VA director: 12 more workers will help settle claims here
Thursday, July 7, 2005
Printable FormatCHICAGO SUN-TIMES
BY RUMMANA HUSSAIN
The Chicago VA office plans to hire a dozen more employees to settle disability claims of Illinois veterans -- in addition to the squad of five specialists assigned to work here earlier this month, director Michael Olson said Wednesday at a Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing held in Chicago by Senators Barack Obama and Dick Durbin.
While Obama and Durbin found the news encouraging, they weren't ready to let Olson off the hook.
"We have to stay on top of them because we don't know whether the 12 new raters are going to be sufficient for the backlog of existing claims . . . and won't even take into account the new veterans that are going to be coming home [from Iraq]," Obama said after the two-hour hearing at the Dirksen Federal Building.
The two senators said they were surprised to learn that Olson never heard of complaints about local rating specialists whose rulings against veterans have been constantly overturned on appeal.
Durbin called the admission "troubling," adding, "It seems like there's some dialogue missing here."
He later told reporters, "You would think in this world of computers that the VA would know exactly how many times VA specialists have been overturned."
Olson said he would be willing to meet with Allen Lynch, chief of the state's Veterans Rights Bureau and a Medal of Honor recipient from Vietnam, to discuss how to improve processing claims.
The Chicago Sun-Times has reported that Illinois disabled veterans on average received $6,961 per veteran -- the lowest in the nation and $1,400 less than the national average.
"I still get a sense that there's some resistance in the Chicago regional office," Obama said, pointing to the case of former Marine Sgt. Stephen Herres, who never received compensation for injuries to his hands that were crushed between an aircraft tow tractor and lift in Beaufort, S.C., in 1974.
"There's some defensiveness there, and instead of them wanting to be proactive and try to make the system work better, that they're constantly defending practices that haven't been working in the past. And I think that mind-set is going to have to change if we were going to see long-term improvements."
'I feel betrayed by the system'
Herres, 56, who cannot grasp with his fingers, said dealing with the VA administrators has been extremely frustrating.
"I don't feel betrayed by my country," Herres said. "I love my country, but I feel betrayed by the system. I believe it's not the entire system, but actually individuals that are within the system that are never reprimanded, and they seem to answer to nobody."