The Veterans Administration (VA) was part of an ongoing effort to make the government run more efficiently while also eliminating staff. Now, veterans are having claims denied by the VA that they counted on for healthcare.
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NOTUS told a story of Paul Rushing, who had a stroke at age 54 and a pulmonary embolism. Ahead of the incident, there were no significant underlying health issues.
The VA wasn’t going to help because it said his illness wasn’t connected to his service for the military. As NOTUS explained, “The denial letter mentioned medical issues entirely unrelated to his situation.”
Russing thought it was nothing more than a “copy-paste error” meant for someone else.
President Donald Trump’s administration wanted to clear the backlog of over 400,000 claims. It brags that, as of July, that number is a little closer to 70,000. The problem, however, is that it keeps getting those cases wrong.
“We’re getting more decisions, but they’re not good decisions,” Wesley McCauley told NOTUS. He’s an accredited agent who helps veterans handle their claims. According to him, these mistakes being made aren’t complicated cases.
“These are just very clear errors that just should not be missed with just a little bit of review,” McCauley said.
According to the report, the new Trump term has brought a 100 percent increase in requests for a “higher-level review” before the Board of Veterans’ Appeals.
The board has roughly 1,000 attorneys. Requests they were getting were for “very basic errors” and “egregious” mistakes that “would have been caught in times past,” said one appeals board employee.
“The errors that we’re seeing have just been exploding in the last year and a half,” said Derek Debus, who runs a military and veteran law practice. His office emails adjudicators 10-15 times a week because the VA missed something.
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For Rushing, he fixed some problems on the filing and gave them a doctor’s note from a VA physician walking through how his medical issues are connected to his service.
The VA stipend would “allow me to focus on my health and not be out chasing dollars every day,” Rushing said. “It wouldn’t replace my income, but it would make life easier.” In the meantime, Rushing is still working every day.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins pledged that for the “America 250” events, the VA would clear the backlog. He ramped up production and set quotas for those processing claims. To do so, he had to kill the VA’s employee union agreements, a move that’s now in court.
The result has been burnout and mistakes, employees told NOTUS. There was “extraordinary pressure from their supervisors and VA headquarters to produce at all costs, likening VA disability claims to widgets that must be processed,” said the report.
One Veterans Benefits Administration employee told NOTUS, “At the end of the day, the number one thing is making the numbers, making the secretary look good, because if you don’t there’s going to be a problem. Everyone is afraid.”
Anyone who can’t meet their quotas can be fired. If there are IT problems or staff must attend meetings or trainings, they still must meet that quota. Anyone who takes maternity or paternity leave also wouldn’t meet their quotas. Accuracy is not the goal. The VA leadership only wants to process the claims.
Debus explained that some are using AI to try and sort through the claims, and they don’t spot-checked the cases afterward.
According to the data, since the previous administration, the Trump administration increased the number processed by 30,000, but it increased refusals by 9,000.
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