Greetings fellow Veterans. I’m hoping this finds the majority of you with completed claims and fat bank accounts. Right. What am I saying? Like that’s ever going to happen. From my perspective, it looks like VA is hiring more -and boy howdy do I mean More with a capital M- of every stripe of employee to try to get a grip on the backlog. That’s a dry hole in oil drilling vernacular. If you wage war for twenty-plus years straight, you end up with the proverbial shit ton of damaged Veterans. It takes 16 months to train a rater and they’re just now getting started? Didn’t Vietnam teach these chuckleheads anything?

Here’s what I know. I have about 80 active cases I work and right now I have five or six brand new clients lined up out the door just waiting for me to dive into their claims. They’ve been on Arlo Guthrie’s Group W (waiting) bench  for one reason alone. I have to keep fighting the VBA raters over and over on the existing claims. Litigating SMC is time-consuming. Nobody knows how to do it as evidenced by repeated denials even though their 2680s all say they’re charcoal.

There’s a simple reason for this. Primarily,  there are simply too few raters who have been trained to do it. The sub silentio reason is even more glaring. Raters know what happens if you’re maxed out with 100% for PTSD and TBI. They’ll artificially try to corral you in the SMC S hoosegow until you wake up one day and ask for more. With TBI, I find almost every one of my boys is a candidate not just for aid and attendance but for SMC at the T rate which we all know is SMC at the R2 rate. That’s $10,567.47 shekels per month (married).

Pulling the trigger on that authorization is anathema to most raters. They’d rather eat dogshit hotdogs than cut the paper in your favor. I get a bang out of some of the verbiage I read. How about “The clinician (think QTC/VES/Optum etc. FNP) stated you need ‘prompting’ to remember to take your Thorazine but not full-time medication management.” Ditto “You need to be reminded to take a shower and maintain your personal hygiene…but not on a regular basis.” Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over?

Just for shits and grins, let’s parse what §3.352(a) actually says.  Down towards the bottom there’s the dead giveaway:

“It is only necessary that the evidence establish that the veteran is so helpless as to need regular aid and attendance, not that there be a constant need.

Ruh-oh Rorge. To see this denial technique in action, you’d have to look at something I never spotted or dialed in on until recently. It’s ugly. Take your protein pill and put your brain bucket on. Here goes nothing.

In early April, a group of four Vets arrived at my front door looking for a&a and SMC T. Each and every one of them are eligible. The worst is one who had made 7 attempts since 2013 to summit Mount A&A and failed each time. One is burned on over forty percent of his body with enough ratings to pile up four 100%s combined. Do you think he qualifies? Oh Hell no. He hasn’t lost the use of any of his four appendages. He’s not blind. He can walk after a fashion if he eats enough Trazadone or oxycontin. So what is their impediment to success? All four of them, are black -as in African American.

Now, let me say this about that before I step in it. I might have been born in the south and seen blatant racism first hand in the fifties. I might have served in Vietnam and witnessed that subtle racism that divided blacks and whites into two camps. I even bunked with two of the most wonderful black folks I ever had the pleasure to know for six months. But I sure never expected to encounter all-consuming black hatred at the VA.

You read that right. How could that kind of racism over ratings be alive and well in this day and age of woke insanity? If you go into VA’s rolodex of employees now, we (yep-me too) can add our pronouns after our names just to ensure nobody “misgenders” us. Perish the thought that might happen. But, if you’re black, you get redlined. Game. Set. Match. Well, you do until you hire me as a Rep. I won the first one by brute force late in April but the Vet still hasn’t been paid yet. I actually had to contact the OAR (Office of Administrative Review) and ask if they had two sets of rules for this poker game- one for white bread and one for pumpernickel. They didn’t answer me other than granting it.

Turns out they really change their tune once you pitch a bitch. Bingo. Sorry Alex. Somebody screwed up and we fixed it…sort of. They kicked it back to the offending Coach in question and ordered him to cut the paper. He rewrote it granting a&a but couldn’t resist sticking the knife in and wiggling it a bit. He sent it back to the QTC gomer and got him/her(they?) to change his mental state to incompetent to handle VA funds. That means he gets a fiduciary who peels off a couple five hundred a month to ‘supervise’ him and make sure he doesn’t squander it all in Vegas on a stripper. Quo Vadis the nonadversarial VA-friendly venue in which to adjudicate our claims?

Given VA’s record of hiring fiduciary critters right out of prison with former records of embezzlement, I can say with authority that you do not want one of these bloodsuckers attached to your benefits. Extricating yourself from this tar baby isn’t hard but it’s time-consuming and should never even happen. Sure, there are some who probably need it but if they have loving family or a devoted spouse, they don’t need that overbearing presence watching their every expenditure like a hawk.

As for this black issue with VA, it actually isn’t a phenomenon. I googled it for shits and grins yesterday and was dumbfounded to find out VA figured this out waaaaay back in 2017. Check it out:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/11/racism-benefits-black-veterans-study/

Or this: Senator Richard (DaNang Dick, aka Bien Hoa Blumenthal) Blumenthal even helped get this rolling. Nothing like getting help from someone who disremembered being there!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/11/racism-benefits-black-veterans-study/

Or a VA finding of fact:

“According to a Yale University statistician who analyzed the VA records, the records show throughout the two-decade period that the VA denied Black veterans disability compensation at an average rate of 29.5%, compared to the 24.2% of White veterans who were denied disability benefits. The VA notably granted disability compensation to Black veterans at an average rate of 30.3% and White veterans at an average rate of 37.1%, the lawsuit says the statistician found.”

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/30/us/va-black-veterans-discrimination-lawsuit-reaj/index.html

Or:

https://www.rand.org/blog/2023/03/reducing-racial-disparities-in-va-disability-compensation.html

I could cite 50 more articles but they are pretty much redundant on the subject. So, being a total dick, I emailed hizhonor Denis the Menace yesterday afternoon and asked him why this conundrum exists in 2023-and why to what appears to be a select cadre of Veterans of a specific race. I’ll get back to you if and when he deigns to enlighten me.

 But let’s think about that. VA has a cadre of bean counters-legions strong, I might add- who do nothing but try to figure out important statistics about Veterans like how many of us pee when we first get up in the morning versus how many can hold it until 10AM. That may be a facetious shot but it conveys the VA mentality on the “need to know’.

The corn is almost 12 feet tall this year. I get that. I can see it’ll  go taller yet and most will have three ears. I supersized the horse poop this year. I had to use a six foot ladder back in 2013 to retrieve them. There’s a lot of chemtrail activity hereabouts which folks tell me always guarantees a good crop. The beets are already huge. I checked out the carrots yesterday and it’s going to be a bumper crop. Shoot, I might need a backhoe to get some of them out.

The peach trees are overwhelmed with fruit so I had to take a pair of crutches out and prop up a few branches. Ditto all three apple trees and the plums. I’ll write an article here directly on the ILP greenhouse trip to DC and horrendous reception the VLJ gave me. It began with ” you don’t look very disabled to me, dude. You flew all the way across country for this hearing? Amazing Mr. Graham. Well, yeah. I did. But then again I wasn’t out in the sun in a f—–g biplane, your honor. It went downhill from there. In fact, it took so long I had to change my flight home because I couldn’t make it to BWI in time due to the 2-hour dressing down I got for having a job and the temerity to ask for a greenhouse.

This is a developing story. News and film when I get a chance.