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The saga of how the Veterans Administration has tried to get the expensive PTSD diagnosis discredited and discarded is legendary among Vietnam Vets. Sadly, it's not over yet. In fact, under Bush, Iraq War vets are about to get the same screwing that we got.
Jim Nicholson, Secretary of the Department of Veteran's Affairs (VA), a guy who has all the charisma, credentials and qualifications for the post as "Heckofajob Brownie" had at FEMA, has been hell-bent on trying to help the Bush Administration cheat veterans out of their earned benefits. If you didn't already know, Nicholson was chairman of the Republican National Committee and former ambassador to the Vatican. That's what "qualifies" him to deal with disabled veterans.
Here are some of the tricks he is currently playing:
If you can't kill the PTSD program, paralyze it with paperwork! If an Iraq War vet comes home with PTSD and/or other disabilities, his claim goes to the VA for a compensation exam known in the parlance as a "Comp and Pen" exam, for compensation and pension. Traditionally the exam was performed on the veteran and the results sent on to a single "rater" in the VA offices who had the power to authorize the degree of disability and determine whether or not it would be for a period of three years, or whether it would be "permanent and total." Nicholson has instituted a policy of adding more raters to the decision-making process. Now you need at least two or more raters to approve the claim.
Under his Second Signature Required or "SSR" policy, a vet's disability claim must run the gauntlet of as many as four different raters and each one has the power to kill the claim. At present, the average time between examination and a decision by the VA to allow or deny a claim is nine months! A needy veteran could die between the time he is examined and the time the VA gets back to him. Maybe that's what Nicholson is trying to accomplish: Bury them in paperwork or just literally bury them while they wait for an answer.
Nicholson has virtually eliminated the permanent and total types of disability claims of tens of thousands of veterans in favor of three-year re-exams. So an Iraq War vet must live the rest of his life in fear that he may be required to re-submit the paper evidence of this disability. If he can't find his old medical records and bills? Too bad, gotcha! For PTSD sufferers, Nicholson wants them back every three years to undergo painful, stress-inducing adversarial psychiatric exams in which the veteran must revisit the horrible nightmares of combat and death and prove to the satisfaction of a hostile VA-appointed contract psychologist that he is continuing to suffer from his experience.
In addition to insulting and questioning the honesty of a veteran, Nicholson aims to make it so difficult to get a disability that many veterans will just give up and go away, or blow their brains out. It's all the same to him.
Last year, Nicholson tried but failed to set in motion a plan to allow the VA to throw out the current and accepted definition of PTSD and to write a new one! That's right. Nicholson's credo is that if he must follow the rules and he doesn't like it then he just change the rules. Bushian thinking at its worst.
Under Nicholson's order, and without any Congressional oversight, indeed without even telling Congress, the VA tried to contract with some private organization called the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to redefine PTSD by altering the criteria. The American Psychiatric Association, the body that helped the VA define the diagnosis of PTSD after Vietnam, was not consulted.
But none other than Barak Obama raised the alarm and with the help of the APA, got this contract quackery stopped before it got started.
