetrepreneur magazine.

But it's encouraging to see the specific addition of veterans to supplier diversity policies within companies that don't do a predominance of business with the federal government, for they do so voluntarily and purely for sound business reasons. The emphasis on voluntary participation is important as it represents an acceleration of the veteran business movement nationally. "In such a patriotic era during a time of war, it's natural to use veteran-owned suppliers because it's the 'right thing to do.' But that's not a sustainable reason. The companies on our list have realized that buying from veteran-owned businesses gives them a competitive advantage; that it just makes good business sense," said Chris Hale, president of NaVOBA. Lisa Johnson, procurement group manager at UPS agrees. "We value military experience in our employees, our UPS Store franchisees and our suppliers. Veterans have been taught to deliver on time and under budget -- qualities that are essential to UPS." And she's not alone in that belief. "Veterans have been taught diversity, teamwork and commitment while in the service," says Comcast's senior manager of supplier diversity Ajamu Johnson, adding that "Veteran-owned firms give Comcast the flexibility and quick turnaround that many large suppliers cannot." DynCorp International's Douglas Ebner adds more deep-seated corporate belief in the value of using veterans' suppliers. "DynCorp International benefits from the valuable skills, knowledge and experience that veterans and veteran-owned businesses bring to our work." "Veterans are over-represented in small business ownership. This is not coincidental. This over-representation is directly attributed to military training and experience. Leadership, teamwork, confidence and performance under pressure are all skills that military members learn early and often. These traits prepare veterans well for the challenges of small business ownership," said Hale. "And all veterans, egardless of service-disabled status, come armed with these qualifications. This is the 'Buy Veteran' message that we have carried to corporate America, where a $100 billion plus opportunity awaits our nation's 3 million veteran-owned businesses."

NaVOBA's ten honorees include Alcatel-Lucent, Applera, Booz Allen Hamilton, CH2M Hill, Comcast, DynCorp International, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, SAIC, UPS and Xerox. Criteria for making the list included veteran supplier diversity program specifics, assets allocated to veteran outreach and overall results in usage of veteran suppliers.
SOURCE NaVOBA; US Dept of Veterans Affairs
Copyright © 2008, PRNewswire
Copyright © 2008, NewsBlaze, Daily News


http://www.news.com.au/couriermail
/story/0,23739,23836382-3102,00.html

THE Defence Department's denial of using Agent Orange in Innisfail in the 1960s was "a snow job", human rights activist Jean Williams says. Ms Williams, an award-winning author and Agent Orange researcher of Nambour, on the Sunshine Coast, said Defence had admitted using Diquat, Tordon and dimethyl sulfoxide in its tests - chemicals equally as potent as the toxic defoliant Agent Orange.

A Defence spokesman said that the herbicide 2,4-D - a component of Agent Orange - was not tested.
Mrs Williams who wrote Cry In The Wilderness - Guinea Pigs of Vietnam and Children of the Mist - Agent Orange, Future Generations, said it was time to stop "telling lies".

She said Defence Science and Technology Organisation documents she unearthed in the archives of the Australian War Memorial showed that 2,4-D had been recommended for use with other agents for early 1966 trials in Innisfail.

The defoliation experiments were carried out in rainforest in the Gregory Falls area using Diquat and Tordon.
"A study was done on Tordon, funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs, which showed that 2,4-D was a part of Tordon," Mrs Williams said. "Tordon is 2,4-D and picloram  which equals Agent White," she said.

Mrs Williams said the chemicals affected the skin, muscles, blood, respiratory, immune and nervous systems, heart and liver as well as being carcinogenic and interfering with female and male reproduction. Diquat affected the respiratory and nervous system as well as the liver and male reproduction and was also a mutagen. Mixing the chemicals together heightened their toxicity, she said.

"This has been accepted by the Department of Veterans' Affairs and you can't make it any clearer than that, yet they (Defence) are still making a fuss and lying and I'm not going to let them get away with it," Mrs Williams said. She said the Veterans' Support Agency had similar concerns. It had contacted her about Vietnam veterans with serious health problems they believed were due to chemical spraying, including one Army officer (not a veteran) who was involved in the deforestation tests at Cowley Beach, near Innisfail.

"He died from colon and liver cancer and his family are convinced it was from the testing at Innisfail," she said.  Queensland Health rejected claims last month that cancer rates in Innisfail were 10 times the Queensland average after reports that Agent Orange was sprayed close to the town's water supply between 1964 and 1966.

The Defence Department said a trial was conducted to evaluate the performance of herbicides using only "small quantities of commercially available chemicals - Diquat, Tordon and dimethyl sulfoxide" to control the growth of tropical vegetation.


Task force formed to combat problems at Veteran Home
Amanda J. Crawford
 The Arizona Republic
 Jun. 8, 2008 12:00 AM

The state has formed a multi-agency task force to address systemic problems at the Arizona State Veteran Home.

The state-run nursing home came under fire last month for sending home a 67-year-old diabetic man recovering from brain surgery without any home-health services or medications.

The state health department declared that residents in the home were in "immediate jeopardy" - the second time in about 15 months. Other inspections over the last year also found significant problems at the home.

Susan Gerard, director of the Arizona Department of Health Services, said the task force will include representatives from her agency, the Governor's Office, the Department of Economic Security, the Department of Veterans' Services, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the state Medicaid program and the Health Services Advisory Group.

The task force, which will meet regularly for the next several months, will look at training, staffing and other systemic issues to go beyond specific findings from state inspections to get at the root of the problems.


Norman Veterans Center under investigation
By Carol Cole-Frowe   
Transcript Staff Writer

The state is launching an investigation into allegations leveled at the Norman Veterans Center by several veterans and their families.

The veterans allege there has been a lack of care in several instances because of understaffing, improper health procedures and systematic intimidation to keep them from filing grievances or complaints. State Rep. Al Lindley, D-Oklahoma City, said at a meeting at the Capitol with one of the family members and two area legislators Wednesday, Oklahoma Secretary of Veterans Affairs Norman Lamb told them an independent investigator from the state’s Merit Protection Commission will examine their complaints. The VA secretary told them the investigator would be named within the week.

According to minutes of the meeting, Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs Executive Director Phillip Driskill said the investigator will be from outside the system and will include talking to people who left employment at the center within the last six months. The legislators will be given copies of the report. “They are going to go in and look at the whole system,” Lindley said, adding he had heard from enough veterans to know problems are not isolated.

State Rep. Wallace Collins, D-Norman, made arrangements for the meeting with Driskill; Lindley; Susan Simmons, sister of Norman Veterans Center resident Mike Simmons; and James Shearer, former brother-in-law of Mike Simmons. Lamb attended the meeting at the request of Gov. Brad Henry.

“There’s so much smoke that there’s got to be some fire there,” Collins said. Norman Veterans Center administrator Bob Weeks was in attendance, but was asked to leave the meeting to allow the family member to air her grievances. Weeks has been in charge for about three years of the 300-bed Norman Veterans Center, which remains at capacity often with a waiting list.

Susan Simmons, a registered nurse for 33 years, detailed problems to the group, which met for about two-and-a-half hours. She said injuries at the center are way beyond the occasional accident.  Simmons said one incident occurred when her brother Mike, a 60-year-old Vietnam veteran and decorated Marine who suffers from multiple sclerosis, was left to lie in his own feces for 59 minutes. She was on the phone with him much of that time and said she heard his continued polite requests of staff to clean him up. Some of the feces had dried by that time and they scrubbed his skin to get it off, leaving it “as raw as hamburger.” “It looked like someone had taken a cheese grater to him,” she said, when she observed the injury later. “It’s disgusting.”


Health Care For Veterans In Rural Areas Evaluated
Posted: 7:58 PM Jun 7, 2008
Last Updated: 7:58 PM Jun 7, 2008
Reporter: Lynnette Taylor

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Dr. James B. Peake has appointed 13 people to a new Veterans Rural Health Advisory Committee, which will advise him on health care issues affecting veterans in rural areas. “This distinguished panel includes strong advocates for the needs of VA patients in rural areas,” Peake said. “This is an important step in expanding access to VA’s world-class health care system for veterans.” The 13-member group will examine ways to enhance Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care services for veterans in rural areas by evaluating current programs and identifying barriers to health care. The committee, chaired by James F. Ahrens, former head of the Montana Hospital Association, includes affected veterans, rural health experts in academia, state and federal professionals who focus on rural health, state-level veterans affairs officials, and leaders of veterans service organizations.

Veterans tell VA of long waits for their claims to be handled. About 40 veterans came to a town- hall meeting yesterday that was put on by the Winston-Salem regional office of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Many came with questions and concerns about the length of time it has taken to deal with their claims. Some veterans said they have claims filed in the 1970s that the veterans' office hasn't settled. Bob Ketels, the acting director of the regional office, and other officials from Veterans Affairs attended the meeting, which was at American Legion Post 55 on Miller Street. Ketels acknowledged that the office needs to do a better job, and that veterans affairs is continuing to hire more people to handle claims.


Bill on female vets gets VA thumbs-down
LES BLUMENTHAL; lblumenthal@mcclatchydc.com
Published: May 22nd, 2008 01:00 AM
WASHINGTON – The Department of Veterans Affairs said Wednesday that it opposes much of Sen. Patty Murray’s bill to improve care for female veterans, even as the number of women seeking VA medical services is expected to double within the next five years.

A top VA official admitted during a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing that the agency might not be prepared for the anticipated influx of female veterans.

“We recognize there may well be gaps in services for women veterans, especially given the VA designed its clinics and services based on data when women comprised a much smaller percentage of those serving in the armed forces,” said Gerald Cross, the VA’s principal deputy undersecretary for health.

But Cross said the VA opposes many sections of the bill sponsored by Murray, a Washington state Democrat.

The agency’s concerns cover new studies of the physical and mental health problems female veterans faced and how the department was dealing with them. Cross said that would overlap with existing studies under way and would cost millions of dollars that could better be spent on health care services.

The VA also opposed sections that would require mental health workers to get special training on how to care for female victims of military sexual trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, to require additional staff to deal with female veterans and to provide child care for veterans seeking VA care. The agency’s concerns about those proposals involved cost, necessity and a preference to let each region or hospital decide how to allocate its staffing.

The VA does support a provision requiring each VA medical center to have at least one full-time employee acting as a female veterans program manager and would require the department’s Advisory Committee on Women Veterans to include women who recently left the military.

“We are addressing the gaps with a number of initiatives,” Cross said. “We are absolutely committed to making (female veterans) welcome.”

“Making them welcome and addressing their needs are two different things,” Murray responded. “It’s important we focus laserlike on this.”

Women make up 14 percent of active-duty, National Guard and Reserve forces. About 180,000 have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In addition, there are about 1.7 million female veterans, and the VA is providing health care to about 253,000. That number is expected to double within five years.

Murray said female veterans have long been reluctant to voice their concerns.

“The voices of women are no longer whispers,” she said. “Today, they are full-throated calls for equal access to care at the VA.”

The committee is scheduled to vote on Murray’s bill June 26.

The senator said after the hearing that she was particularly upset with the VA for saying it didn’t have the money to implement major provisions in her bill.

“That irritates me,” she said. “I almost come out of my chair when I hear that. If they need more money, then they should ask for it.”

“At least they didn’t say no, no, no,” she said. “I’ve been around long enough to know the VA doesn’t want anyone telling them what to do. But I know if you don’t tell them, they do what they want.”

“I give them some credit. They recognize the barriers to women’s care,” she added. “I am saying they need to do something about it.”

Les Blumenthal: 202-383-0008

blogs.thenewstribune.com/politics

Problems at the V.A. hospital in Marion, Illinois are once again in focus on Capitol Hill.

This morning Illinois Senator Dick Durbin addressed the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee to discuss pending legislation that will oversee hiring practices at the V.A. and attempt to improve veteran care.

The legislation would require all V.A. doctors be licensed in the states where they're performing care. It would also provide hospital employees with a way to report problems without fear of retaliation. Durbin says employees knew a doctor at the Marion hospital was linked to bad surgeries but feared losing their jobs.

“I had a young man on my staff who started talking to the surgical nurses. They said they saw it coming. The doctor was doing surgeries beyond his expertise. He was doing surgeries never performed at the hospital. They knew but were afraid to speak out,” Durbin said.

Meanwhile, Durbin applauds the Marion V.A. for resuming low-risk outpatient surgeries a little over a week ago but says it still needs to be closely watched.
Copyright 2008 WPSD-TV, LLC. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcasted, rewritten, or redistributed.


Groups to expand free mental health services to veterans

By Maureen Groppe, Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON — A significant number of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with mental health problems could benefit from an expanding program offering them free counseling.
The Lilly Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co., announced Monday it is contributing $1 million to Give an Hour and the American Psychiatric Foundation to help connect mental health professionals with veterans and their families.
Psychiatrists, psychologists and other counselors volunteer a minimum of an hour a week for a year to help bridge the gap in mental health services provided to veterans.
"Recent studies indicate that our military community is facing an emerging mental health crisis," said Barbara Romberg, a psychologist who founded Give an Hour in 2005.
A study by the RAND Corporation estimates about 300,000 soldiers who had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression and 320,000 reported experiencing probable traumatic brain injury during deployment.
The study also found that only 53% of service members with PTSD or depression had seen a physician or mental health care provider in the past year.
Give an Hour and the American Psychiatric Foundation will be using the $1 million for recruitment and training, to raise public awareness of the program and to increase outreach to the military community, according to Romberg and Eli Lilly.
Counselors wanting to volunteer their services or veterans seeking help can go to giveanhour.org.


05.19.08

Secretary of Veterans Affairs tours El Paso's VA care facility

Posted: May 20, 2008 01:15 AM 
Updated: May 20, 2008 01:19 AM 

By ABC-7 Anchor/Reporter Rick Cabrera

EL PASO, Texas - The Secretary of Veterans Affairs got a firsthand look at El Paso's VA outpatient care facility on Monday. The tour came on the heels of a VA report last month ranking El Paso's facility among the worst in the nation.
The Secretary toured the facility at the urging of Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Afterwards, Hutchison made it clear she believes the necessary improvements will be made.
"They are certainly going to hire more doctors and nurse practitioners but also the clerical personnel that can help with data transfer," she said.
Hutchison, a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee, hopes those improvements will increase patient satisfaction and result in better clinical care. Two areas where El Paso's VA Health Care System scored poorly.
 "I don't want to leave you with the idea that we are giving really poor care in any shape or form to our veterans.  What we want to do is improve access and improve their satisfaction", said Secretary James Peake.
 Congressman Silvestre Reyes, who also took the tour, believes the VA must fix the problems before troops fighting the war on terror return home.
"I think that is the number one priority.  Take care of the veterans that we have, maintain the service at that level and then make sure we have the resources to take care of the veterans that we have coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan", said Reyes.
Based on literature provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs, El Paso's VA Health Care System provides services to over 24,000 veterans and had a budget of $73,600,000 in 2006.
Yet El Paso still scored low, so, the funding must be there if the fixes are to take place.
 "I think that the funding is going to be there and I think that can be expected.  People can budget for it", said Hutchison.
"Our satisfaction scores have jumped in the last 6 months", said Peake.  "So, we're already seeing the fruits of it.  We also appreciate that we have a ways to go".
There is also talk of building a VA hospital in El Paso. Right now veterans who need that level of care must go to Albuquerque. Congressman Reyes, County Commissioner Veronica Escobar, the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce, and the administration at Texas Tech's 4-year medical school have all voiced their support. However, Senator Hutchison says she's not sure if a hospital, or expanding clinical service, is the best option.


http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=10483

Webb: Bush would be first to veto veterans' benefits
05/18/2008 @ 9:01 pm
Filed by Nick Langewis and David Edwards

Some politicians have no qualms about using other people's military service for their own benefit, but appear to be reluctant to extend a benefit with historical precedent to those who have served, said Senator Jim Webb during an interview with NBC's Tim Russert this morning.
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"The Republican Party...continually seeks to politicize military service for its own ends even as it uses their sacrifices as a political shield against criticism for its failed policies," Webb wrote in his book, A Time to Fight. "And in that sense, it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service."

The Senator opined that Republicans have benefited from a climate of anti-war and perhaps anti-military sentiment stemming from the Vietnam era, resulting in well-meaning but misguided activism among Democratic-leaning people, and Republicans have won the image of being more positive towards the military and military service by default.

Webb's pending GI bill would offer tuition and living stipends to veterans similar to the benefits enjoyed by those returning from Japan and Germany in the 1940s.

"I introduced this GI bill my first day in office," Webb said. "The idea was to give the people who'd been serving since 9/11 the same educational benefits--the same right to a first class future--as those who served in World War II."

"No president in history has vetoed as benefits bill for those who've served," he continued. "[President Bush is] fine with sending these people over and over again where they're spending more time in Iraq than they are at home.

"He's fine with the notion of 'stop-loss,' where we can...make people stay in even after enlistments are done. And then we say, 'Give them the same benefit that the people in World War II have,' and they say it's too expensive. So I think the Republican Party is...on the block here to clearly demonstrate that they value military service, or suffer the consequences of losing the support of people who've served."


VA e-mail: Save money, do not diagnose PTSD

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Friday May 16, 2008 10:24:47 EDT

Two veterans advocacy groups have asked for copies of all documents relating to the Veterans Affairs Department’s post-traumatic stress disorder policies after an e-mail surfaced asking VA doctors to keep costs down by giving diagnoses of adjustment disorder instead.

Veterans diagnosed with PTSD are eligible for health benefits and, in some cases, disability retirement pay. Adjustment disorder, on the other hand, is considered a short-term diagnosis, and does not qualify veterans for benefits, said Brandon Friedman, vice chair of VoteVets.org, one of the advocacy groups.

“They can say, ‘Ah, you’ve got something temporary, it’ll go away, so we don’t need to pay you for the rest of your life,’ ” Friedman said.

He said several veterans have told him they were diagnosed with adjustment disorder rather than PTSD, and that they felt they had received the wrong diagnosis.

“We hear anecdotal evidence all the time that VA is trying to cut costs by not diagnosing PTSD,” said Friedman, a former infantry officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “But we’ve never actually seen proof that it was being done in an organized way.”

The e-mail, which Friedman said came from a VA hospital’s PTSD program coordinator, was apparently sent to several VA employees at that hospital. A psychologist from the hospital in turn sent it to VoteVets.org, Friedman said.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation-seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” the e-mail states. “Consider a diagnosis of adjustment disorder, r/o [rule out] PTSD. Additionally, we really don’t ... have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD.”

The e-mail also states veterans are appealing their compensation and pension ratings based on diagnosis from his staff.

VA Secretary James Peake acknowledged in a statement that the e-mail did come from a VA facility, but said it’s not official policy.

“A single staff member, out of VA’s 230,000 employees, in a single medical facility sent a single e-mail with suggestions that are inappropriate and have been repudiated at the highest level of our health-care organization,” he said. “The employee has been counseled and is extremely apologetic.”

VoteVets.org and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a Freedom of Information Act request May 14 asking VA for all documents relating to PTSD, said Naomi Seligman Steiner, spokeswoman for the latter group.

“We’re not head-hunting,” Friedman said. “There are a lot of great people who work at VA who have helped me and my friends. We had to file the FOIA to get to the bottom of this. Is it from the head of the VA? The presidential administration? Or individual hospitals? I would like to know where this directive is coming from.”

Peake said his staff “works hard” to make sure mental health issues are accurately diagnosed.

“VA’s leadership will strongly remind all medical staff that trust, accuracy and transparency is paramount to maintaining our relationships with our veteran patients,” he said. “We are committed to absolute accuracy in a diagnosis and unwavering in providing any and all earned benefits. PTSD and the mental health arena is no exception.”

http://www.militarytimes.com/news/2008/05
/military_va_adjustmentdisorder_051508w/


Bedford - After a nine-year battle, the Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial VA Medical Center will remain open and its programs unchanged, according to a ruling by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“This news is so gratifying, not only because of the relief it provides to so many veterans and their families, but also as confirmation of our community's continuing friendship with our neighbor for the past 80 years,” said Bedford Selectman Mike Rosenberg. “I'm delighted that ‘Bedford VA’ will continue to be synonymous with quality care and cutting-edge research.”

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., and members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation issued the following statements in response to the decision to preserve the VA medical facilities in Bedford, Brockton, Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury. Such a decision signals the end of the multi-year Capital Asset Realignment for Enhanced Services (CARES) process.

“Our nation's veterans deserve the best possible care. The VA made the right decision to keep the hospitals in Bedford, Brockton, West Roxbury and Jamaica Plain open. It’s a victory for all the veterans in our region who have sacrificed so much for our country. A big cloud has been removed, as the VA will continue to provide essential services at all four of these facilities,” said Sen. Kennedy.

There was an extensive two-year examination of the department's Boston operations two years ago. The local review was part of a nationwide initiative to analyze VA infrastructure in response to a 1999 Congressional report showing that many VA facilities were being under-utilized. In 2004, the commission on Capital Asset Realignment to Enhance Services, or CARES, identified 18 sites across the country for further review, including the greater Boston area. Monday’s VA ruling ends any further studies on consolidation.

“The announcement is a victory for everyone who cares about the quality of veterans' services in the greater Boston area. The veterans' communities of Brockton, Bedford, Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury will be better served because of the VA's decision not to transfer or consolidate health care services and to maximize the space on these four campuses. I will continue working with Secretary Peake to ensure that the VA is equipped and empowered to meet the health care needs of veterans in Massachusetts,” said Sen. John Kerry.

"This announcement is outstanding news for veterans in Massachusetts who rely on the Bedford VA for their medical services.  Our veterans and their families deserve convenient access to the best possible medical care and I applaud Congressman Tierney and all of the members of the delegation who have worked to ensure the continued availability of these services at the Bedford VA,” said Rep. Niki Tsongas, D-Mass.



Vets' growing suicide rate worries officials

John Koopman, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, May 12, 2008


(05-11) 19:26 PDT  -- Tim Chapman hit bottom on a trip to Reno.

He had been a soldier and served in the Middle East. But after his discharge for mental health problems, he returned to his home in Manteca and started a rapid descent. He joined a gang, sold and used drugs. His wife left him.

He wanted to commit suicide. And almost did.

The number of veterans who commit suicide is growing, and it is causing major concern among veterans groups and lawmakers. A recent report by CBS News, now supported by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, indicates that an average of 18 veterans commit suicide every day nationwide.

[See PDF tables for veteran and non-veteran suicides for 2005 and 2006.]

In California in 2006, 666 veterans committed suicide - 21 percent of the 3,198 suicides that year, according to the California Department of Public Health. Yet that year, the 2.1 million veterans in the state represented only 6 percent of the state's 37.1 million residents.

The suicide figures among veterans have caught congressional attention. Two senators have demanded the resignation of Ira Katz, the VA official who wrote "Shh" at the top of the e-mail dealing with suicide attempts and disputed the statistics in public testimony while confirming them in internal documents. A House committee has scheduled a hearing on veterans' suicides this week.
Suicide hot line

Kerri Childress, a VA spokeswoman, said the department has more than 17,000 mental health workers and is hiring 3,700 more, making the VA the largest mental health provider in the nation. The VA has also created a veteran suicide hot line, which is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the agency has suicide prevention coordinators at each of its medical centers.

The VA has not disclosed what proportion of suicidal veterans served in Iraq and Afghanistan. But testimony in a lawsuit - brought by veterans groups seeking an order to force the VA to promptly screen and treat those at risk of suicide and set timetables for handling claims for medical benefits - indicated there was evidence that returning troops are taking their own lives in greater numbers. Witnesses and plaintiffs said there has been a steady increase in the veterans' suicide rate since 2001, and a comparatively high rate among veterans ages 20 to 24. The suit was heard by federal District Court Judge Samuel Conti, who has yet to make a ruling.

During the trial, witnesses testified the suicide rate for those veterans was anywhere from two to 7.5 times the rate among the general population.

The causes for this increase in veterans' suicide rates aren't well understood, but mental-health professionals say the biggest problem is post-traumatic stress disorder. The ailment, better-known as PTSD, is thought to afflict up to 30 percent of the troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Stress and trauma

Dr. Frank Schoenfeld, assistant chief of mental health at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, said suicidal impulses and PTSD are two distinct afflictions, but that the stress and trauma of war, or serving during war-time, can exacerbate suicidal impulses.

"We've seen this throughout military history, whether Vietnam or the first Gulf War and earlier," he said. "There are increased mental-health problems and a corresponding increase in suicide rates. That this is happening with veterans returning from Iraq is not surprising."

Schoenfeld said the issue might affect younger veterans more, because they are less likely to seek treatment and they don't have strong family ties, as do older veterans. They might be more likely to seek solace in alcohol or drugs, which only make matters worse.

Dr. Mel Blaustein, an expert on suicide and a former army therapist, said some veterans can feel isolated and helpless. If those feelings spiral out of control, the individual feels intense emotional pain, and might believe the only way to relieve it is to commit suicide.

For troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the conditions are ripe for mental health problems.

All service in the war zones is not the same. Many live comfortably on bases with all sorts of amenities, including base exchanges as big as department stores and access to Burger King. Others live in tents or old buildings with no running water, and get ambushed or shot by snipers while on patrol in dirty, filthy neighborhoods.
Something in common

But they all share one thing: the ever-present possibility of instant death. Anyone in a convoy on a roadway might be blown up by a roadside bomb, what the military calls "IEDs" or improvised explosive devices. Even on the most secure base, insurgents lob mortars and rockets, and people die in their sleep, or walking to the post office.

Romeo Horvath returned from Iraq with a bad case of PTSD, and while he is not suicidal, he said, that's not uncommon even in Iraq.

A military police officer, Horvath was on watch in a guard tower one night and heard a gunshot from within the compound. Over the radio, someone announced that a Marine had just shot himself.

"A lot of people get this feeling of helplessness," he said. "Some guy has a girlfriend, and she's cheating on him. Can't call home, can't go try to work things out. You just sit there and think about it over and over again. You can go crazy."

Janie Patterson, the suicide prevention coordinator for the VA Medical Center in Palo Alto, said much of her job involves training VA personnel how to identify and offer help to veterans who might be thinking of killing themselves. The trick, she said, is finding those veterans and convincing them that it's all right to have those problems and it's all right to seek help.

"Everyone thinks a mental problem means you're nuts," she said, "instead of, you just need help. It's like drinking or gambling or any disability. There are avenues to help you function."
Trouble at home

Chapman, who is 24, started suffering from depression after he was sent to the Middle East. He was having trouble at home, and his grandfather was dying. He said he just needed to go home to straighten things out, then he would have returned to his unit.

But the depression hit hard, and the army discharged him for mental-health reasons. Disillusioned, he somehow figured a trip to Reno would help. Chapman found himself facing the edge of a steep cliff, revving the engine and contemplating whether to kill himself.

"I was sitting there, crying so hard, I felt like my eyeballs were melting," Chapman said.

As he sat and pondered the end of his life, Chapman said, a ball of light appeared to him and slowly settled over his head. It might have been the drugs he'd been taking, he realizes. Or it might have been God speaking to him. In either case, he woke from his stupor and looked up. Just ahead was a blue highway sign that said, "Hospital."

Chapman lived through his ordeal. He is now in recovery at San Francisco's Swords to Ploughshares and living in an apartment on Treasure Island.

Chapman likes the place a lot. He smiles, and he's put on some weight. He lives with other veterans, and the people who run the place were in the military, too. They understand, he said.

"It's a little easier to talk to these guys," he said. "I can work on my issues."
Suicide hot line

To reach the veteran suicide hot line, call (800) 273-8255 and press 1. The line is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

E-mail John Koopman at jkoopman@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f
=/c/a/2008/05/12/MNE810FAIK.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
© 2008 Hearst Communications Inc.


Duckworth update on the La Salle Veterans Home
05/12/2008, 10:08 am
Comment on this story

L. Tammy Duckworth, Director, Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs, Special to The Times

I am extremely enthusiastic about the upcoming opening of the expansion to the La Salle Veterans Home.

We recognized the need for additional beds given for the Vietnam veteran population and are meeting that need. I believe the La Salle community shares my excitement and therefore, I wanted to give an update on the expansion.

Construction of the expansion is complete. Although the work took about eight weeks longer than anticipated, it is finished and we have started the next phase of this project, which includes furnishing and installing the proper equipment, which is well under way.

Once all of the furnishings are in and the equipment is installed, our focus is to complete our inspections. The process for opening this expansion follows a thorough inspection process at both the state and federal levels. Our initial inspection by the Illinois Department of Public Health has been completed. We await the arrival of the rest of the equipment, which has been purchased, and then the Department of Public Health will return for a licensing inspection.

Additionally, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs also must inspect the expansion and provide approval documentation before the expansion is legally authorized to place residents in the facility.

After the expansion has been licensed to operate, the department will hire the additional staff to operate the facility. In the meantime, the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs is recruiting for the upcoming positions and will continue to recruit throughout the next few months.

Although the funding for the initial staffing of the expansion was originally in the fiscal year 2008 state budget, the general contractor said the completion date for the construction of the expansion would be pushed back about eight weeks. Therefore, the facility would not be operational until after the end of the fiscal 2008 budget. The funding in the proposed fiscal 2009 budget will allow the agency to staff the beds for which the need is greatest -- dementia or Alzheimer's patients.

Staffing levels at the home have been the subject of a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation concerning what is required at the state and federal levels to operate a veterans long-term care facility and how many employees are needed to meet those requirements.

In short, there is a federal formula for calculating resident to staff ratios to meet the requirements. Unfortunately, that formula does not take into account such regular occurrences such as employee turnover, illness, vacation, short-term call offs or leaves of absence. Combined, these occurrences present an appearance of understaffing.

The department regularly and actively recruits to fill empty positions. We cannot hire additional staff to fill positions where the employee is ill or has taken a leave of absence under their collective bargaining agreement.

Finally, the waiting list at the La Salle home has steadily grown over the past few years. Recently, 20 beds that had been closed down during the construction of the expansion are now filled. In filling those beds, we discovered there were many people on the list who were not prepared to enter the facility. In fact, staff at the home had to contact 150 applicants to identify 20 who wished to enter the home.

Additionally, many applicants were not in need of skilled nursing care, but for unknown reasons had been accepted as qualified applicants.

As a result, we took the following steps:
# The department has initiated a new waiting list policy that takes into account an applicant's desire to stay at their own residence while medically possible to provide a smoother and hopefully shorter wait for those veterans who are ready to enter the home when a bed is available.
# The waiting lists at all our homes are reviewed to ensure only those who need skilled nursing care are accepted onto waiting lists. I believe this will make the process for admission more effective and allow us to fill the beds with veterans who want and need admittance right away.

Our military heroes should be treated with respect and given the very opportunities they fought for when serving this country. I want to assure you all I will continue to do everything I can to make sure all veterans are being properly cared for at the Illinois veterans homes.


LAS CRUCES, New Mexico

It took an act of congress to get the new veterans center in Las Cruces up an running.
It opened it's doors in late December and has already begun to help improve the lives of many military veterans suffering from mental illnesses.

The center is staffed by 4 staff members including the team leader, Guy McCommon. who said the center is for all veterans who previously were under served in the region.

The veterans center is the only one in southern new Mexico that is a division of the department of veterans affair. Prior to it opening all vets seeking treatment had to go to northern New Mexico or El Paso. Now that the center is all set up, the staff is encouraging any military veteran who is in need of counseling for a wide range of issues, including post traumatic stress disorder and marriage advice, to come on in. They have an open door policy and the services are free to both the veteran, and their family members.

The center is located in downtown Las Cruces at 230 south Waters Street.

http://www.kvia.com/Global/story.asp?S=8303096&nav=menu193_2


CBS News, NY -May 2, 2008
CBS News producer Pia Malbran wrote this for CBSNews.com.
In closing arguments in a federal lawsuit against the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), plaintiff lawyers accusing the agency of failing to effectively take care of our nation"s military veterans said, 1,457 veterans died while their appeals were pending in the last six months alone.

More of these veterans are dying in the United States than out in combat, attorney Arturo Gonzalez said.

Two veterans rights groups - Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth - sued the VA hoping a federal judge could order the government agency to overhaul and improve its system. The trial took place in San Francisco with seven days of court testimony. Closing remarks were held Wednesday.

Plaintiff lawyers claimed the agency has dropped the ball in a number of ways and as a result has not provided proper access to health care and benefits to veterans. For example, they said the VA has yet to fully implement the Mental Health Strategic Plan that was introduced back in 2004. Gonzalez said, there is no plan for dealing with all of these veterans who are returning and who are in need of help. The argument was also made that veterans are waiting too long to get medical appointments and the benefits they deserve.

Daniel Bensing, the Department of Justice lawyer representing the VA, told the judge that the VA has a very well-regarded system for providing health care. He insisted that 80 percent of the Mental Health Strategic Plan recommendations have been adopted and he said, 98 percent of Iraq/Afghanistan veterans are seen within 30 days.

The issue of suicide also played a big part in the trial. Damaging internal e-mails made public early on, as reported by CBS News, showed top officials at the VA discussing how to withhold critical information about the risk of suicide among veterans from the public. Gonzalez and his team said the emails show how the  top brass are not dealing with the true scope of mental health issues facing veterans.

Bensing did not talk specifically about the e-mails in his closing statement but said we don't dispute that suicide is a major, serious problem among veterans. He said the issue of suicide is already a major priority for the VA and claimed the evidence presented by other attorneys on the issue of suicide was unnecessary. Furthermore, he said the mental health budget has increased from $3.2 billion to $3.5 billion annually and 3,700 new mental health professionals have recently been hired by the VA.

U.S. District Court judge Samuel Conti now has to make a decision in the case and will do so after receiving post-trial summaries from both sides which is scheduled to happen May 9 and May 19.
Copyright legal By Pia Malbran
© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.


Senators Call For VA Official To Quit
NEW YORK, April 22, 2008(CBS) CBS News producer Pia Malbran wrote this story for CBSNews.com.

In the wake of a CBS News report that revealed the Department of Veterans Affairs deliberately withheld critical information about the true suicide risk among veterans, Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, today both called for the resignation of Dr. Ira Katz, the VA's top official for mental health.

Murray, a senior member of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, says "Dr. Katz's irresponsible actions have been a disservice to our veterans and it is time for him to go. She continues, The number one priority of the VA should be caring for our veterans, not covering up the truth.

Akaka, the Chairman of the Committee, sent a letter to the VA's Under Secretary for Health, Michael Kussman, expressing similar concerns about Dr. Katz.

For months, CBS News has been trying to obtain veteran suicide and attempted suicide data from the VA. Earlier this year, the agency provided CBS News with data that showed there were a total of 790 suicide attempts in all of 2007 by veterans who were under the VA's care.

On February 13, however, Katz sent an e-mail indicating the total number of attempts was much higher. The e-mail was addressed to his top media advisor Everett Chasen and entitled, Not for the CBS News Interview Request.

Katz wrote: Shh! Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilitates. He then asked is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it??

In another e-mail message, Katz told the VA?s Under Secretary for Health, Michael Kussman, that there are about 18 suicides per day among America's 25 million veterans. This is a figure that the VA has never made public.

Yesterday, Katz told CBS News that the reason the numbers mentioned in his e-mails had not been made public was because the results were available for only one or two months, and there were and still are questions about how consistent or reliable the findings would be.

In other development today, Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., introduced legislation this afternoon requiring the VA to track veteran suicides. Harkin told CBS News that the e-mail controversy is what sparked the legislation. He said anyone at the VA who is involved in this cover up should be removed immediately.






VA urges dismissal of health care lawsuit
By PAUL ELIAS Associated Press Writer
Article Launched: 04/21/2008 01:42:21 PM PDT

SAN FRANCISCO A government lawyer on Monday urged a judge to dismiss a lawsuit charging the Department of Veterans Affairs with failing to properly treat thousands of veterans for mental illness, saying the VA runs a "world class" medical care system.

In opening statements of the trial, veterans' lawyers painted a diverging portrait of the system, one in which suicides and suicide attempts are rising at alarming rates because of VA incompetence and recalcitrance to address the issue.

Two veterans groups have joined in a class-action lawsuit against a sprawling VA system that handled a record 838,000 claims last year. U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti is hearing the case in a two-week trial, without a jury. Justice Department lawyer Richard Lepley argued Monday that the VA has responded to the unprecedented number of claims, which officials say is being driven by aging Vietnam veterans and other warriors of the Cold War era, by launching a massive new hiring process. Lepley told the judge that the VA has added more than 3,700 new "mental health physicians" to a mental health professional staff of 17,000 that treats increasing cases if post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological problems in the last year. "We are staffing up," Lepley said. "We can't do it overnight."  Government lawyers say the VA has been devoting more resources to mental health and making suicide prevention a top priority. They also argue that the courts don't have the authority to tell the department how it should operate.  Earlier in the morning, veterans lawyer Gordon Erspamer told the judge that the VA isn't doing enough, calling for the judge to order a massive overhaul of how the VA processes claims and perhaps hire a "special master" to preside over the agency. Erspamer cited a RAND Corp. report released last week estimating that 300,000 U.S. troops about 20 percent of those deployed are suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress from serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Erspamer showed the judge two e-mails written last year among high-ranking officials that said an average of 18 military veterans kill themselves each day and five of them are under VA care when they commit suicide. Another e-mail said 1,000 veterans under VA care attempt suicide each month.  And many of the 900,000 troops currently deployed in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan will soon need to be treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, Erspamer said. The plaintiffs' lawyer also complained that it takes too long for the VA to process new claims an average of about 180 days and probably longer for post-traumatic stress. It also takes an average of more than five years for the VA to decide a veteran's appeal of denied coverage, Erspamer said. In the last six months, 526 vets have died while awaiting word of their appeal within the VA, he noted.  "This is a serious problem," Erspamer told the judge.  In addition to overhauling the system, Erspamer said veterans should have access to lawyers and other court tools that they're currently barred from using in the VA appeals process. The government's attorney countered that involving more lawyers in the process will add to the delays rather than reduce wait times. Lepley also argued that it takes the VA longer to process claims than typical private insurance companies because it has to prove a veteran's disability was incurred during service time. Lepley noted the VA will spend $3.8 billion for fiscal year 2008 on mental health and announced a policy in June that requires all medical centers to have mental health staff available all the time to provide urgent care.



I am ALWAYS available to discuss the outrageousness of the VA outpatient clinic on Glendale Ave. in Toledo,Ohio.
Mutantimage
17th Combat Engineer Battalion
2nd Armor Division
Fort Hood,Tx. 1974-75
Delta Company (Sam)

"Desperate men do desperate things.... Desperate times make desperate men..... Republicans make desperate times."


The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.   - Anatole France


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