VA clinics experiencing an increased demand

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

WASHINGTON — When he got home from war, Rey Leal’s biggest problem was that he couldn’t sleep as he tried to free himself of the images of combat in Iraq.

“My thing was turning off that movie in my head,” says Leal, a former marine and now a student at a college in south Texas. Ultimately, he sought mental-health assistance at a Veterans Affairs clinic in the Rio Grande Valley. But he found navigating the bureaucratic tangle a strain: He waited a month or more for appointments with the sole psychologist there.

With hundreds of thousands of veterans like Leal trying to get help, the VA is experiencing an unprecedented demand for its services.

Among the roughly 2 million people who have deployed, there are some 300,000 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder and thousands more of traumatic brain injury, according to a RAND report last year. And in the past decade, the number of disability claims that the VA processes has skyrocketed.

Even with a heavy infusion of funding — a 50 percent increase since 2006 — the VA has been hard-pressed to meet veterans’ needs. President Barack Obama has outlined yet more funding, but the question remains: Will a new generation of vets get the resources and help it is likely to need from the VA for years to come?

“The surge home has begun,” says Patrick Campbell, a top official at the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an advocacy group, and himself a veteran of the National Guard.

The VA has tried to keep up with the demand, dramatically increasing the number of mental-health professionals and counselors over the past four years. More than 17,500 mental-health personnel are across the VA system.

The VA is also hiring more personnel for claims. It increased its processing staff by about 58 percent between 2005 and 2009. It’s done this for good reason: The number of claims that the VA closes out annually has increased 60 percent since 1999 — from 458,000 to about 729,000 in fiscal year 2008, the Government Accountability Office reported last month. At the same time, the number of claims that are in “pending” status — claims that have not yet been resolved — has increased some 65 percent to about 343,000, the report said.

“It is indeed a mess. They are indeed in a hole,” says a staffer on Capitol Hill familiar with the VA issues, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the subject.

The surge in claims is the result of a confluence of events — not just the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the increase comes in part from recent vets, it is also from older vets, chiefly from the Vietnam War. And the number of claims per person has shot up. For example, many of those making claims were forced from service for any number of medical reasons. That can change the perceptions these people have about their military service — and may lead to more claims, according to the congressional staffer.

“I don’t doubt that everybody who works at the VA wants nothing else than to help veterans,” says Leal. “Are they being given the tools to do that? That is another question.”