Military veterans living in Washington wait twice as long as former service members in the rest of the country for mental health care and disability benefits, according to a review of government records, a delay that advocates say places them at greater risk for developing debilitating conditions down the road.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has been heavily criticized for amassing a backlog of 600,000 cases nationwide. And nowhere is the delay more prevalent than at D.C.’s regional VA office.
Fifty-three percent of the claims filed in D.C. take longer than six months to be acted upon, more than twice the national average. And nearly 29 percent of the claims filed at the Washington regional office are not processed for more than a year, five times the national average.
Advocates say that defies one of the lessons from the Vietnam War — that returning troops need to be cared for immediately, or the toll exacted on those troops can be incalculable.
“They need this care immediately,” said Todd Bowers, of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “It’s like walking into an emergency room and being told to wait.”
Iraq war veteran Adam Kokesh tried to get help at the D.C. Veterans Affairs Medical Center but was turned away three times, he said.
He was told that he couldn’t receive assistance without a VA identification card, but the camera used to take the I.D. picture was broken.
“I just said forget it, they can’t even take care of this little [stuff],” said Kokesh, 25, a former U.S. Marine Corps sergeant.
The VA identification card for his roommate, Geoff Millard, arrived in the mail earlier this week after a nearly two-month wait, but he said he had yet to receive an appointment to see a health official.
Millard, who spent 13 months in Iraq, says he opposes the rule that puts veterans returning from the current war to be bumped ahead of the others.
“Why can’t [the government] find the money to help all the vets?” asked Millard, 26. “They find the money to support the war whenever they want it.”
Jerry Manar, deputy director of national veterans service for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said the backlogs at the Washington regional office are chronic.
“It’s a regional office in a headquarters town,” said Manar, who worked at the D.C. VA Medical Center from 1999 to 2004.
The national headquarters each year skims the D.C. office’s best employees, Manar said.
“Imagine if you lost your star employees every year for 30 or 40 years,” Manar said. “Your work force becomes more average.”
The problem was made worse recently when the national VA board of appeals, which is housed in the same building, took about a third of the people from the regional office.
Officials said they couldn’t recruit people from the other 57 regional offices to D.C. because of the cost of living.
Adding to the woes: the National VA benefits administration instituted a policy that punishes poor-performing regional offices by not filling vacancies and diverting resources to offices that perform well.
At one point, the regional office had only one or two specialists reviewing cases for disability compensation pay and for mental health care for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, Manar said.
“It just becomes a downward spiral,” Manar said.
