US Department of Veterans Affairs

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A lawsuit has been filed and is seeking class action status against the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for allegedly failing to provide medical and mental healthcare to injured servicemen and women returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The lawsuit was filed in Federal Court in San Francisco on behalf of hundreds of thousands of veterans and by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth. The case claims individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, are being deprived of mental health services in the early phases of the illness, when identification and treatment are critical.

A recent report revealed that 38% of soldiers and 50% of National Guard members coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan have mental health issues, ranging from stress disorder to brain injuries. The lawsuit claims that only 27 of the VA's 1,400 hospitals around the country have in patient post-traumatic stress disorder programs.

"The major thrust of this case is that the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical side and the adjudication side are experiencing unprecedented delays in death and disability compensation," says lawyer Gordon Erspamer. "There are huge backlogs from the initial filing of claims (600,000 pending claims at the regional offices) and huge numbers at every stage of the appeal process."

Erspamer explains that this backlog is so overwhelming that it now takes about three years at the first stage of appeal and almost four years at the first court appeal. Meanwhile, on the medical side, the VA is turning away veterans for lack of resources and/or qualified doctors. Erspamer also emphasizes several other important issues:

"This is really a veteran's civil rights case," he says. "We attack a number of restrictions on veteran's civil rights: the inability to call witnesses to testify, the lack of any emergency procedures (e.g. if a VA threatens suicide, there is no remedy for them or their family); and the court of veteran's appeals lack of ability to enforce its own decisions; and a variety of other restrictions.

And there is the abuse caused by the VA's incentive compensation system which causes adjudicators to take shortcuts or commit criminal acts at the expense of veterans.

Another restriction: veterans cannot pay a lawyer anything to represent them at the regional office level. It is actually a criminal offence and has been around since the Civil warâ€"since 1862--in one form or another. Criminals can get council at taxpayer expense but vets cannot pay a lawyer out of their own pockets. The rationale by the VA is that it prevents overreaching by unscrupulous lawyers. The real reason is that the VA denies a lot of valid claims and attorneys have a much higher success rate.

To date, Erspamer and his firm have been contacted by over 1,000 veterans, most of whom are seeking help on their claims.

Regarding the status of the lawsuit, "The government has moved to dismiss, saying the veterans don't have the right to be in court at allâ€"another indignity on veteran's civil rights, and claiming that the government is completely immune from suit," says Erspamer. "Basically, this lawsuit is about how we treat veterans as second class citizens--it is deplorable."

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