Rationed government health care for veterans

Houston Chronicle:

Houston is at the heart of a growing national crisis involving the backlog of claims at the Department of Veterans Affairs that’s approaching a record 1 million, including thousands of returning service members injured in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Nearly 18,000 veterans are waiting for the Houston VA Regional Office to process their applications for disability benefits, according to the most recent data released by the VA. What’s even more troubling for some veteran advocates is the fact that 26 percent of those claims in Houston have been pending for more than half a year, compared to 21 percent nationwide.

Total claims in Houston, including nondisability compensations and pensions, add up to almost 24,000, with 24 percent pending over six months. That percentage, too, is higher than the national average.

Houston also currently has 11,389 claims in appeal, more than anywhere else in the country.

Overwhelmed, the Houston VA Regional Office has outsourced some of its claims processing to VA facilities elsewhere in Texas and other states.

“The situation at VA’s Houston office is among the worst in America — more than 20,000 veterans are waiting for a claim decision from VA, and more than one in four veterans already waited more than six months for an answer from VA,” said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, a national advocacy group. “Our veterans and their families deserve better.”

A Houston VA Regional Office spokeswoman said the number of claims received by the facility have increased by 26 percent since last year, a trend that represents more than twice the national average of 12 percent.

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Tomball native Richard Jimenez is all too familiar with the VA’s waiting game. Every time the 27-year-old Marine veteran gets a VA form letter in the mail, he barely glances at it before tossing it in the trash.

The letters all say the same thing: That the appeal of his disability claim rating for injuries he suffered during two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan is still being processed. He’s been told to expect a two- to five-year wait.

“It perplexes me that people could get welfare in a much smaller time frame,” he said.

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This is government rationed health care at work. If veterans can be treated this way imagine how they will treat those who have not served this country. One of the reasons for the high case load in Houston is that the area has produced more people who volunteered for service in recent years. This kind of patriotism deserves better treatment.