Important Amendment Protecting Disability Compensation COLA

Take Action! Please Write to Your Senators Today!   This week the Senate is considering its budget resolution, a bill that would fund the entire federal government, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, for fiscal year 2014. One provision in this bill would have a long-lasting consequence: it would drastically change the way annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) are added to disability compensation and pension payments to veterans, their dependents and survivors. If adopted, this change will reduce government payments for these obligations by billions of dollars over the next ten years. The Chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has asked for help from DAV (Disabled American Veterans) in gaining other Senators' support for his amendment to stop this change from occurring, thereby preserving the current system for calculating COLA additions to payments to veterans and others. Please use the prepared email in this alert, or write your own individualized email to your Senators to urge their support of the Sanders' amendment. Veterans and their survivors earned the compensation and pension payments they receive by virtue of their military service to the nation. The federal deficit was not created by sick and disabled veterans, and they do not deserve to be unfairly penalized. DAV appreciates your use of the Commander's Action Network in helping DAV communicate our priorities to Congress. Your grassroots advocacy is key to our effectiveness in Washington. With your help, DAV CAN! Please send your message to your Senators TODAY!

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Sean Eagan
American Cold War Veterans, Inc.

Web:	http://americancoldwarvets.org/
Blog:	Cold War Veterans Blog
Email:	Sean.Eagan@gmail.com
Phone:	716 720-4000
Network:	My Fast Pitch! Profile

Hearing to Examine How VA Tracks Patient Wait Times

HVAC Hearing to Examine How VA Tracks Patient Wait Times

 

WASHINGTON, D.C.—On Thursday, March 14, 2013, at 1:00 P.M., in Room 334 of the Cannon House Office Building, the Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee will hold a hearing examining the continued struggle of the Department of Veterans Affairs to accurately track patient wait times.

 

Currently, VA is not able to provide an accurate assessment as to the average time between when an appointment is desired, scheduled and when a veteran receives treatment – a problem attributable to VA's tendency to move its performance metrics around and stray from its own internal policies, training and procedures.

 

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and VA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) have been reviewing VA patient wait times since at least 2005 and have found consistent problems with VA's data reliability and policy implementation. While VA has expressed an intent to fix these problems, the department has made very little progress in doing so. This lack of progress has contributed to a backlog of veterans awaiting appointments, some for critical and life-threatening procedures.

 

The following event is open to the press:

 

WHO:             Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations

WHAT:          Hearing: Waiting for Care: Examining Patient Wait Times at VA 

WHEN:          1:00 P.M., Thursday, March. 14, 2013

WHERE:        Room 334, Cannon House Office Building and streaming at veterans.house.gov

 

The witness list is as follows:

 

Panel 1

 

Mr. William Schoenhard

Deputy Under Secretary for Health for Operations and Management

Veterans Health Administration

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

 

Accompanied by:

 

Mr. Thomas Lynch, M.D.

Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for Health Clinical Operations and Management

Veterans Health Administration

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

 

Mr. Philip Matkovsky

Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for Health for Administrative Operations

Veterans Health Administration

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

 

Mr. Michael Davies, M.D.

National Director of Systems Redesign

Veterans Health Administration

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

 

 

Ms. Debra A. Draper

Director, Health Care

Government Accountability Office

 

Mr. Roscoe Butler

National Field Service Representative

Veterans Affairs and Rehabilitation Commission

The American Legion

 

 

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Sean Eagan
American Cold War Veterans, Inc.

Web:	http://americancoldwarvets.org/
Blog:	Cold War Veterans Blog
Email:	Sean.Eagan@gmail.com
Phone:	716 720-4000
Network:	My Fast Pitch! Profile

Furloughs Could Affect Army's Behavioral Health Care

Furloughs Could Affect Army's Behavioral Health Care

By C. Todd Lopez
Army News Service

WASHINGTON, March 14, 2013 - Upcoming furloughs for Army civilians, along with budget cuts, will affect the Army's ability to provide behavioral health care to soldiers, the service's chief of behavioral health care said here this week.

More than half of the Army's behavioral health providers are either government civilians or contractors, Col. Rebecca Porter said at a Defense Writers Group breakfast March 12.

"The plan is that our Department of the Army civilians who are employed with us would be impacted across the board," Porter said.

The Army's medical community is about 60 percent civilian, overall, she said. Within the behavioral health specialty, which includes about 4,500 providers, more than half are civilian. The Army surgeon general's priorities for medical care in coping with spending cuts for the rest of the fiscal year mandated by the sequestration provision in budget law are warrior care, primary care, behavioral health and the Integrated Disability Evaluation System, Porter said. Army officials are looking at possibly exempting some of those Army civilians from furlough, she added.

Another option, she said, is to have medical providers in uniform, backfill where care is most needed.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan created a greater need in the Army for behavioral health providers, Porter said, and the Army has worked to bring those medical professionals on board. With furloughs and sequestration, lack of stability as a behavioral health provider within the Army may drive some of those professionals back to the private sector, she added.

"There is a national shortage of behavioral health providers. ... Since 2007, we've more than doubled the number of behavioral health providers that we have in the Army," Porter said. "To see them now looking elsewhere because they don't have the job security that they thought they were going to have, and they don't know how much the organization or the institution supports them in what they are trying to do, it is a morale issue."

When contracts or term behavioral health positions come up for expiration or renewal, providers go through her office "so we can look, kind of corporately, at what do we have as far as resources in the personnel realm," Porter said.

"We value those individuals greatly," she added. "Particularly for providers, we are looking to retain them."

Porter said the Army has seen success with embedded behavioral health teams, or EBHTs, where behavioral health providers are taken out of the hospitals and are aligned with specific brigades. The pilot installation for that effort was Fort Carson, Colo., and success with the program has meant an expansion to brigade-sized elements across the Army by the end of fiscal year 2016, she said.

An evaluation of the EBHT program at Fort Carson, she said, has shown "a decrease in incidents of psychiatric hospitalizations, decreased incidents of suicides, of suicide attempts and even things like alcohol-related incidents."

The success of the EBHT program, and cause for its expansion across the force, stems largely from the benefits of creating familiarity between providers and unit commanders.

"Co-locating them with the unit and with the commanders, I think, helps the behavioral health provider be more in tune with what are the needs of the command," Porter said. "But it also, in our experience, makes the commander, and the soldiers, more trusting of the behavioral health providers."

Early in her career, Porter said, she was in a position to recommend to a commander that he not take a soldier on deployment, due to post-traumatic stress disorder. She said that commander thanked her for her input, but took the soldier on deployment anyway. Later, she said, problems surfaced and the commander had to send the soldier home.

"Today, I think if I made the same recommendation to a commander, I think they would heed a behavioral health professional's input a lot more than they did 16 or 17 years ago," she said. "It's a different environment -- vastly different than it was back then."

Part of the increased trust commanders have in behavioral health providers stems from increased awareness of issues such as PTSD, Porter said. But she added that she believes the relationships that can be built through the use of EBHTs will only further commander trust.

The EBHTs are made up of civilian behavioral health providers, she said. Downrange, units have two organic behavioral health providers and two behavioral health technicians. In addition, combat stress control teams function in a general area and go where commanders think additional help is needed.
 

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Sean Eagan
American Cold War Veterans, Inc.

Web:	http://americancoldwarvets.org/
Blog:	Cold War Veterans Blog
Email:	Sean.Eagan@gmail.com
Phone:	716 720-4000
Network:	My Fast Pitch! Profile

End The VA Backlog , Stop The Madness !

Sean, A shocking report just came out about the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) disability benefits backlog. It says that delays for new vets to receive disability compensation from the VA are much longer than originally reported, which is saying a lot. (If you've had a loved one file a claim, you know what I mean.) We must end this backlog now. Sign a petition to call for action with IAVA. According to the report, more than 900,000 veteran's benefits claims are currently in the system, a number that VA expects to grow to over a million by the end of this month. Of the 600,000 backlogged, VA has said that the average wait time was 273 days, but this report reveals that veterans are waiting between 316 and 327 days after filing. Furthermore, despite spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on developing a digital claims process, 97% of claims are still on paper. The wait is 490 days in New Orleans. 619 in Los Angeles. 612 in Indianapolis. 586 in Houston. 642 in New York. And 681 in Reno. That's 681 days to get benefits for injuries received while at war. 681 days. That's just ridiculous. And it's gone on for long enough. The men and women who have sacrificed so much deserve better than that. Sign the petition today to call on President Obama to establish a Presidential Commission to end the backlog.  Next week at Storm the Hill, IAVA's membership will bring the petition with your name to the White House. We'll also gather IAVA members from across the nation on the steps of the Capitol to demand the President fix this ongoing problem once and for all. We'll keep the pressure up – and we won't stop fighting until it's done.  Paul Paul Rieckhoff Founder and CEO Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA)

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Sean Eagan
American Cold War Veterans, Inc.

Web:	http://americancoldwarvets.org/
Blog:	Cold War Veterans Blog
Email:	Sean.Eagan@gmail.com
Phone:	716 720-4000
Network:	My Fast Pitch! Profile

VFW ACTION ALERT

Action Alert: Contact Congress to Lower Medal Status

The VFW needs you to immediately contact your members of Congress to urge their support of H.R. 833 and S. 470 to lower the ranking of the new Distinguished Warfare Medal to below the Purple Heart. Why? Because in a letter to VFW National Commander John Hamilton, the Defense Department again said they would not lower the status of the medal, which now ranks 9th highest out of five dozen current medals and ribbons in the order of precedence—and you don't have to go to war to earn it! As of this morning, H.R. 833 had only 41 sponsors out of 435 members of the House, and S. 470 had only 10 sponsors out of 100 members of the Senate. We need more! This VFW-supported legislation has bipartisan support because it is the right thing to do for the troops who go into harm's way and not home every night. This is a policy disagreement over the placement of the new medal, not whether drone operators, cyber warriors and others don't deserve to be properly recognized for the tremendous impact they are bringing to the battlefield in real-time. The VFW just adamantly believes that medals that can only be earned in combat must rank higher than new medals awarded in the rear. Tell your members of Congress to support H.R. 833 and S. 470 today! Take action. 

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Sean Eagan
American Cold War Veterans, Inc.

Web:	http://americancoldwarvets.org/
Blog:	Cold War Veterans Blog
Email:	Sean.Eagan@gmail.com
Phone:	716 720-4000
Network:	My Fast Pitch! Profile

HVAC Update

Vets don't have to worry about sequestration cuts at VA

By Mark Flatten

Washington Examiner

http://washingtonexaminer.com/vets-dont-have-to-worry-about-sequestration-cuts-at-va/article/2523507

Those who rely on the Department of Veterans Affairs for medical care, disability benefits or educational assistance will be spared whatever pain eventually comes from sequestration because the agency is exempt from the automatic budget reductions, the chairman of the House veterans committee said today.

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said he has pressed VA officials for a year to get a straight answer whether President Obama would claim veterans would be hurt by the sequestration that began this month.

Miller finally got a clear concession that the VA's budget is totally exempt from the automatic cuts last December, so any claims now that veterans programs will be harmed are pure hype, he told The Washington Examiner today.

"The one thing I wanted to make sure of was that veterans weren't used as political pawns in the discourse," Miller said. "We clearly said VA was exempt. For a year I could not get the White House nor the VA to say 'yes, in fact that's the way we interpret the law.'"

The ambiguity is rooted in two conflicting laws. One passed in 1985 allowed a 2 percent cut to veterans' health care in a sequestration while the other, passed in 2010, exempted the VA from any cuts.

In November 2011, Miller could not get a clear answer from W. Todd Grams, VA's chief financial officer. White House lawyers were researching the issue, he said.

That triggered a series of letters from Miller to the VA and the White House Office of Management and Budget. OMB responded in June 2012 that all programs administered by VA were exempt from sequestration, but the agency could face cuts in undefined "administrative expenses."

VA Secretary Eric Shinseki repeated that assertion in congressional testimony last July.

"VA is exempt from sequestration except for administrative costs," Shinseki said. "I don't have a definition of administrative costs right now."

Miller finally got the answer he wanted in December, when Shinseki sent a letter affirming the entire VA budget, including administrative expenses, are exempt from automatic cuts.

Miller said he is concerned the White House chose to "slow roll" the answer because threats to popular veterans programs would give President Obama leverage in budget negotiations.

VA officials could not be reached today for comment.

While the VA is completely exempt from sequestration, veterans could see some disruptions. For instance, veterans filing disability claims must get their military and medical records from the Department of Defense, which is facing automatic reductions.

Pentagon officials blamed the looming sequestration for a decision not to link electronic health records with the VA during a house veterans committee hearing last month.

Miller said agencies can minimize those disruptions by making veterans a priority.

"I don't think veterans' funding should ever be allowed to be used as political leverage," Miller said.

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Curt Cashour

House Committee on Veterans' Affairs

curt.cashour@mail.house.gov

202.225.3527

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Sean Eagan
American Cold War Veterans, Inc.

Web:	http://americancoldwarvets.org/
Blog:	Cold War Veterans Blog
Email:	Sean.Eagan@gmail.com
Phone:	716 720-4000
Network:	My Fast Pitch! Profile