If anybody deserves government health care, it’s members of the armed services who literally put their lives on the line for their country. But the government’s promise to take care of wounded and sick warriors has too often been an empty one. The Veterans Administration is notorious for red tape that keeps veterans from actually receiving the health benefits they were promised.
Here’s just one example: For many years, the Navy provided sailors with government-subsidized cigarettes, which they could purchase for just five cents a carton. So seven months before Vietnam veteran Robert Krone died from end-stage lung disease on Aug. 20, 1998, the VA admitted that his emphysema “is not questioned as being service connected.”
Eight months before his death — and three weeks before the VA stopped accepting tobacco-related claims — Krone got a call from a VA employee telling him that his tobacco claim had finally been approved and the check would be in the mail within 10 days. His wife, Bessie, who was caring for her terminally ill husband, dashed off a letter thanking former Montgomery Service Center manager Jack Downes and his staff.
Thirteen years later, the check has still not arrived.
When Bessie finally got access to her husband’s claim file in 2005, she found that official documents had been altered — including the date when Robert entered active duty. In another document, VA employees tried to assume guardianship of the dying man to gain control over “disbursement of funds.” Bessie says they even started calling his doctor every day, demanding to know exactly when he was going to die.
An Aug. 22, 1997 letter in the file to Robert Krone, signed by Downes, said: “As we have received information from your physician that you are now a resident of a local nursing home and no longer reside at the address on record, all correspondence will now be sent to you at that facility. … Your monthly benefit check will be sent to the nursing home, we have notified your wife of this development.”
All of these claims were false, Bessie Krone told the Washington Examiner. Her husband was never in a nursing home, she said, and VA officials never informed her that his benefits would be sent there. Curiously, the VA kept sending Krone’s $424 pension benefit check — including another $424 for home care — to the couple’s Montgomery home. A letter from Krone’s physician almost a year later confirmed that “Mr. Krone is definitely home bound with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.”
This April, when Mrs. Krone went for a routine mammogram at Baptist Hospital in Montgomery, the staff told her that the VA had already paid for one. Puzzled, she asked to see her own medical records and was startled to find Earl Hawkins, the Montgomery VA Medical Center’s volunteer coordinator, listed as her “friend.” A Dr. Julian McIntyre was also listed as her primary care physician, even though Krone says he never examined her.
Krone says she faxed a copy of the altered document to medical center “integrity officer” Michael Hubbard, who told her that no Dr. McIntyre was employed at the VA. Three weeks later, she got a letter from Hubbard admitting that McIntyre was a fee-based doctor at the Montgomery VA. But since Hubbard blames the hospital — not the VA — for the mix-up, you can be sure that nobody is investigating the theft of her identity either.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is the Examiner’s local opinion editor.
