Advice for the VA and for the Persian Gulf War Veteran

Advice for the VA and for the Persian Gulf War Veteran
Friday 30 April 2010
by: James A. Bunker, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

I have been working with veterans all over this country of ours in their fight with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The one thing that stands out is this: The VA has many regional offices throughout the country, and few rate veterans' disability claims in the same way.

It does not matter if it is a claim for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Gulf War Illnesses (GWI), or something else. There seems to be little uniformity or standardization in the methods used to decide these claims from one region to another. This is not right!

When all factors are identical in two different claims, a veteran in one state will be approved for a 50 percent disability and the veteran in a different state is told that the disability is not related to his or her service. Where are the standards?

Did these Rating Specialists (RS) not all get the same training? They all have to follow the same law - CFR 38. The VA has published a book that all of the RS's are supposed to use in adjudicating claims. It is called the M21-1R. Yet despite these clear-cut instructions, we see vast disparities from one VA region to another.

The problem, as I see it, is that RS's are poorly trained and overworked. Their daunting workload quite obviously has prevented many of them from remaining current on new protocols and training letters. They have to get through so many claims in a day and are not given the time for reading training letters or new instructions from headquarters.have been focusing on these types of claims for many years.