OpEdNews » Wounded Soldiers Wait Longer for Disability Checks

Support OEN
With Your
Tax-Deductible Donation

Tags for This Article:

Populum Tag Cloud Control Panel
	Fine tune your search to access content

Articles	Links
Diaries	Products
Events	All

All time
Last 6 mos
Last month
Last week
Last 24 hrs

From:
Month Day Year

To:
Month Day Year

Alphabet Popularity	Count ON Count OFF
This Level	Sub-levels

Tag(s): Checks And Balances; Homeless; Newspapers; Story; Veterans; Veterans; Video; Work; Work
Add to My Group

November 28, 2007 at 16:05:38

Wounded Soldiers Wait Longer for Disability Checks

by Aaron Glantz Page 1 of 1 page(s)

www.opednews.com

SAVE FAVORITES

VIEW FAVORITES

View Ratings | Rate It

Wounded veterans are being forced to wait longer and longer for a disability check, according to new data from the Department of Veterans Affairs information obtained by McClatchy Newspapers. According to McClatchy, veterans must wait an average of 183 days for a claim to be decided - up from 177 days a year before.

Is this surprising? Not really.

Remember, the man President Bush put in charge of processing disability claims, Veterans Benefits Administration chief Daniel Cooper recently appeared in a fundamentalist Christian video and said Bible Study was "More important than doing [my] job."

Their complaint stems from an appearance Cooper made in a fund raising video for the evangelical group Christian Embassy, which carries out missionary work among the Washington elite as part of the Campus Crusade for Christ.

In the video, Cooper says of his Bible study, "it's not really about carving out time, it really is a matter of saying what is important. And since that's more important than doing the job -- the job's going to be there, whether I'm there or not."

Long wait times for disability checks is a leading reason veterans become homeless.

Also, be sure to check out my new story published in the Nation Magazine on efforts to improve the GI Bill.

warcomeshome.org

Pacifica radio network reporter Aaron Glantz is author of the new book "How America Lost Iraq" (Tarcher/Penguin). More information at www.warcomeshome.org

	Contact Author
	Contact Editor
	View Other Articles by Author

Bookmark this page: (what's this?)

(More...)

3 comments

I thought it time for a revision to the biography. Where I seem to have "disturbed" a fair number of posters here at OEN to the point they've asked me not to write about their comments, feel free to call me "troll", "shill", "neo-con lapdog", "jack-booted thug", or "bad hat Harry". They've all been applied to me over the past year because I have challenged people to think beyond the emotions of an issue and review all the available data – not just the cherry-picked stuff. Of course, this appr...

to see more of bio, click on member name
Tom MurphyI thought it time for a revision to the biography. Where I seem to have "disturbed" a fair number of posters here at OEN to the point they've asked me not to write about their comments, feel free to call me "troll", "shill", "neo-con lapdog", "jack-booted thug", or "bad hat Harry". They've all been applied to me over the past year because I have challenged people to think beyond the emotions of an issue and review all the available data – not just the cherry-picked stuff. Of course, this appr...

to see more of bio, click on member name

Grasping for the pick-up sticks?

"According to McClatchy, veterans must wait an average of 183 days for a claim to be decided - up from 177 days a year before. Is this surprising? Not really."

So, the ONLY reason that a slip of six days to process the checks is due to the manager's religious convictions? Does he personally process the checks or do others? The slip could NEVER have had anything to do with the increased volume of processed claims because of the increased number of wounded veterans in the past year?

"If you look for the bad in people, you will surely find it," - Abraham Lincoln. Keep looking and grasping for those pick-up sticks. Eventually you'll get one that is actually real.

by Tom Murphy (3 articles, 4 quicklinks, 12 diaries, 1767 comments) on Thursday, November 29, 2007 at 9:44:47 AM