It was one of the simplest, most poignant promises Barack Obama made
in 2008 in his first campaign for the White House: he would fulfill “a sacred trust with our veterans”
by significantly reducing the government’s lengthy backlog of pending
claims for disability coverage. The goal: all veterans could get a
decision on disability claims within 125 days.
But on this Veterans Day as Obama prepares for the advent of his second term, the president’s pledge not only remains unfulfilled, it has become a farcical rallying cry for sick veterans, their widows and their advocates who now can wait as long as one to two years for disability decisions from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Records obtained by the Washington Guardian show as of Nov. 5, the day before Obama won re-election, 558,230 of the 820,106 veterans seeking disability coverage had their claims pending for more than the 125-day target. That’s a whopping 68.1 percent, or nearly double the 36 percent rate in the summer of 2010.
And there's tens of thousands of more cases pending in various forms of appeal, where decisions can take months or years to resolve. For instance, the average time it takes to resolve a case before the Veterans Appeals Board is 883 days.
In short, Obama made it worse, not better. The reason is because the new claims workers his administration hired did not keep pace with the crush of new demand from Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans or the new coverage areas authorized by the VA in 2010 for Vietnam veterans.
Read more: http://www.washingtonguardian.com/obamas-broken-promise-vets
But on this Veterans Day as Obama prepares for the advent of his second term, the president’s pledge not only remains unfulfilled, it has become a farcical rallying cry for sick veterans, their widows and their advocates who now can wait as long as one to two years for disability decisions from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Records obtained by the Washington Guardian show as of Nov. 5, the day before Obama won re-election, 558,230 of the 820,106 veterans seeking disability coverage had their claims pending for more than the 125-day target. That’s a whopping 68.1 percent, or nearly double the 36 percent rate in the summer of 2010.
And there's tens of thousands of more cases pending in various forms of appeal, where decisions can take months or years to resolve. For instance, the average time it takes to resolve a case before the Veterans Appeals Board is 883 days.
In short, Obama made it worse, not better. The reason is because the new claims workers his administration hired did not keep pace with the crush of new demand from Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans or the new coverage areas authorized by the VA in 2010 for Vietnam veterans.
Read more: http://www.washingtonguardian.com/obamas-broken-promise-vets
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