Vets still battling Defense and VA for care and benefits, despite advances

As top Defense and Veterans Affairs department officials highlighted new policies and technology to ease the transition from active duty to veteran status at a Senate hearing Wednesday, two veterans portrayed a flawed process that forces them to battle the departments to receive care for their combat wounds.

George Taylor, deputy assistant secretary of Defense, force health protection and readiness, in his written testimony for the Senate Veterans Affairs committee, said the department has in place a system to electronically transfer historic medical information to VA when troops are discharged, including admission, discharge and transfer information; standard ambulatory data records; demographic data; and pre- and post-deployment health assessments and post-deployment health reassessments, with records of traumatic brain injury included in the post-deployment medical reviews.

Antonette Zeiss, acting deputy chief officer for VA mental health services, told the hearing, "Our clinicians can now access health information for almost 4 million veterans and service members between our health information systems."

Meanwhile, Tim Horton, a Marine who had a leg amputated and suffers from traumatic brain injury as the result of an improvised bomb blast while on patrol in Iraq on Feb. 8, 2005, said at the hearing that VA gave him only a 60 percent disability rating when he retired in June 2006 because it did not take his TBI into consideration during evaluation.

Horton told the hearing he has had to reopen his disability claim three times and provide additional documentation to VA on his injuries, including TBI and shrapnel wounds all over his body. He finally ended up with a 100 percent disability, Horton said, but it took six years of battling the agencies.

Steven Bohn, a soldier who suffered spinal cord and intestinal injuries when a suicide bomber detonated a truck packed with 2,000 pounds of explosives at his Iraq outpost in November 2008, told the hearing his claims problems started shortly after his medical evacuation and while still in the Army.

Bohn said he was sent from Iraq to the Fort Campbell, Ky., warrior transition unit, which could not provide for his care and subsequently transferred him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. After undergoing spinal surgery at Walter Reed, Bohn was transferred to a VA hospital in his home state of Massachusetts.

But Walter Reed did not inform Fort Campbell of his transfer to the VA, Bond said, and Fort Campbell threatened to declare him absent without leave, so he had to return to Kentucky.

Bohn said the Army medically retired him in October 2010 with 80 percent compensation, but not until earlier this month and after he was scheduled to appear at the hearing did anyone at VA follow up on his request for health care, and "no one [at VA] seemed to have been aware of my spinal cord injuries."

While Taylor told the hearing that Defense had developed an online Career Decision Toolkit last August, which uses the latest technology to ease the transition to civilian life and help troops find jobs, Bohn said his transition plan amounted to "a flag and a retirement pin."

Both Bohn and Horton bemoaned the lack of veteran advocates to help patients navigate two complex and often baffling bureaucracies. Horton said, "Were it not for the mentorship of other veterans -- particularly Vietnam veterans I met at the VA medical centers -- I would not have known how to advocate for myself and fight through the compensation and pension process to receive the benefits I have earned."

James Lorraine, director of the privately funded Central Savannah River Area Wounded Warrior Care Project in Augusta, Ga., told the hearing it is essential that "veterans have strong advocates, both government and nongovernment, working together at the national, regional and community levels to improve the recovery, rehabilitation and reintegration of our warriors and families."

Defense and VA set up such an advocacy program in 2008 -- the Federal Recovery Coordinator Program -- but Lorraine said these coordinators need the kind of authority to "push the right buttons" at the Veterans Benefits Administration and the Veterans Health Administration to fulfill their advocacy mission.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., chairwoman of the committee, said Defense and VA must to do more to ensure that veterans do not "fall through the cracks" as they transition from one system to another.

Ranking member Richard Burr, R-N.C., said as far as he could determine both Defense and VA are a long way from "seamless transition" and over the past four years the process has worsened, not improved.