Following my Aug. 25 column (“Does government-run health care work? Ask vets”), I got a call from Bessie Krone, the widow of a World War II Navy veteran. She faxed me a copy of a shocking letter she said she recently received from the Department of Veterans Affairs’ regional office in Montgomery, Ala.
The profanity-laced screed, date-stamped Sept. 3, 2009, and stapled to Form 4107 (“Your Rights to Appeal Our Decision”), brazenly admits that VA employees deliberately removed medical records from her late husband Robert’s file.
“Mrs. Krone, are you that f***ing stupid?” asked the letter, supposedly signed by triage assistant coach Mark Carter, who acknowledged that the VA owed her late husband eight years of back pay in addition to a special monthly disability allowance he never got: “I still do not know why the previous team did not give that to him in September 1997. It was an oversight (maybe) but not likely. … Your husband’s application that he placed back in 1987 and his doctor’s statement is still safely tucked away until you give up. Then it will be placed back into the file.”
The letter also stated that Carter’s boss, service center manager Amy Hill, repeatedly lied when she promised to approve Krone’s overdue benefits if she dropped her complaint with the VA’s Office of Inspector General: “You have personally spoken to Amy several times now, and both times she b*** slapped you while looking straight into your eyes. She told you that if you would trust her and not ask for a OIG investigation, that she would grant your claim. What a truckload of s** that was.
“As you know an appeal would take years to achieve, only to be denied again,” the letter continued. Hill “wanted you to trust her because [regional office director Ricardo] Randall told her to make you go away and to clean up her s*** Randall and Amy both know what a s*** load of trouble they are in and you Mrs. Krone are once again the toilet paper.”
The letter added that Carter was told to “give the impression that you do not have a claim, no matter what you do or how you may respond.”
When Krone personally asked Hill three times if she was aware of the shocking content of the letter, Hill allegedly said she was. I called Hill myself Friday, but she quickly said, “I can’t comment,” before referring me to the VA’s public information office, which said that the matter was under investigation by the OIG. On Monday, Krone called again to say that her entire $35,000-plus claim had been deleted from the system.
Whom to believe? A woman with crippling arthritis who spent a year demonstrating in front of the Montgomery regional office demanding benefits the VA still owes her and thousands of other military families?
Or a government agency that, the U.S. Court of Appeals noted in a landmark Aug. 12 ruling, illegally altered disabled Vietnam veteran Philip E. Cushman’s medical records to avoid paying his decades-old $100,000 claim?
That’s a no-brainer.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
