Charlotte Observer is running big story on the V.A.

and how they are failing to take care of the thousands of vets in this county. Looks to be a good series. My biggest hope is that the stories over the new few days will all lead to *Bush and perhaps wake up some of the sheeple. Maybe then they will realize he cares nothing for the troops.

Here is the link for those interested:

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/special_packages/veterans/

There is also a back story on how Knight/Ridder sued to get access to this info

:eyes:

so they haven't been able to fire all of their decent reporters.

Good reporting sneaks in every so often.

It took some doing to read that article (registration process not easy!), but was well worth the time. Snips:


But Knight Ridder found that the network of VA-accredited service officers is a patchwork of well-meaning helpers whose training and expertise vary widely. Contrary to its own regulations, the VA does little to ensure that veterans receive competent representation from veterans service organizations. Yet the agency prohibits vets from hiring their own attorneys until after their claims have been denied and they're generally years into the appeals process.

Even when a service officer does a good job, veterans' claims often get bogged down in the VA's 57 regional offices, where veterans' claims are processed.

In an electronic age, these regional offices are a throwback to an ink-and-paper world. In Waco, Texas, the records room is almost the length of a football field, with row after row of file cabinets - 2,700 in all - containing records that date back six decades.

Workers wheel massive brown folders with rubber bands around them around on carts, shifting them from one table to the next as they move through the approval process. In the constant shuffle of paper, things get lost and mistakes get made.

Nationwide, errors are made in 13 percent of claims, more than three times the agency's hoped-for rate of 4 percent, according to a VA quality-control database that reviews a sample of the decisions. That translates to 103,000 errors a year; in many cases they can result in either an overpayment or an underpayment of benefits.

"I don't think anybody is proud of the fact that we have" a 13 percent error rate, said Michael Walcoff, who oversees the agency's regional offices. Errors often trigger appeals, sending thousands of veterans into an ongoing cycle of mistakes, appeals, rehearings, mistakes, appeals, rehearings.

In some regional offices, the error rate last year was far worse - as high as 23 percent in Wilmington, Del. (The low was 3 percent, in Des Moines, Iowa.) And such varied performances affect nearly every aspect of a veteran's experience:

I looked at this article to see if maybe it was the same, but it's not. I wonder how many other papers across the country are doing this?