The Department of Veterans Affairs is headed in the wrong direction if the goal is to help veterans

By Julie Ferland. Read it in Stars and Stripes.

The Department of Veterans Affairs system is supposed to help those who have served, like my husband Kyle, and their families. But as a military spouse who was the ombudsman for Kyle’s Navy ship, I know the truth: The VA is broken, and service members and their families are being denied the care they deserve. 

I have seen firsthand the problems within the department, like when friends leave and are told that their post-traumatic stress disorder doesn’t qualify for care, or when they’re discouraged during service from reporting mental health problems, which leads to the VA telling them there’s no diagnosis to support their claims.  

These problems are only getting worse, because VA Secretary Doug Collins thinks the VA needs fewer people processing the backlog of veterans claims, which right now sits at over 69,000 people. All this while the process to file claims remains confusing and backward. 

To his credit, Collins has reduced the backlog claims during his tenure. But this raises an important question: Are they reviewing these claims properly, or just denying them quickly to show the media a lower backlog? Just because the numbers have been reduced does not mean that veterans are being properly cared for — especially with fewer people doing the work needed to help veterans.

My husband is approaching military retirement, and while we’re fortunate he’s avoided many of the physical and psychological challenges veterans often face, that could change any day -- and we’ll be reliant on the same VA we’ve watched fail so many others. I feel the anxiety that so many share; how will we care for our family when we’ll have to fight a domestic war just to get what we were promised when Kyle raised his right hand? As we see with most things within the Trump administration, the VA is focused on the wrong problem.

And while the administration continues the long, bipartisan pattern of failing veterans, other options are being denied throughout our country. For example, a court recently ruled that only agencies accredited by the VA can act on behalf of veterans. This means veterans who are seeking certain types of help to navigate the confusing claims system, or have only certain types of complaints, can work with only companies inside the VA network rather than looking for help from companies that could get the job done faster.

Organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Disabled Veterans of America do their best, but let’s be honest — they are largely run by volunteers, not VA bureaucracy experts. And the accredited lawyers can be horribly expensive. There are a lot of fee-based scam artists, so VA certification makes sense, but the court’s ruling literally means that I couldn’t start a small consulting practice to help families navigate their claims. Any dollars I make could be taken via a fine because I haven’t crossed the right “t” and dotted the right “i,” even though I have been doing this for years as a volunteer ombudsman.

The VA’s atrocious status is to America’s shame. If the VA could actually fix the problems internally, it would not be forcing our country’s veterans to seek outside help. Instead, legitimate help is kept out of reach by making it illegal — and Congress is just as bad, with good bills like the CHOICE Act that would create the exact structure the court demanded languishing in partisan purgatory.

This isn’t government efficiency or a real way forward. This is papering over the problem as merely a numbers game and ignoring the real fixes that would make the system easier to manage. Allowing outside help, when needed, to navigate the system should be first on the list.  Donald Trump and his administration ran on a platform of improving government efficiency. To them, that means firing employees and trying to get good statistics in the media, but this only hurts our veterans.

The so-called “efficiency” of the government is not doing anything to improve the care veterans get or their ability to file claims. Those who put everything on the line for their country deserve the best care in return.

If the VA served veterans efficiently, private assistance would be unnecessary. Instead of eliminating alternatives, the government should fix the system that created demand for them. That starts, by the way, with fewer wars and actually winning the wars people like my husband are sent to fight.