One veteran’s battle with the VA
Fox News tells the story of a wounded veteran who lost his leg in an IED attack and now does his battle with the VA;
Iraq War veteran Joel Klobnak is waiting. It’s how he spends his time these days after the Department of Veterans Affairs slashed his disability pay two years ago, the Des Moines Register reports.
Klobnak, 24, a former Marine who lost his leg in Iraq in 2006, says the cut in disability pay is a misunderstanding, but he still feels forgotten.
He’s trying to support a family of four on $1,557 per month while he waits to hear whether the government will reinstate full disability pay for his injury and the mental anguish that accompanied it, according to the paper.
His appeal is trapped in a paperwork backlog that is delaying payments to injured veterans across the country.
The story goes that he his payments were slashed when he missed an appointment with a VA doctor that he wasn’t aware of, then he got a hearing with an administrative law judge who told him she’d make a decision about his benefits in three months…more than a year ago.
But we can all take comfort in the fact that people like Tammy Duckworth still get their checks and take time off from their duties at the VA to use their own VA benefits. Did Duckworth have anything to do with Klobnak’s claim…no, probably not, but she didn’t help either.
Shinseki and his band of leftist nitwits went to head the VA because he is a disabled veteran and was supposed to bring personal perspective to the job…so why is the VA still on it’s bloated ass, doing nothing for veterans except kicking the can down the road while they’re tearing apart real lives and real veterans?
And who are the first to pay for the national debt out of our COLA and medical benefits?
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Veteran Health Care, Veterans Issues, Veterans' Affairs Department
It would take a sea-change in managerial thinking to transition from rule-based decision-making to situation/people-based decision-making.
But that would pare down the VA to about 1/10th of its administrative staff.
Wondering why the DAV NSO isn’t involved. Those folks tend to work miracles.
I know exactly where this guy is coming from regarding missing appointments that a person is unaware they have. It happened to me last year, where I received a nastygram from the VA stating that I had missed a scheduled appointment. I called them up and told them I had not received any correspondence stating that I had the appointment to begin with. They apologized and re-scheduled it, however, some others told me that if they missed appointments, they received letters stating that they would be removed from the system. How f’ed up is that?
That’s why I found his story credible, OT, I’ll bet it’s happened to all of us.
Does anyone know if vets who get TSGLI payments get any kind of financial counseling? I can see how a guy down one leg and fresh out of the hospital could burn through 50 grand pretty quickly, if no one is advising him better ways to use it.
Shinseki and his band of leftist nitwits
The same General Shinseki who was fired by Bush and Rummy for saying that the Iraq War strategy wasn’t good? He sounds like a real nitwit.
Shinseki wasn’t fired. He served his whole term and retired. and he lost his cachet long before the Iraq War…he blew his political wad battling over the Black Beret and then purchasing the first load from China. He was forced to appear and explain why at a House Small Business Committee hearing under the threat of a subpoena. His career was toast years before Iraq.
Damn, and I thought with school being out, we’d be free from the nonsense of some posters.
Keep on keepin’ on, OG, never mind facts or anything.
Jonn in #4: Yep, I watched it just a month ago, when I was waiting in the blood draw room. 2 guys were waiting for appointments that they had paperwork telling them what time to be there and they weren’t being called, so one of them went to the desk only to find out that he wasn’t on the schedule, same with the other guy. That happened to me last year (they told me I had already been there for blood draw the month prior (I’m not that smart, but I would have remembered getting stabbed for blood a month ago) only to find out, when they looked at the dates, they were looking to the prior year).
Jonn’s right – it happens to everyone sooner or later. I got a call from a clinic over a year after the administrative staff had canceled my appointment for be a no show – to an appointment that hadn’t been scheduled yet (that’s what the clinic was calling to schedule, over a year later).
Give me a break lilyea I am not one of your mindless followers.. It’s public knowledge that Shinseki and Rummy feuded over the number of soldiers needed for post war Iraq. Rummy didn’t like someone standing up to him so Shinseki was forced into early retirement. General Abizaid said in 2006 that Shinseki was right. Is he a liberal nitwit also? I guess you like Generals like Tommy Franks and Ray O’Dierno who were just yes men for the neo cons..
Yeah, Obama girl, if you really believe that Shinseki was forced to retire early, you are mindless. Even a cursory search of the internet will tell you differently, but since it is different from what you “know”, you won’t.
Bobogirl; what’s a neo-con? Would that be the opposite of a neo-lefties or neo-commies? As for Shinseki…..I will keep my opinion to myself. As to to your learned opinion of Franks and O’Dierno, well, that would make Wesley Clark and Shinseki yes men for the neo-lefties; right?
Well, unfortunately, not even the brightest, most awesome stud muffin could ever hope to fix even one quarter of what ails the bloated VA system. It has been so broke, for so long, and in sooo many ways, that to even think that shinseki had any remote chance of “fixing” this disaster, well, don’t have much to say about that.
“It’s public knowledge that Shinseki and Rummy feuded over the number of soldiers”, and was forced into retirement, means that BoBogirl read it at DU or Kos, or maybe Bowel MoveOn.
#11 Obamagirl,
It’s “Odierno” not “O’Dierno.” That’s public knowledge.
I agree with Tman that the VA’s endemic issues are bigger than any one man. Shinseki is basically competent, but lacks the authority, the money, and subordinates that both in positions to effect outcomes and dedicated to the goals of the organization (as opposed to the organization itself). No one can succeed without a Congress and vets group and the VA itself that are truly unified in command and purpose.
Shinseki and what VA employees are loyal to veterans have had a number of successes.
I wonder whatever happened to all those flag officers once they’d served their purpose in 2006? Haven’t seen any of them sitting in those uber-plush corporate positions.
I worked in a VA Division HQ for a certain period. The blatant waste, fraud and abuse I witnessed was appalling. I saw stuff every day that would have gotten people fired in the real world – in a .gov office they simply had to mark their time until retirement.
It’s impossible to pick a “worst” incident of the countless things I witnessed.
E-mail me if you’re interested in details — this might be just the place…