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GI Bill Funds Flow to For-Profit Colleges That Fail State Aid Standards
Memorial Day: A Veteran Stops to Meet a Stranger
VA Pays $200 Million For 1,000 Wrongful Deaths
Her War: The Aftermath of Military Sexual Assault
Oakland VA Office Makes Veterans Wait 618 Days for Disability Pay
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(Mimi Chakarova/Center for Investigative Reporting)","imgSizes":{"kqedFullSize":{"file":"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2015/07/06_CHAKAROVA.jpg","width":864,"height":576}},"fetchFailed":false,"isLoading":false}},"audioPlayerReducer":{"postId":"stream_live"},"authorsReducer":{"byline_news_11966533":{"type":"authors","id":"byline_news_11966533","meta":{"override":true},"slug":"byline_news_11966533","name":"\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/author/shreya-agrawal/\">Shreya Agrawal\u003c/a>","isLoading":false},"byline_news_11632413":{"type":"authors","id":"byline_news_11632413","meta":{"override":true},"slug":"byline_news_11632413","name":"Libby Denkmann\u003cbr>\u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"https://www.scpr.org/about/people/staff/libby-denkmann\">KPCC\u003c/a>\u003c/strong>","isLoading":false},"byline_news_11298297":{"type":"authors","id":"byline_news_11298297","meta":{"override":true},"slug":"byline_news_11298297","name":"\u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/people/105678418/quil-lawrence\">Quil Lawrence, Steve Walsh, Patricia Murphy, Stephan Bisaha\u003c/strong>","isLoading":false},"byline_news_11286464":{"type":"authors","id":"byline_news_11286464","meta":{"override":true},"slug":"byline_news_11286464","name":"Quil Lawrence","isLoading":false},"kqed":{"type":"authors","id":"236","meta":{"index":"authors_1591205172","id":"236","found":true},"name":"KQED News Staff","firstName":"KQED News Staff","lastName":null,"slug":"kqed","email":"faq@kqed.org","display_author_email":false,"staff_mastheads":[],"title":null,"bio":null,"avatar":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/ef0e801a68c4c54afa9180db14084167?s=600&d=blank&r=g","twitter":null,"facebook":null,"instagram":null,"linkedin":null,"sites":[{"site":"arts","roles":["contributor"]},{"site":"news","roles":["editor"]},{"site":"futureofyou","roles":["author"]}],"headData":{"title":"KQED News Staff | KQED","description":null,"ogImgSrc":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/ef0e801a68c4c54afa9180db14084167?s=600&d=blank&r=g","twImgSrc":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/ef0e801a68c4c54afa9180db14084167?s=600&d=blank&r=g"},"isLoading":false,"link":"/author/kqed"},"kqednewsstaffandwires":{"type":"authors","id":"237","meta":{"index":"authors_1591205172","id":"237","found":true},"name":"KQED News Staff and Wires","firstName":"KQED News Staff and Wires","lastName":null,"slug":"kqednewsstaffandwires","email":"onlinenewsstaff@kqed.org","display_author_email":false,"staff_mastheads":[],"title":null,"bio":null,"avatar":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/72295af8ebbfbd19a4948f5271285664?s=600&d=blank&r=g","twitter":null,"facebook":null,"instagram":null,"linkedin":null,"sites":[{"site":"arts","roles":["contributor"]},{"site":"news","roles":["contributor"]},{"site":"lowdown","roles":["author"]},{"site":"stateofhealth","roles":["contributor"]},{"site":"food","roles":["author"]}],"headData":{"title":"KQED News Staff and Wires | KQED","description":null,"ogImgSrc":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/72295af8ebbfbd19a4948f5271285664?s=600&d=blank&r=g","twImgSrc":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/72295af8ebbfbd19a4948f5271285664?s=600&d=blank&r=g"},"isLoading":false,"link":"/author/kqednewsstaffandwires"},"aemslie":{"type":"authors","id":"3206","meta":{"index":"authors_1591205172","id":"3206","found":true},"name":"Alex Emslie","firstName":"Alex","lastName":"Emslie","slug":"aemslie","email":"aemslie@kqed.org","display_author_email":true,"staff_mastheads":["news"],"title":"KQED Senior Editor","bio":"Alex Emslie is senior editor of talent and development at KQED, where he manages dozens of early career journalists and oversees news department internships.\r\n\r\nHe is a former carpenter and proud graduate of City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University, where he studied journalism and criminal justice before joining KQED in 2013.\r\n\r\nAlex produced investigative journalism focused on \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11667594/the-trials-of-marvin-mutch-video\">criminal justice\u003c/a> and policing for most of a decade. He has broken major stories about \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/135682/amid-a-series-of-vallejo-police-shootings-one-officers-name-stands-out\">police use of deadly force\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/10454955/racist-texts-prompt-sfpd-internal-investigation\">officer misconduct\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11712239/terrorist-or-troll-judge-to-weigh-whether-oakland-man-really-intended-to-attack-bay-area\">other\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11221414/hayward-paid-159000-to-husband-of-retired-police-chief-documents-show\">high\u003c/a>-\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/10622762/the-forgotten-tracking-two-homicides-in-san-francisco-public-housing\">profile\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11624516/federal-agency-promoted-ranger-just-months-after-his-gun-was-stolen-and-used-in-steinle-killing\">cases\u003c/a>. He co-founded the \u003ca href=\"https://projects.scpr.org/california-reporting-project/\">California Reporting Project\u003c/a> in 2019 to obtain and report on previously confidential police internal investigations. The effort produced well over 100 original stories and changed the course of multiple criminal cases.\r\n\r\nHis work has been recognized with numerous journalism awards, including a national Edward R. Murrow award for several years of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11688481/sfpd-officers-in-mario-woods-case-recount-shooting-in-newly-filed-depositions\">reporting\u003c/a> on the San Francisco Police shooting of Mario Woods. His \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/147854/half-of-those-killed-by-san-francisco-police-are-mentally-ill\">reporting\u003c/a> on police killings of people in psychiatric crisis was cited in amicus briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court.\r\n\r\nAlex now enjoys mentoring the next generation of journalists at KQED.","avatar":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e691e65209f20e9da202bd730ead5663?s=600&d=blank&r=g","twitter":"SFNewsReporter","facebook":null,"instagram":null,"linkedin":null,"sites":[{"site":"arts","roles":["editor"]},{"site":"news","roles":["editor"]},{"site":"mindshift","roles":["editor"]},{"site":"stateofhealth","roles":["editor"]},{"site":"science","roles":["administrator"]}],"headData":{"title":"Alex Emslie | KQED","description":"KQED Senior Editor","ogImgSrc":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e691e65209f20e9da202bd730ead5663?s=600&d=blank&r=g","twImgSrc":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e691e65209f20e9da202bd730ead5663?s=600&d=blank&r=g"},"isLoading":false,"link":"/author/aemslie"}},"breakingNewsReducer":{},"campaignFinanceReducer":{},"firebase":{"requesting":{},"requested":{},"timestamps":{},"data":{},"ordered":{},"auth":{"isLoaded":false,"isEmpty":true},"authError":null,"profile":{"isLoaded":false,"isEmpty":true},"listeners":{"byId":{},"allIds":[]},"isInitializing":false,"errors":[]},"navBarReducer":{"navBarId":"news","fullView":true,"showPlayer":false},"navMenuReducer":{"menus":[{"key":"menu1","items":[{"name":"News","link":"/","type":"title"},{"name":"Politics","link":"/politics"},{"name":"Science","link":"/science"},{"name":"Education","link":"/educationnews"},{"name":"Housing","link":"/housing"},{"name":"Immigration","link":"/immigration"},{"name":"Criminal Justice","link":"/criminaljustice"},{"name":"Silicon Valley","link":"/siliconvalley"},{"name":"Forum","link":"/forum"},{"name":"The California Report","link":"/californiareport"}]},{"key":"menu2","items":[{"name":"Arts & Culture","link":"/arts","type":"title"},{"name":"Critics’ Picks","link":"/thedolist"},{"name":"Cultural Commentary","link":"/artscommentary"},{"name":"Food & Drink","link":"/food"},{"name":"Bay Area Hip-Hop","link":"/bayareahiphop"},{"name":"Rebel Girls","link":"/rebelgirls"},{"name":"Arts Video","link":"/artsvideos"}]},{"key":"menu3","items":[{"name":"Podcasts","link":"/podcasts","type":"title"},{"name":"Bay Curious","link":"/podcasts/baycurious"},{"name":"Rightnowish","link":"/podcasts/rightnowish"},{"name":"The Bay","link":"/podcasts/thebay"},{"name":"On Our Watch","link":"/podcasts/onourwatch"},{"name":"Mindshift","link":"/podcasts/mindshift"},{"name":"Consider This","link":"/podcasts/considerthis"},{"name":"Political Breakdown","link":"/podcasts/politicalbreakdown"}]},{"key":"menu4","items":[{"name":"Live Radio","link":"/radio","type":"title"},{"name":"TV","link":"/tv","type":"title"},{"name":"Events","link":"/events","type":"title"},{"name":"For Educators","link":"/education","type":"title"},{"name":"Support KQED","link":"/support","type":"title"},{"name":"About","link":"/about","type":"title"},{"name":"Help Center","link":"https://kqed-helpcenter.kqed.org/s","type":"title"}]}]},"pagesReducer":{},"postsReducer":{"stream_live":{"type":"live","id":"stream_live","audioUrl":"https://streams.kqed.org/kqedradio","title":"Live Stream","excerpt":"Live Stream information currently unavailable.","link":"/radio","featImg":"","label":{"name":"KQED Live","link":"/"}},"stream_kqedNewscast":{"type":"posts","id":"stream_kqedNewscast","audioUrl":"https://www.kqed.org/.stream/anon/radio/RDnews/newscast.mp3?_=1","title":"KQED Newscast","featImg":"","label":{"name":"88.5 FM","link":"/"}},"news_11966533":{"type":"posts","id":"news_11966533","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"news","id":"11966533","score":null,"sort":[1699304389000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"californias-unhoused-crisis-hits-veterans-hard-despite-funding-efforts","title":"California's Unhoused Crisis Hits Veterans Hard, Despite Funding Efforts","publishDate":1699304389,"format":"standard","headTitle":"California’s Unhoused Crisis Hits Veterans Hard, Despite Funding Efforts | KQED","labelTerm":{},"content":"\u003cp>California has poured billions of dollars into finding homes for unhoused veterans, but the number of former military service members living on the street has held steady for almost a decade. Today, a third of the nation’s unhoused veterans are in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tori Gibson of San Francisco is one of them. She’s been looking for a stable place to live since she left the Navy seven years ago, and it hasn’t been easy for her. She left the service in part because of health issues that continue to debilitate her. [pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Tori Gibson, Navy veteran, San Francisco\"]‘It was just a really bad spiral of just more disability and then less money and no support.’[/pullquote]Now 32 and undergoing a gender transition, she’s struggling to make ends meet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was just a really bad spiral of just more disability and then less money and no support,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s searching for a new start as Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes a significant change in the state’s strategy for ending veteran homelessness. His plan, included in a \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/health/mental-health/2023/09/gavin-newsom-mental-health-2024-election/\">$6.4 billion mental health bond\u003c/a> he’s sending to voters in the March primary election, would set aside funding specifically for veterans with serious behavioral health conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a shift from California’s last two major efforts to fund housing for veterans, which created units for a general population of former military service members.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first effort began in the late 1990s when the state built seven new veterans’ homes over 17 years. Today, those veterans’ homes are underused. They \u003ca href=\"https://www.calvet.ca.gov/Documents/Master%20Plan%202020.pdf\">were built to house about 2,400 people\u003c/a>, but only 1,575 veterans live there. \u003ca href=\"https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/the-state-worker/article242868816.html\">The 300-unit veterans home in Barstow\u003c/a> was so underutilized in 2020 that Newsom moved to close it as he braced for a pandemic recession, although \u003ca href=\"https://abc7.com/save-veterans-home-barstow-veterans-state-cuts-threaten-to-close-shut-down/6249524/\">lawmakers blocked him from shutting the site\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second push centered on a pair of ballot measures voters approved in \u003ca href=\"https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_41,_Veterans_Housing_and_Homeless_Prevention_Bond_(June_2014)\">2014\u003c/a> and in \u003ca href=\"https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_1,_Housing_Programs_and_Veterans%27_Loans_Bond_(2018)\">2018\u003c/a> that allocated $4.6 billion to build housing specifically for former military service members. The money created the \u003ca href=\"https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-and-funding/programs-active/veterans-housing-and-homelessness-prevention\">Veterans Housing and Homelessness Prevention Program\u003c/a>, which has supported the construction of about 3,250 housing units for veterans to date.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Veterans advocates and state officials view the programs — along with federal efforts led by the \u003ca href=\"https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/public_indian_housing/programs/hcv/vash\">Department of Veterans Affairs\u003c/a> — as successful in reducing homelessness among former military service members. In the last 12 years, veteran homelessness in California has decreased by more than 30%.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the trend in California mostly accounts for gains made during the Obama administration, when veteran homelessness peaked nationwide, and the Department of Veterans Affairs moved aggressively to place former troops in housing. Since 2014, the number of homeless veterans in California has mostly plateaued around 10,000 to 12,000 people, according to annual counts released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The number of homeless veterans in California has fallen by more than 4,000 people since data collection began\" aria-label=\"Column Chart\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-Z2Fqo\" src=\"https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Z2Fqo/4/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"400\" data-external=\"1\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said the high numbers of veteran homelessness result from the challenges veterans face on returning home in California’s \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-homeless-growth-report/\">competitive housing market\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When housing markets are unaffordable and incredibly competitive, those with the greatest needs are going to be more likely to fall out,” he said. [pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow, National Alliance to End Homelessness\"]‘When housing markets are unaffordable and incredibly competitive, those with the greatest needs are going to be more likely to fall out.’[/pullquote]Newsom’s new strategy in the mental health bond, advocates say, should help those most in need. The California Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that half of the state’s unhoused veterans suffer from some behavioral health issue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The money in the bond would go to the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, which would work with CalVet “to focus specifically on housing veterans experiencing behavioral health challenges,” said Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, the Thousand Oaks Democrat who wrote the bill that ultimately put the bond on the ballot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Studies have shown veterans are \u003ca href=\"https://www.research.va.gov/topics/homelessness.cfm\">overrepresented in the nation’s homeless population\u003c/a>. They may experience personal challenges, such as post-traumatic stress disorders or other mental health issues, as well as disabilities related to their military service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Transitioning from that very specific culture and society to civilian life is a lifelong process,” said Amy Fairweather, director of policy at the veterans advocacy group Swords to Plowshares. “If you do have any physical or mental disabilities, dealing with those and trying to re-enter civilian life can be very difficult.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>California’s veterans’ homes\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>California’s long history of providing housing to former military service members dates to 1884 when it opened an estate in \u003ca href=\"https://www.calvet.ca.gov/VetHomes/Pages/Yountville.aspx\">Napa County as the state’s first veterans home\u003c/a>. That site is still in operation, housing around 600 veterans on a picturesque property in wine country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Altogether, the state now has eight veterans homes. The two largest homes are in fairly remote communities — one is in Napa County’s Yountville, and the second is in Barstow in the Mojave Deserts. Moving to them can mean living far from a veteran’s family. That geography somewhat limits interest in the homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The homes account for the lion’s share of CalVet’s $650 million annual budget. Some advocates have called on the state to put money into programs that would benefit people who don’t necessarily want to live in a veterans’ home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"California's veterans homes\" aria-label=\"Locator maps\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-wYJ4R\" src=\"https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/wYJ4R/1/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;\" height=\"599\" data-external=\"1\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Map: Liliana MichelenaSource: \u003ca href=\"https://www.calvet.ca.gov/calvet-programs/veteran-homes\">California Department of Veteran Affairs\u003c/a> Created with \u003ca href=\"https://www.datawrapper.de/_/wYJ4R/\">Datawrapper\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The state should keep its promises to the current home residents, but as things change, the program needs to be less structured on just providing room and board for a minimal number of people and more structured on providing skilled nursing facility care for those who need it,” said Ethan Rarick, executive director at Little Hoover Commission, which published \u003ca href=\"https://lhc.ca.gov/sites/lhc.ca.gov/files/Reports/237/Report237.pdf\">a report on the veterans’ homes in 2017\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Outside of the veterans homes, California approved a series of bonds meant to help military service members find housing beginning in 2008. The Veterans Bond Act, passed that year, provided $900 million to veterans through the CalVet Home Loans Program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2014, California passed an initiative creating the Veterans Housing and Homelessness Program, which put $600 million toward building multi-family homes for veterans. A second ballot initiative in 2018 gave another $4 billion to the program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The federal Department of Veterans Affairs, meanwhile, has kept up steady funding for housing vouchers that can provide a place to live for former troops. The Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program, \u003ca href=\"https://www.va.gov/homeless/hud-vash.asp\">commonly known as HUD-VASH\u003c/a>, was a centerpiece of the Bush and Obama administration’s efforts to curb veterans’ homelessness. It provides rental assistance to over 100,000 veterans nationally.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A steep drop in veteran homelessness\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The number of \u003ca href=\"https://news.va.gov/press-room/ranks-of-homeless-veterans-drop-18-percent/\">unhoused veterans in the U.S. peaked during the Great Recession\u003c/a> when the VA in 2007 reported some 154,000 former troops were homeless.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At that time, Fairweather of Swords to Plowshares said many of those deployed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were starting to come back home “to a society that wasn’t prepared for it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On top of that, they and older veterans struggled in the economic downturn, which led to more unemployment and homelessness. [pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Amy Fairweather, director of policy, Swords to Plowshares, a veterans advocacy group\"]‘It all came together in a way that was really disadvantageous to the veterans.’[/pullquote]“It all came together in a way that was really disadvantageous to the veterans,” Fairweather said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year, the VA estimated about \u003ca href=\"https://www.va.gov/homeless/pit_count.asp\">33,000 veterans were homeless\u003c/a> nationwide. According to the 2021 annual homelessness assessment report by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than half are over age 55. The data also shows that Black veterans are more likely to be homeless than veterans belonging to other races.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advocates say veterans can be reluctant to ask for help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When veterans ultimately fall down that hole into homelessness, what is happening along with that is that they’re losing connection with friends and family because they’re ashamed that their life is falling apart and it’s hard for them to ask for help,” said Stephen Peck, \u003ca href=\"https://usvets.org/\">president of the veterans support organization U.S. Vets\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11966540\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11966540\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02.jpg\" alt=\"A person stands in front of an apartment building. They wear a face mask and have glasses.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02.jpg 2000w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02-800x533.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02-160x107.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tory Gibson, a veteran who has experienced homelessness, in San Francisco on Oct. 31, 2023. \u003ccite>( Felix Uribe/CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>San Francisco native and Army veteran Latoya White has struggled to stay housed in the dozen years since she left the service. She has found it difficult to afford rent even though she was able to keep decent jobs at a grocery store, the San Francisco airport and now as a city bus driver.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She was unfamiliar with the resources the VA offered to veterans, like housing vouchers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve always had benefits through my job. I don’t think that then the VA had as many resources as they have now. I did go to the VA and they’re so limited on what they could help me with. So, you know, I just went and got a job and I just was really self-sufficient,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After sleeping in her car and couch surfing for several years, White reached out for help from the advocacy group Swords to Plowshares. That led her to transitional housing, and then to an apartment in San Francisco this June through the HUD-VASH program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A lot of us didn’t even know anything about the HUD-VASH program,” White, 34, said. “A lot of veterans don’t even know that there is assistance out there for them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What does Newsom want to do?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Putting the money into the mental health bond comes with a tradeoff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In advancing Newsom’s mental health plan, lawmakers amended an early version of Assemblymember Irwin’s veterans’ housing bill that would have issued more bonds for\u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVersionsCompareClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB531&cversion=20230AB53199INT\"> the existing veterans’ housing program\u003c/a>. Without new funding, the program that supports the construction of multi-unit veterans’ housing is expected to run out of money in 2024.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still,\u003ca href=\"https://treatmentnottents.com/?gclid=CjwKCAjw15eqBhBZEiwAbDomEmjiLODon4xwymj3drkdEFkEUL9z2Ico7Vj0NhjH04C0RWZuaj8v4RoCphcQAvD_BwE\"> representatives for Newsom’s ballot measure\u003c/a> in a written statement said the bond would create more capacity to help former troops.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Proposition 1 adds new money for California’s most vulnerable veterans without any redirection or reprioritization from the current program. Without Proposition 1, there would be zero funding for homeless veteran housing moving forward, which is why the measure is so critically needed,” the statement read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Altogether, the ballot measure going to voters includes $6.4 billion to fund projects for behavioral health issues and those at risk of homelessness. It also includes a proposal to adjust how the state spends money it collects for mental health services from a tax on personal income over $1 million, aiming to direct more of the funds to housing. [aside label='More Stories on the Unhoused Community' tag='homeless']The $1 billion for veterans housing will be distributed through loans and grants by the Department of Housing and Community Development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Representatives from veterans’ groups say the program’s success could hinge on getting the word out and providing services that provide a path out of homelessness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At U.S. Vets, Peck said the nonprofit strives to create a community where veterans help veterans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Building that community is really important,” he said. “A federal veteran who’s been through the process already is probably more effective than we are as social workers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gibson, who currently lives in transitional housing provided by Swords to Plowshares, has started to find that community through the nonprofit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I talked to them about how I’m struggling with some issues and they are pretty open and supportive about it,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gibson hopes that federal and state services fund more community-oriented programs like hers, so more veterans can feel at home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Despite significant spending on housing, California's unhoused veteran population remains stagnant. Gov. Gavin Newsom aims to redirect resources toward veterans with severe mental health conditions. ","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1699304608,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":true,"iframeSrcs":["https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Z2Fqo/4/","https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/wYJ4R/1/"],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":48,"wordCount":2085},"headData":{"title":"California's Unhoused Crisis Hits Veterans Hard, Despite Funding Efforts | KQED","description":"Despite significant spending on housing, California's unhoused veteran population remains stagnant. Gov. Gavin Newsom aims to redirect resources toward veterans with severe mental health conditions. ","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":""},"source":"CalMatters","sourceUrl":"https://calmatters.org/","nprByline":"\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/author/shreya-agrawal/\">Shreya Agrawal\u003c/a>","excludeFromSiteSearch":"Include","showOnAuthorArchivePages":"No","articleAge":"0","path":"/news/11966533/californias-unhoused-crisis-hits-veterans-hard-despite-funding-efforts","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>California has poured billions of dollars into finding homes for unhoused veterans, but the number of former military service members living on the street has held steady for almost a decade. Today, a third of the nation’s unhoused veterans are in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tori Gibson of San Francisco is one of them. She’s been looking for a stable place to live since she left the Navy seven years ago, and it hasn’t been easy for her. She left the service in part because of health issues that continue to debilitate her. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"‘It was just a really bad spiral of just more disability and then less money and no support.’","name":"pullquote","attributes":{"named":{"size":"medium","align":"right","citation":"Tori Gibson, Navy veteran, San Francisco","label":""},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Now 32 and undergoing a gender transition, she’s struggling to make ends meet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was just a really bad spiral of just more disability and then less money and no support,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s searching for a new start as Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes a significant change in the state’s strategy for ending veteran homelessness. His plan, included in a \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/health/mental-health/2023/09/gavin-newsom-mental-health-2024-election/\">$6.4 billion mental health bond\u003c/a> he’s sending to voters in the March primary election, would set aside funding specifically for veterans with serious behavioral health conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a shift from California’s last two major efforts to fund housing for veterans, which created units for a general population of former military service members.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first effort began in the late 1990s when the state built seven new veterans’ homes over 17 years. Today, those veterans’ homes are underused. They \u003ca href=\"https://www.calvet.ca.gov/Documents/Master%20Plan%202020.pdf\">were built to house about 2,400 people\u003c/a>, but only 1,575 veterans live there. \u003ca href=\"https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/the-state-worker/article242868816.html\">The 300-unit veterans home in Barstow\u003c/a> was so underutilized in 2020 that Newsom moved to close it as he braced for a pandemic recession, although \u003ca href=\"https://abc7.com/save-veterans-home-barstow-veterans-state-cuts-threaten-to-close-shut-down/6249524/\">lawmakers blocked him from shutting the site\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second push centered on a pair of ballot measures voters approved in \u003ca href=\"https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_41,_Veterans_Housing_and_Homeless_Prevention_Bond_(June_2014)\">2014\u003c/a> and in \u003ca href=\"https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_1,_Housing_Programs_and_Veterans%27_Loans_Bond_(2018)\">2018\u003c/a> that allocated $4.6 billion to build housing specifically for former military service members. The money created the \u003ca href=\"https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-and-funding/programs-active/veterans-housing-and-homelessness-prevention\">Veterans Housing and Homelessness Prevention Program\u003c/a>, which has supported the construction of about 3,250 housing units for veterans to date.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Veterans advocates and state officials view the programs — along with federal efforts led by the \u003ca href=\"https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/public_indian_housing/programs/hcv/vash\">Department of Veterans Affairs\u003c/a> — as successful in reducing homelessness among former military service members. In the last 12 years, veteran homelessness in California has decreased by more than 30%.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the trend in California mostly accounts for gains made during the Obama administration, when veteran homelessness peaked nationwide, and the Department of Veterans Affairs moved aggressively to place former troops in housing. Since 2014, the number of homeless veterans in California has mostly plateaued around 10,000 to 12,000 people, according to annual counts released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The number of homeless veterans in California has fallen by more than 4,000 people since data collection began\" aria-label=\"Column Chart\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-Z2Fqo\" src=\"https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Z2Fqo/4/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"400\" data-external=\"1\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said the high numbers of veteran homelessness result from the challenges veterans face on returning home in California’s \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-homeless-growth-report/\">competitive housing market\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When housing markets are unaffordable and incredibly competitive, those with the greatest needs are going to be more likely to fall out,” he said. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"‘When housing markets are unaffordable and incredibly competitive, those with the greatest needs are going to be more likely to fall out.’","name":"pullquote","attributes":{"named":{"size":"medium","align":"right","citation":"Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow, National Alliance to End Homelessness","label":""},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Newsom’s new strategy in the mental health bond, advocates say, should help those most in need. The California Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that half of the state’s unhoused veterans suffer from some behavioral health issue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The money in the bond would go to the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, which would work with CalVet “to focus specifically on housing veterans experiencing behavioral health challenges,” said Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, the Thousand Oaks Democrat who wrote the bill that ultimately put the bond on the ballot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Studies have shown veterans are \u003ca href=\"https://www.research.va.gov/topics/homelessness.cfm\">overrepresented in the nation’s homeless population\u003c/a>. They may experience personal challenges, such as post-traumatic stress disorders or other mental health issues, as well as disabilities related to their military service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Transitioning from that very specific culture and society to civilian life is a lifelong process,” said Amy Fairweather, director of policy at the veterans advocacy group Swords to Plowshares. “If you do have any physical or mental disabilities, dealing with those and trying to re-enter civilian life can be very difficult.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>California’s veterans’ homes\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>California’s long history of providing housing to former military service members dates to 1884 when it opened an estate in \u003ca href=\"https://www.calvet.ca.gov/VetHomes/Pages/Yountville.aspx\">Napa County as the state’s first veterans home\u003c/a>. That site is still in operation, housing around 600 veterans on a picturesque property in wine country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Altogether, the state now has eight veterans homes. The two largest homes are in fairly remote communities — one is in Napa County’s Yountville, and the second is in Barstow in the Mojave Deserts. Moving to them can mean living far from a veteran’s family. That geography somewhat limits interest in the homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The homes account for the lion’s share of CalVet’s $650 million annual budget. Some advocates have called on the state to put money into programs that would benefit people who don’t necessarily want to live in a veterans’ home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"California's veterans homes\" aria-label=\"Locator maps\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-wYJ4R\" src=\"https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/wYJ4R/1/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;\" height=\"599\" data-external=\"1\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Map: Liliana MichelenaSource: \u003ca href=\"https://www.calvet.ca.gov/calvet-programs/veteran-homes\">California Department of Veteran Affairs\u003c/a> Created with \u003ca href=\"https://www.datawrapper.de/_/wYJ4R/\">Datawrapper\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The state should keep its promises to the current home residents, but as things change, the program needs to be less structured on just providing room and board for a minimal number of people and more structured on providing skilled nursing facility care for those who need it,” said Ethan Rarick, executive director at Little Hoover Commission, which published \u003ca href=\"https://lhc.ca.gov/sites/lhc.ca.gov/files/Reports/237/Report237.pdf\">a report on the veterans’ homes in 2017\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Outside of the veterans homes, California approved a series of bonds meant to help military service members find housing beginning in 2008. The Veterans Bond Act, passed that year, provided $900 million to veterans through the CalVet Home Loans Program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2014, California passed an initiative creating the Veterans Housing and Homelessness Program, which put $600 million toward building multi-family homes for veterans. A second ballot initiative in 2018 gave another $4 billion to the program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The federal Department of Veterans Affairs, meanwhile, has kept up steady funding for housing vouchers that can provide a place to live for former troops. The Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program, \u003ca href=\"https://www.va.gov/homeless/hud-vash.asp\">commonly known as HUD-VASH\u003c/a>, was a centerpiece of the Bush and Obama administration’s efforts to curb veterans’ homelessness. It provides rental assistance to over 100,000 veterans nationally.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A steep drop in veteran homelessness\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The number of \u003ca href=\"https://news.va.gov/press-room/ranks-of-homeless-veterans-drop-18-percent/\">unhoused veterans in the U.S. peaked during the Great Recession\u003c/a> when the VA in 2007 reported some 154,000 former troops were homeless.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At that time, Fairweather of Swords to Plowshares said many of those deployed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were starting to come back home “to a society that wasn’t prepared for it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On top of that, they and older veterans struggled in the economic downturn, which led to more unemployment and homelessness. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"‘It all came together in a way that was really disadvantageous to the veterans.’","name":"pullquote","attributes":{"named":{"size":"medium","align":"right","citation":"Amy Fairweather, director of policy, Swords to Plowshares, a veterans advocacy group","label":""},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“It all came together in a way that was really disadvantageous to the veterans,” Fairweather said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year, the VA estimated about \u003ca href=\"https://www.va.gov/homeless/pit_count.asp\">33,000 veterans were homeless\u003c/a> nationwide. According to the 2021 annual homelessness assessment report by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than half are over age 55. The data also shows that Black veterans are more likely to be homeless than veterans belonging to other races.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advocates say veterans can be reluctant to ask for help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When veterans ultimately fall down that hole into homelessness, what is happening along with that is that they’re losing connection with friends and family because they’re ashamed that their life is falling apart and it’s hard for them to ask for help,” said Stephen Peck, \u003ca href=\"https://usvets.org/\">president of the veterans support organization U.S. Vets\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11966540\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11966540\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02.jpg\" alt=\"A person stands in front of an apartment building. They wear a face mask and have glasses.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02.jpg 2000w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02-800x533.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02-160x107.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/CM02-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tory Gibson, a veteran who has experienced homelessness, in San Francisco on Oct. 31, 2023. \u003ccite>( Felix Uribe/CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>San Francisco native and Army veteran Latoya White has struggled to stay housed in the dozen years since she left the service. She has found it difficult to afford rent even though she was able to keep decent jobs at a grocery store, the San Francisco airport and now as a city bus driver.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She was unfamiliar with the resources the VA offered to veterans, like housing vouchers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve always had benefits through my job. I don’t think that then the VA had as many resources as they have now. I did go to the VA and they’re so limited on what they could help me with. So, you know, I just went and got a job and I just was really self-sufficient,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After sleeping in her car and couch surfing for several years, White reached out for help from the advocacy group Swords to Plowshares. That led her to transitional housing, and then to an apartment in San Francisco this June through the HUD-VASH program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A lot of us didn’t even know anything about the HUD-VASH program,” White, 34, said. “A lot of veterans don’t even know that there is assistance out there for them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What does Newsom want to do?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Putting the money into the mental health bond comes with a tradeoff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In advancing Newsom’s mental health plan, lawmakers amended an early version of Assemblymember Irwin’s veterans’ housing bill that would have issued more bonds for\u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVersionsCompareClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB531&cversion=20230AB53199INT\"> the existing veterans’ housing program\u003c/a>. Without new funding, the program that supports the construction of multi-unit veterans’ housing is expected to run out of money in 2024.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still,\u003ca href=\"https://treatmentnottents.com/?gclid=CjwKCAjw15eqBhBZEiwAbDomEmjiLODon4xwymj3drkdEFkEUL9z2Ico7Vj0NhjH04C0RWZuaj8v4RoCphcQAvD_BwE\"> representatives for Newsom’s ballot measure\u003c/a> in a written statement said the bond would create more capacity to help former troops.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Proposition 1 adds new money for California’s most vulnerable veterans without any redirection or reprioritization from the current program. Without Proposition 1, there would be zero funding for homeless veteran housing moving forward, which is why the measure is so critically needed,” the statement read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Altogether, the ballot measure going to voters includes $6.4 billion to fund projects for behavioral health issues and those at risk of homelessness. It also includes a proposal to adjust how the state spends money it collects for mental health services from a tax on personal income over $1 million, aiming to direct more of the funds to housing. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"aside","attributes":{"named":{"label":"More Stories on the Unhoused Community ","tag":"homeless"},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The $1 billion for veterans housing will be distributed through loans and grants by the Department of Housing and Community Development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Representatives from veterans’ groups say the program’s success could hinge on getting the word out and providing services that provide a path out of homelessness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At U.S. Vets, Peck said the nonprofit strives to create a community where veterans help veterans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Building that community is really important,” he said. “A federal veteran who’s been through the process already is probably more effective than we are as social workers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gibson, who currently lives in transitional housing provided by Swords to Plowshares, has started to find that community through the nonprofit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I talked to them about how I’m struggling with some issues and they are pretty open and supportive about it,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gibson hopes that federal and state services fund more community-oriented programs like hers, so more veterans can feel at home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/news/11966533/californias-unhoused-crisis-hits-veterans-hard-despite-funding-efforts","authors":["byline_news_11966533"],"categories":["news_8"],"tags":["news_18538","news_1416","news_27626","news_16","news_23730","news_2109","news_31651","news_31666","news_827"],"featImg":"news_11966539","label":"source_news_11966533"},"news_11632413":{"type":"posts","id":"news_11632413","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"news","id":"11632413","score":null,"sort":[1511211981000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"the-plan-to-get-women-vets-to-use-more-health-services","title":"The Plan to Get Women Vets to Use More Health Services","publishDate":1511211981,"format":"standard","headTitle":"The California Report | KQED News","labelTerm":{},"content":"\u003cp>Denise Berry remembers the day a mortar blew up part of the hospital in Iraq where she was working as a U.S. Army combat medic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The explosion claimed a person in a portable toilet next to her, blew up her truck, and made the ambulance she was working underneath, doing a maintenance check, bounce on top of her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I am lucky to be alive,\" Berry said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She woke up a while later, unsure how long she’d been unconscious. Berry suffered memory loss related to traumatic brain injury, and later, symptoms of PTSD.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After demobilizing and leaving the service, Berry waited. Despite worsening mental health effects from the bombing and her time working in the high-stress environments of emergency rooms and prisons in Iraq, she hesitated to reach out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The resources didn’t come to you. So if you weren’t a very proactive person, you weren’t going to get any help,\" she said. \"And I would have to say that’s for most veterans coming back.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The same thing that made her successful on deployment — the strength to keep it together and handle any obstacle that came her way — motivated Berry to try to tough out the disturbing dreams and anxiety alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She also wondered why her difficulties deserved attention ahead of scores of wounded service members. Berry remembered thinking, \"How could I possibly receive benefits when this person over here is dealing with the ramifications of Agent Orange, or lost a leg?\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11632414\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-11632414\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"878\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full.jpg 1024w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-160x137.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-800x686.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-1020x875.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-960x823.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-240x206.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-375x322.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-520x446.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Army combat medic Denise Berry at Fort Hunter Liggett in 2011. Berry worked in three different prisons in Iraq, on one ambulance team, and in an emergency room. She joined the army in 2007. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Denise Berry )\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Opening up combat jobs to women in the military is bringing a greater need for resources to treat the trauma and mental health challenges that echo after service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the National Institutes of Health has found women veterans underutilize VA health care compared with men. It says many report delaying getting care, and that when they do receive treatment, it's inadequate. Other women aren't seeking help at all, according to the government researchers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A group of nonprofits is testing a new outreach program in Los Angeles County, dubbed Women Vets on Point, which aims to overcome the barriers keeping female veterans from connecting with services.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Experts say there are many possible reasons women don't avail themselves of veteran-specific resources. They may not think of themselves as part of a veteran community that’s dominated by men. Parenthood duties often fall to women and make it difficult to find time to reach out or travel for care. And many women have experienced sexual assault or harassment while serving, an experience that alienates them from military institutions that may have protected their assailants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA has \u003ca href=\"http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/07/11/62418/va-working-to-make-female-veterans-more-welcome-vi/\">made strides\u003c/a> in welcoming the growing number of female veterans and addressing their unique health needs. But for some, the system still feels like a testosterone-only space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Male veterans, their style of banter and communication is very different,\" said Dr. Miatta Snetter, a clinical psychologist with the housing and services nonprofit U.S.VETS. \"Sometimes it can be triggering for female veterans, and they don’t feel comfortable being in that kind of an environment.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>U.S.VETS and Education Development Center (EDC), a nonprofit research organization, are partnering to develop and test Women Vets on Point.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The program is meant to specifically serve women veterans’ needs by overcoming barriers to care, and connect veterans with a range of services in their community, including mental health care, substance abuse treatment, child care, professional development and educational resources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of those services is a U.S.VETS program called Outside the Wire, in which Snetter works with student veterans providing counseling and mental health services on college campuses in Orange County.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’d like more women to knock on her office door.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Oftentimes even in civilian populations, females are more of the nurturers. They’re more apt to take care of others,\" she said. \"They see the problems and concerns that others have, and [don’t] really seek help for themselves.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As part of its pilot program, Women Vets on Point is building a network of partners that have resources for veterans, and will offer small grants to help improve or tailor that care for women vets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There are a lot of clinicians who would love to be able to provide services to female veterans,\" Snetter said. \"They don’t know how.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The biggest outreach tool will be a new website, ideally a one-stop shop for female veterans to find resources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"To educate, to connect people, to help people choose what they want to do next in their own time, when they’re ready,\" said Rebecca Stoeckle with EDC.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>EDC's research has shown peer-to-peer encouragement is an important motivator for female veterans seeking help, so they're tapping interviews and focus groups to develop a site women will feel comfortable sharing with their social network.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With these goals in mind, Stoeckle said the biggest challenge is to restore trust in the help that’s available.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some women veterans feel the system has let them down. They weren’t taken seriously when they suffered mental health difficulties, or the effects of military sexual harassment and assault.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Denise Berry finally went to the VA to address her own psychological wounds of war, she felt her doctors saw a fresh-faced young woman—not a veteran recovering from war-zone trauma.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The first psychiatrist I went to kind of rolled their eyes at me, and said, ‘You know, I really don’t know why you’re wasting my time, because there’s nothing wrong with you,' \" Berry said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We need to do better than that,\" Stoeckle said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After an initial testing period, the developers of Women Vets on Point want to expand the program nationwide. They hope a new kind of outreach spearheaded by community nonprofits outside the VA system may be the on-ramp women need to get back into care, or start it for the first time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Because we are an entity that is not the VA, per se, we may have an opportunity to reopen those doors,\" Stoeckle said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was produced by the American Homefront Project -- a collaboration of North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC, Southern California Public Radio-KPCC, WUSF-Tampa, KPBS-San Diego, Texas Public Radio and North Country Public Radio.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Women veterans underutilize VA health care, so a group of nonprofits is testing a new outreach program in Los Angeles County.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1511219862,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":34,"wordCount":1114},"headData":{"title":"The Plan to Get Women Vets to Use More Health Services | KQED","description":"Women veterans underutilize VA health care, so a group of nonprofits is testing a new outreach program in Los Angeles County.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":""},"disqusIdentifier":"11632413 https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11632413","disqusUrl":"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/11/20/the-plan-to-get-women-vets-to-use-more-health-services/","disqusTitle":"The Plan to Get Women Vets to Use More Health Services","source":"KPCC","sourceUrl":"https://www.scpr.org/news/2017/11/20/77862/an-effort-to-connect-more-women-vets-with-va-healt/","nprByline":"Libby Denkmann\u003cbr>\u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"https://www.scpr.org/about/people/staff/libby-denkmann\">KPCC\u003c/a>\u003c/strong>","path":"/news/11632413/the-plan-to-get-women-vets-to-use-more-health-services","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Denise Berry remembers the day a mortar blew up part of the hospital in Iraq where she was working as a U.S. Army combat medic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The explosion claimed a person in a portable toilet next to her, blew up her truck, and made the ambulance she was working underneath, doing a maintenance check, bounce on top of her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I am lucky to be alive,\" Berry said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She woke up a while later, unsure how long she’d been unconscious. Berry suffered memory loss related to traumatic brain injury, and later, symptoms of PTSD.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After demobilizing and leaving the service, Berry waited. Despite worsening mental health effects from the bombing and her time working in the high-stress environments of emergency rooms and prisons in Iraq, she hesitated to reach out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The resources didn’t come to you. So if you weren’t a very proactive person, you weren’t going to get any help,\" she said. \"And I would have to say that’s for most veterans coming back.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The same thing that made her successful on deployment — the strength to keep it together and handle any obstacle that came her way — motivated Berry to try to tough out the disturbing dreams and anxiety alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She also wondered why her difficulties deserved attention ahead of scores of wounded service members. Berry remembered thinking, \"How could I possibly receive benefits when this person over here is dealing with the ramifications of Agent Orange, or lost a leg?\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11632414\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-11632414\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"878\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full.jpg 1024w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-160x137.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-800x686.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-1020x875.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-960x823.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-240x206.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-375x322.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/178389-full-520x446.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Army combat medic Denise Berry at Fort Hunter Liggett in 2011. Berry worked in three different prisons in Iraq, on one ambulance team, and in an emergency room. She joined the army in 2007. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Denise Berry )\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Opening up combat jobs to women in the military is bringing a greater need for resources to treat the trauma and mental health challenges that echo after service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the National Institutes of Health has found women veterans underutilize VA health care compared with men. It says many report delaying getting care, and that when they do receive treatment, it's inadequate. Other women aren't seeking help at all, according to the government researchers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A group of nonprofits is testing a new outreach program in Los Angeles County, dubbed Women Vets on Point, which aims to overcome the barriers keeping female veterans from connecting with services.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Experts say there are many possible reasons women don't avail themselves of veteran-specific resources. They may not think of themselves as part of a veteran community that’s dominated by men. Parenthood duties often fall to women and make it difficult to find time to reach out or travel for care. And many women have experienced sexual assault or harassment while serving, an experience that alienates them from military institutions that may have protected their assailants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA has \u003ca href=\"http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/07/11/62418/va-working-to-make-female-veterans-more-welcome-vi/\">made strides\u003c/a> in welcoming the growing number of female veterans and addressing their unique health needs. But for some, the system still feels like a testosterone-only space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Male veterans, their style of banter and communication is very different,\" said Dr. Miatta Snetter, a clinical psychologist with the housing and services nonprofit U.S.VETS. \"Sometimes it can be triggering for female veterans, and they don’t feel comfortable being in that kind of an environment.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>U.S.VETS and Education Development Center (EDC), a nonprofit research organization, are partnering to develop and test Women Vets on Point.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The program is meant to specifically serve women veterans’ needs by overcoming barriers to care, and connect veterans with a range of services in their community, including mental health care, substance abuse treatment, child care, professional development and educational resources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of those services is a U.S.VETS program called Outside the Wire, in which Snetter works with student veterans providing counseling and mental health services on college campuses in Orange County.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’d like more women to knock on her office door.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Oftentimes even in civilian populations, females are more of the nurturers. They’re more apt to take care of others,\" she said. \"They see the problems and concerns that others have, and [don’t] really seek help for themselves.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As part of its pilot program, Women Vets on Point is building a network of partners that have resources for veterans, and will offer small grants to help improve or tailor that care for women vets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There are a lot of clinicians who would love to be able to provide services to female veterans,\" Snetter said. \"They don’t know how.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The biggest outreach tool will be a new website, ideally a one-stop shop for female veterans to find resources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"To educate, to connect people, to help people choose what they want to do next in their own time, when they’re ready,\" said Rebecca Stoeckle with EDC.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>EDC's research has shown peer-to-peer encouragement is an important motivator for female veterans seeking help, so they're tapping interviews and focus groups to develop a site women will feel comfortable sharing with their social network.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With these goals in mind, Stoeckle said the biggest challenge is to restore trust in the help that’s available.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some women veterans feel the system has let them down. They weren’t taken seriously when they suffered mental health difficulties, or the effects of military sexual harassment and assault.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Denise Berry finally went to the VA to address her own psychological wounds of war, she felt her doctors saw a fresh-faced young woman—not a veteran recovering from war-zone trauma.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The first psychiatrist I went to kind of rolled their eyes at me, and said, ‘You know, I really don’t know why you’re wasting my time, because there’s nothing wrong with you,' \" Berry said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We need to do better than that,\" Stoeckle said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After an initial testing period, the developers of Women Vets on Point want to expand the program nationwide. They hope a new kind of outreach spearheaded by community nonprofits outside the VA system may be the on-ramp women need to get back into care, or start it for the first time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Because we are an entity that is not the VA, per se, we may have an opportunity to reopen those doors,\" Stoeckle said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was produced by the American Homefront Project -- a collaboration of North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC, Southern California Public Radio-KPCC, WUSF-Tampa, KPBS-San Diego, Texas Public Radio and North Country Public Radio.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/news/11632413/the-plan-to-get-women-vets-to-use-more-health-services","authors":["byline_news_11632413"],"programs":["news_72"],"categories":["news_457","news_6188"],"tags":["news_2109","news_80","news_17286","news_237","news_827"],"affiliates":["news_7055"],"featImg":"news_11632415","label":"source_news_11632413"},"news_11298297":{"type":"posts","id":"news_11298297","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"news","id":"11298297","score":null,"sort":[1486073507000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"va-hospitals-still-struggling-with-adding-staff-despite-billions-from-choice-act","title":"VA Hospitals Still Struggling With Adding Staff Despite Billions From Choice Act","publishDate":1486073507,"format":"standard","headTitle":"The California Report | KQED News","labelTerm":{},"content":"\u003cp>Before they get to work on reforming the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Congress and the White House might want to take a closer look at the last time they tried it — a $16 billion fix called the \u003ca href=\"https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr3230/text\">Veterans Choice and Accountability Act\u003c/a> of 2014, designed to get veterans medical care more quickly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR and local member stations have been following that money, including the $10 billion for vets to get care \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/series/479609181/from-back-at-base-coverage-of-the-veterans-choice-program\">outside the VA system\u003c/a>. The Choice Act also channeled about $2.5 billion for hiring more doctors, nurses and other medical staff at VA medical centers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The goal of the hiring money was to address a simple math problem. The number of veterans coming to the VA has shot up in recent years, and the number of medical staff has not kept pace. The idea was that more caregivers would cut wait times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But an investigation by NPR and local member stations found that: the VA has about the same number of new hires as the VA would have been projected to hire without the additional $2.5 billion; the new hires weren't sent to VA hospitals with the longest wait times; and the VA medical centers that got new hires were not more likely to see improved wait times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe src=\"https://www.npr.org/player/embed/512052311/512592790\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" title=\"NPR embedded audio player\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>San Diego's wait-time dilemma\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Diego's experience is typical. The Southern California city is home to one of the largest concentrations of post-9/11 veterans, and when the Veterans Choice Act passed, the San Diego VA had some of the country's worst wait times for mental health care in particular. The act was meant to help former soldiers like Charlie Grijalva, who was diagnosed with PTSD when he was still in the Army.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in 2014, Grijalva lived with his wife, Gloria, in Imperial Valley — about two hours from the VA hospital in San Diego. After spending 18 months deployed in Afghanistan, and a year in Iraq, he started having suicidal thoughts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA tried to help him. Early in 2014, the doctors there seemed to get his prescription right. By summer, his psychiatrist had left the VA, but Grijalva was transferred to a nurse practitioner. He missed an appointment in September 2014, according to records provided by the VA, but the new provider agreed to refill his prescription over the phone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because San Diego's wait times were so long, under the new Choice program, Grijalva qualified to see a private doctor outside the VA system. He had an initial consultation with the private psychiatrist near his home, but he didn't live to begin treatment. In December 2014, his medication ran out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grijalva had a young family and a new baby on the way. His wife said he insisted on giving his kids a magical Christmas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"He said, you know, 'I want to do what I did as a kid,' \" Gloria Grijalva said. \"Play some Christmas music. Have the kids decorate the tree, drink hot chocolate. ... Even though he was feeling the way he was, he wanted to have that kind of Christmas for his kids.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It wasn't to be. A few days before Christmas, his wife found him. He had hanged himself a few hours after he texted her, \"I love you.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"He has told me when he was at his lowest that [he] 'didn't want my kids to see me like this; I don't want to put my kids through this,' \" she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His VA records show Grijalva went to one last appointment at the VA in San Diego, scheduled in December. His medication arrived just before his death. Around the time of his death, the VA was just beginning to implement the Veterans Choice Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Diego seemed like a prime candidate to get extra staff. But the NPR and local member station analysis of the VA's own data show that San Diego got far fewer new staff members than it requested, and also fewer than many other VA centers that didn't have such bad wait times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-11298363\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlStaffVA-800x730.jpg\" alt=\"AddlStaffVA\" width=\"800\" height=\"730\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlStaffVA.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlStaffVA-160x146.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlStaffVA-240x219.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlStaffVA-375x342.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlStaffVA-520x475.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>No logical staffing pattern\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA data show no logical pattern for distributing the 12,000 doctors, nurses and other medical staff hired under the Choice Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Shulkin became head of the Veterans Health Administration after that law passed, but has been overseeing the reform since 2015. Last fall, he told NPR that the Choice hires were based on a survey of VA medical centers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Our goal is to get [the medical centers] the health professionals that they need. So that's the Choice money. We wanted everybody to go out and execute on it, and to use that money as quickly as possible because we have a sense of crisis,\" said Shulkin, who has been nominated to become secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. His confirmation hearing is expected this week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He also said the VA focused on places where the staff was most needed. Thirty-three medical centers were \"prioritized\" among the VA's 168 hospitals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the VA data show that prioritized medical centers didn't always get more resources than others. Los Angeles was prioritized and got only about 108 new hires from the Choice money. Dallas, a similarly large center, got almost three times as many (298), even though Dallas was not \"prioritized\" and didn't have particularly bad wait times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-11298376\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-800x790.jpg\" alt=\"AddlVAstaff\" width=\"800\" height=\"790\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-160x158.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-240x237.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-375x370.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-520x514.jpg 520w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-32x32.jpg 32w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-50x50.jpg 50w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-64x64.jpg 64w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-96x96.jpg 96w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Cincinnati have about the same volume of appointments. But Albuquerque had among the worst wait times in the country for mental health, while Cincinnati was among the best. The VA's data show both received the same number of psychiatrists from the Choice money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wait times across the board have not come down, though the VA says that's because of a continuing surge in demand from patients. And Shulkin stressed that wait times are not the most important measure of health care. He says efficiency is up and the number of veterans waiting for urgent care has shrunk from tens of thousands to a mere dozen or two. Still, it was the long wait times — and the harm they did to veterans — that drove Congress to pass the Choice Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Slow hiring in a tough market\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Doctors and nurses are scarce nationwide. In the economic centers where many vets live, medical professionals often find better offers at private hospitals. And in rural or remote areas, there often are very few doctors or nurses available to work at either VA or private hospitals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shulkin knows that his hiring process is cumbersome.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The complexity of hiring puts us at a disadvantage with the private sector. We are very fortunate that people wait and turn down private sector jobs because this is where they want to work and this is the mission ... but frankly we have to be competitive,\" he told NPR last fall.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shulkin came to the VA from the private sector, he said, to get the department in step with best practices. He has succeeded in getting some salaries up to private-sector levels. But the roughly $2.5 billion from the Choice Act resulted in a net gain of only a few thousand doctors and nurses, across a system that serves about 9 million veterans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11298308\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-11298308\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-800x503.jpg\" alt=\"Secretary of Veterans' Affairs-designate David Shulkin testifies during a Senate confirmation hearing on February 1, 2017.\" width=\"800\" height=\"503\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-800x503.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-160x101.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-1020x642.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin.jpg 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-1180x742.jpg 1180w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-960x604.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-240x151.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-375x236.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-520x327.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Secretary of Veterans Affairs-designate David Shulkin testifies during a Senate confirmation hearing on Feb. 1, 2017. \u003ccite>(ZACH GIBSON/AFP/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>That's partly because the VA's process is so slow that about 13 percent of candidates drop out during the months-long lag time after they are hired. NPR and local member stations spoke with more than half a dozen current VA employees about this problem, but none agreed to be quoted. Almetta Pitts is a former VA employee who used to work at the VA in Seattle. Waiting to start that job nearly left her broke.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It took about six months. And so I had to think about ways to just put my money together to be able to really be able to pursue this job,\" she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pitts liked the VA. She interned at the VA in Seattle while pursuing her master's in social work. Her mother, an Army vet, was already working there as a federal police officer. After a series of interviews, Pitts was notified she had been hired.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I received my acceptance letter and it did inform me that I started that September and I was like 'Oh my gosh, I'm so excited,' but ... 'Wow, it's like May.' \"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During the four months of waiting, Pitts moved back in with her mom to save money until the job started. She ended up working for the VA for 13 months and was laid off. At the time, Human Resources offered to help find another job at a VA out of state. She loved her work helping traumatized veterans, but Pitts decided she had to move on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Budget shuffling\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another reason the $2.5 billion bump didn't seem to raise the VA's staffing levels may have more to do with Washington bureaucracy than health care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR found that the rate of increase in VA staff after the Choice money was not noticeably different than past years without it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Choice hiring money from Congress mostly replaced, instead of augmented, the VA's normal hiring budget, which freed up less restricted money to take care of other needs. Shulkin defends how the money was spent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"When you're given a budget you face a number of new stresses on those resources. You have increases in pharmaceuticals, you have your wage increase, you have your leasing cost increases, you have IT increases. So without the Choice money, we would not have been able to have maintained the type of hiring that we were doing and expanded the type of hiring we were doing,\" Shulkin told NPR in December.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This sort of budgeting strategy is common in Washington, according to Phil Carter, of the Center for New American Security.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It makes complete sense for a self-interested bureaucracy to hire with that money first. I think VA hired staff with this money will all intention of improving access and quality. I think the VA leadership found it harder to do that,\" he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carter says that the VA has a difficult time projecting what needs it will have across a system of 168 hospitals nationwide, and that the VA may just have been hiring at its maximum capacity in a tough market.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"But I don't see malice here, just the basic inefficacy of American bureaucracy,\" Carter said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But some Republicans in Congress do see something more malicious — a shell game to free up money from congressional restrictions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A spokesman for the House Committee on Veterans Affairs said: \"It was a money grab, with no plan on where to put people, and VA used the funds to fill existing vacancies for the most part.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>NPR's Juan Elosua contributed to this story.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story is part of a project we're calling \"\u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/series/363340041/back-at-base\">Back at Base,\u003c/a>\"\u003cem> in which NPR — along with public radio stations around the country — is chronicling the lives of America's troops where they live.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\" target=\"_blank\">NPR.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Money from the Veterans Choice Act, which was meant to improve medical staffing levels at VA health centers, has had little impact on hiring numbers and how quickly vets get access to medical care.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1486078719,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":52,"wordCount":1878},"headData":{"title":"VA Hospitals Still Struggling With Adding Staff Despite Billions From Choice Act | KQED","description":"Money from the Veterans Choice Act, which was meant to improve medical staffing levels at VA health centers, has had little impact on hiring numbers and how quickly vets get access to medical care.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":""},"disqusIdentifier":"11298297 https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11298297","disqusUrl":"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/02/va-hospitals-still-struggling-with-adding-staff-despite-billions-from-choice-act/","disqusTitle":"VA Hospitals Still Struggling With Adding Staff Despite Billions From Choice Act","source":"NPR","sourceUrl":"http://www.npr.org/","nprByline":"\u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/people/105678418/quil-lawrence\">Quil Lawrence, Steve Walsh, Patricia Murphy, Stephan Bisaha\u003c/strong>","nprImageAgency":"KPBS","nprStoryId":"512052311","nprApiLink":"http://api.npr.org/query?id=512052311&apiKey=MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004","nprHtmlLink":"http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512052311/va-hospitals-still-struggling-with-adding-staff-despite-billions-from-choice-act?ft=nprml&f=512052311","nprRetrievedStory":"1","nprPubDate":"Wed, 01 Feb 2017 07:25:00 -0500","nprStoryDate":"Tue, 31 Jan 2017 04:58:00 -0500","nprLastModifiedDate":"Tue, 31 Jan 2017 09:35:57 -0500","nprAudio":"https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2017/01/20170131_me_va_hospitals_still_struggling_with_adding_staff_despite_billions_from_choice_act.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1003&aggIds=479609181,363340041&d=423&p=3&story=512052311&t=progseg&e=512583156&seg=4&ft=nprml&f=512052311","nprAudioM3u":"http://api.npr.org/m3u/1512592790-ea55cd.m3u?orgId=1&topicId=1003&aggIds=479609181,363340041&d=423&p=3&story=512052311&t=progseg&e=512583156&seg=4&ft=nprml&f=512052311","path":"/news/11298297/va-hospitals-still-struggling-with-adding-staff-despite-billions-from-choice-act","audioUrl":"https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2017/01/20170131_me_va_hospitals_still_struggling_with_adding_staff_despite_billions_from_choice_act.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1003&aggIds=479609181,363340041&d=423&p=3&story=512052311&t=progseg&e=512583156&seg=4&ft=nprml&f=512052311","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Before they get to work on reforming the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Congress and the White House might want to take a closer look at the last time they tried it — a $16 billion fix called the \u003ca href=\"https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr3230/text\">Veterans Choice and Accountability Act\u003c/a> of 2014, designed to get veterans medical care more quickly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR and local member stations have been following that money, including the $10 billion for vets to get care \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/series/479609181/from-back-at-base-coverage-of-the-veterans-choice-program\">outside the VA system\u003c/a>. The Choice Act also channeled about $2.5 billion for hiring more doctors, nurses and other medical staff at VA medical centers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The goal of the hiring money was to address a simple math problem. The number of veterans coming to the VA has shot up in recent years, and the number of medical staff has not kept pace. The idea was that more caregivers would cut wait times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But an investigation by NPR and local member stations found that: the VA has about the same number of new hires as the VA would have been projected to hire without the additional $2.5 billion; the new hires weren't sent to VA hospitals with the longest wait times; and the VA medical centers that got new hires were not more likely to see improved wait times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe src=\"https://www.npr.org/player/embed/512052311/512592790\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" title=\"NPR embedded audio player\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>San Diego's wait-time dilemma\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Diego's experience is typical. The Southern California city is home to one of the largest concentrations of post-9/11 veterans, and when the Veterans Choice Act passed, the San Diego VA had some of the country's worst wait times for mental health care in particular. The act was meant to help former soldiers like Charlie Grijalva, who was diagnosed with PTSD when he was still in the Army.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in 2014, Grijalva lived with his wife, Gloria, in Imperial Valley — about two hours from the VA hospital in San Diego. After spending 18 months deployed in Afghanistan, and a year in Iraq, he started having suicidal thoughts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA tried to help him. Early in 2014, the doctors there seemed to get his prescription right. By summer, his psychiatrist had left the VA, but Grijalva was transferred to a nurse practitioner. He missed an appointment in September 2014, according to records provided by the VA, but the new provider agreed to refill his prescription over the phone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because San Diego's wait times were so long, under the new Choice program, Grijalva qualified to see a private doctor outside the VA system. He had an initial consultation with the private psychiatrist near his home, but he didn't live to begin treatment. In December 2014, his medication ran out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grijalva had a young family and a new baby on the way. His wife said he insisted on giving his kids a magical Christmas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"He said, you know, 'I want to do what I did as a kid,' \" Gloria Grijalva said. \"Play some Christmas music. Have the kids decorate the tree, drink hot chocolate. ... Even though he was feeling the way he was, he wanted to have that kind of Christmas for his kids.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It wasn't to be. A few days before Christmas, his wife found him. He had hanged himself a few hours after he texted her, \"I love you.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"He has told me when he was at his lowest that [he] 'didn't want my kids to see me like this; I don't want to put my kids through this,' \" she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His VA records show Grijalva went to one last appointment at the VA in San Diego, scheduled in December. His medication arrived just before his death. Around the time of his death, the VA was just beginning to implement the Veterans Choice Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Diego seemed like a prime candidate to get extra staff. But the NPR and local member station analysis of the VA's own data show that San Diego got far fewer new staff members than it requested, and also fewer than many other VA centers that didn't have such bad wait times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-11298363\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlStaffVA-800x730.jpg\" alt=\"AddlStaffVA\" width=\"800\" height=\"730\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlStaffVA.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlStaffVA-160x146.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlStaffVA-240x219.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlStaffVA-375x342.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlStaffVA-520x475.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>No logical staffing pattern\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA data show no logical pattern for distributing the 12,000 doctors, nurses and other medical staff hired under the Choice Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Shulkin became head of the Veterans Health Administration after that law passed, but has been overseeing the reform since 2015. Last fall, he told NPR that the Choice hires were based on a survey of VA medical centers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Our goal is to get [the medical centers] the health professionals that they need. So that's the Choice money. We wanted everybody to go out and execute on it, and to use that money as quickly as possible because we have a sense of crisis,\" said Shulkin, who has been nominated to become secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. His confirmation hearing is expected this week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He also said the VA focused on places where the staff was most needed. Thirty-three medical centers were \"prioritized\" among the VA's 168 hospitals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the VA data show that prioritized medical centers didn't always get more resources than others. Los Angeles was prioritized and got only about 108 new hires from the Choice money. Dallas, a similarly large center, got almost three times as many (298), even though Dallas was not \"prioritized\" and didn't have particularly bad wait times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-11298376\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-800x790.jpg\" alt=\"AddlVAstaff\" width=\"800\" height=\"790\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-160x158.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-240x237.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-375x370.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-520x514.jpg 520w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-32x32.jpg 32w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-50x50.jpg 50w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-64x64.jpg 64w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/AddlVAstaff-96x96.jpg 96w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Cincinnati have about the same volume of appointments. But Albuquerque had among the worst wait times in the country for mental health, while Cincinnati was among the best. The VA's data show both received the same number of psychiatrists from the Choice money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wait times across the board have not come down, though the VA says that's because of a continuing surge in demand from patients. And Shulkin stressed that wait times are not the most important measure of health care. He says efficiency is up and the number of veterans waiting for urgent care has shrunk from tens of thousands to a mere dozen or two. Still, it was the long wait times — and the harm they did to veterans — that drove Congress to pass the Choice Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Slow hiring in a tough market\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Doctors and nurses are scarce nationwide. In the economic centers where many vets live, medical professionals often find better offers at private hospitals. And in rural or remote areas, there often are very few doctors or nurses available to work at either VA or private hospitals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shulkin knows that his hiring process is cumbersome.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The complexity of hiring puts us at a disadvantage with the private sector. We are very fortunate that people wait and turn down private sector jobs because this is where they want to work and this is the mission ... but frankly we have to be competitive,\" he told NPR last fall.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shulkin came to the VA from the private sector, he said, to get the department in step with best practices. He has succeeded in getting some salaries up to private-sector levels. But the roughly $2.5 billion from the Choice Act resulted in a net gain of only a few thousand doctors and nurses, across a system that serves about 9 million veterans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11298308\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-11298308\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-800x503.jpg\" alt=\"Secretary of Veterans' Affairs-designate David Shulkin testifies during a Senate confirmation hearing on February 1, 2017.\" width=\"800\" height=\"503\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-800x503.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-160x101.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-1020x642.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin.jpg 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-1180x742.jpg 1180w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-960x604.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-240x151.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-375x236.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2017/02/Shulkin-520x327.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Secretary of Veterans Affairs-designate David Shulkin testifies during a Senate confirmation hearing on Feb. 1, 2017. \u003ccite>(ZACH GIBSON/AFP/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>That's partly because the VA's process is so slow that about 13 percent of candidates drop out during the months-long lag time after they are hired. NPR and local member stations spoke with more than half a dozen current VA employees about this problem, but none agreed to be quoted. Almetta Pitts is a former VA employee who used to work at the VA in Seattle. Waiting to start that job nearly left her broke.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It took about six months. And so I had to think about ways to just put my money together to be able to really be able to pursue this job,\" she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pitts liked the VA. She interned at the VA in Seattle while pursuing her master's in social work. Her mother, an Army vet, was already working there as a federal police officer. After a series of interviews, Pitts was notified she had been hired.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I received my acceptance letter and it did inform me that I started that September and I was like 'Oh my gosh, I'm so excited,' but ... 'Wow, it's like May.' \"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During the four months of waiting, Pitts moved back in with her mom to save money until the job started. She ended up working for the VA for 13 months and was laid off. At the time, Human Resources offered to help find another job at a VA out of state. She loved her work helping traumatized veterans, but Pitts decided she had to move on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Budget shuffling\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another reason the $2.5 billion bump didn't seem to raise the VA's staffing levels may have more to do with Washington bureaucracy than health care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR found that the rate of increase in VA staff after the Choice money was not noticeably different than past years without it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Choice hiring money from Congress mostly replaced, instead of augmented, the VA's normal hiring budget, which freed up less restricted money to take care of other needs. Shulkin defends how the money was spent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"When you're given a budget you face a number of new stresses on those resources. You have increases in pharmaceuticals, you have your wage increase, you have your leasing cost increases, you have IT increases. So without the Choice money, we would not have been able to have maintained the type of hiring that we were doing and expanded the type of hiring we were doing,\" Shulkin told NPR in December.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This sort of budgeting strategy is common in Washington, according to Phil Carter, of the Center for New American Security.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It makes complete sense for a self-interested bureaucracy to hire with that money first. I think VA hired staff with this money will all intention of improving access and quality. I think the VA leadership found it harder to do that,\" he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carter says that the VA has a difficult time projecting what needs it will have across a system of 168 hospitals nationwide, and that the VA may just have been hiring at its maximum capacity in a tough market.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"But I don't see malice here, just the basic inefficacy of American bureaucracy,\" Carter said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But some Republicans in Congress do see something more malicious — a shell game to free up money from congressional restrictions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A spokesman for the House Committee on Veterans Affairs said: \"It was a money grab, with no plan on where to put people, and VA used the funds to fill existing vacancies for the most part.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>NPR's Juan Elosua contributed to this story.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story is part of a project we're calling \"\u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/series/363340041/back-at-base\">Back at Base,\u003c/a>\"\u003cem> in which NPR — along with public radio stations around the country — is chronicling the lives of America's troops where they live.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\" target=\"_blank\">NPR.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/news/11298297/va-hospitals-still-struggling-with-adding-staff-despite-billions-from-choice-act","authors":["byline_news_11298297"],"programs":["news_6944","news_72"],"categories":["news_457","news_8","news_13"],"tags":["news_2109","news_80","news_2139","news_17286","news_827"],"affiliates":["news_253"],"featImg":"news_11298298","label":"source_news_11298297"},"news_11286464":{"type":"posts","id":"news_11286464","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"news","id":"11286464","score":null,"sort":[1485387102000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"hiring-freeze-and-obamacare-repeal-could-clobber-veterans-affairs","title":"Hiring Freeze and Obamacare Repeal Could Clobber Veterans Affairs","publishDate":1485387102,"format":"image","headTitle":"The California Report | KQED News","labelTerm":{},"content":"\u003cp>As promised, President Trump has moved to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. It's a concern for those who might be left without health insurance — and especially for the Department of Veterans Affairs, which may have to pick up some of the slack.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carrie Farmer, a health policy researcher at the Rand Corp., says 3 million vets who are enrolled in the VA usually get their health care elsewhere — from their employer, or maybe from Obamacare exchanges. If those options go away, she has no idea just how many of those 3 million veterans will move over to the VA.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I would expect that the number of veterans using VA health care will increase, which will only provide a further challenge for VA to provide timely and accessible care,\" Farmer says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA has already seen a surge in usage in the past year, straining what has long been an overtaxed system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That could get worse if the agency can't fill vacancies. Trump signed a federal hiring freeze this week, and while national security is supposed to be exempt, the VA is not. White House spokesman Sean Spicer called it a \"broken\" system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The VA in particular, if you look at the problems that have plagued people, hiring more people isn't the answer. It's hiring the right people,\" Spicer told reporters on Tuesday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/304532100\" params=\"color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just hours after the White House emphasized that there would be no exemption for the VA from the hiring freeze, the acting secretary of the agency, Robert Snyder, seemed to issue a contradiction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The Department of Veterans Affairs intends to exempt anyone it deems necessary for public safety, including front-line caregivers,\" he said in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Shulkin, Trump's nominee to lead the VA, in the past has stressed an urgent need to hire more caregivers. Shulkin has run the VA's health administration for the past two years, and he told NPR this past fall that negative attention to VA caused a 78 percent drop in applications there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We have 45,000 job openings. That's too many,\" Shulkin said. \"I need to fill every one of those openings in order to make sure that we're doing the very best for our veterans.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shulkin said the VA performs as well or better than private health care systems, but he said that long before he was asked to \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/11/509318144/trump-announces-david-shulkin-as-pick-for-secretary-of-veterans-affairs\" target=\"_blank\">join the Trump administration\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\" target=\"_blank\">NPR.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, some of those left uninsured will be veterans. They may turn to the VA, further burdening a troubled health care system.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1485562000,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":15,"wordCount":446},"headData":{"title":"Hiring Freeze and Obamacare Repeal Could Clobber Veterans Affairs | KQED","description":"If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, some of those left uninsured will be veterans. They may turn to the VA, further burdening a troubled health care system.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":""},"disqusIdentifier":"11286464 https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11286464","disqusUrl":"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/01/25/hiring-freeze-and-obamacare-repeal-could-clobber-veterans-affairs/","disqusTitle":"Hiring Freeze and Obamacare Repeal Could Clobber Veterans Affairs","source":"NPR","sourceUrl":"http://www.npr.org/","nprImageCredit":"Ross D. Franklin","nprByline":"Quil Lawrence","nprImageAgency":"AP","nprStoryId":"511469982","nprApiLink":"http://api.npr.org/query?id=511469982&apiKey=MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004","nprHtmlLink":"http://www.npr.org/2017/01/25/511469982/hiring-freeze-and-obamacare-repeal-could-clobber-veterans-affairs?ft=nprml&f=511469982","nprRetrievedStory":"1","nprPubDate":"Wed, 25 Jan 2017 09:10:00 -0500","nprStoryDate":"Wed, 25 Jan 2017 04:34:00 -0500","nprLastModifiedDate":"Wed, 25 Jan 2017 10:18:40 -0500","nprAudio":"https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2017/01/20170125_me_hiring_freeze_and_obamacare_repeal_could_clobber_veterans_affairs.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1014&d=126&p=3&story=511469982&t=progseg&e=511537841&seg=4&ft=nprml&f=511469982","nprAudioM3u":"http://api.npr.org/m3u/1511554882-e0266f.m3u?orgId=1&topicId=1014&d=126&p=3&story=511469982&t=progseg&e=511537841&seg=4&ft=nprml&f=511469982","path":"/news/11286464/hiring-freeze-and-obamacare-repeal-could-clobber-veterans-affairs","audioUrl":"https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2017/01/20170125_me_hiring_freeze_and_obamacare_repeal_could_clobber_veterans_affairs.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1014&d=126&p=3&story=511469982&t=progseg&e=511537841&seg=4&ft=nprml&f=511469982","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>As promised, President Trump has moved to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. It's a concern for those who might be left without health insurance — and especially for the Department of Veterans Affairs, which may have to pick up some of the slack.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carrie Farmer, a health policy researcher at the Rand Corp., says 3 million vets who are enrolled in the VA usually get their health care elsewhere — from their employer, or maybe from Obamacare exchanges. If those options go away, she has no idea just how many of those 3 million veterans will move over to the VA.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I would expect that the number of veterans using VA health care will increase, which will only provide a further challenge for VA to provide timely and accessible care,\" Farmer says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA has already seen a surge in usage in the past year, straining what has long been an overtaxed system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That could get worse if the agency can't fill vacancies. Trump signed a federal hiring freeze this week, and while national security is supposed to be exempt, the VA is not. White House spokesman Sean Spicer called it a \"broken\" system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The VA in particular, if you look at the problems that have plagued people, hiring more people isn't the answer. It's hiring the right people,\" Spicer told reporters on Tuesday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cdiv class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__shortcodes__shortcodeWrapper'>\n \u003ciframe width='100%' height='166'\n scrolling='no' frameborder='no'\n src='https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/304532100&visual=true&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false'\n title='https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/304532100'>\n \u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/div>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just hours after the White House emphasized that there would be no exemption for the VA from the hiring freeze, the acting secretary of the agency, Robert Snyder, seemed to issue a contradiction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The Department of Veterans Affairs intends to exempt anyone it deems necessary for public safety, including front-line caregivers,\" he said in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Shulkin, Trump's nominee to lead the VA, in the past has stressed an urgent need to hire more caregivers. Shulkin has run the VA's health administration for the past two years, and he told NPR this past fall that negative attention to VA caused a 78 percent drop in applications there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We have 45,000 job openings. That's too many,\" Shulkin said. \"I need to fill every one of those openings in order to make sure that we're doing the very best for our veterans.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shulkin said the VA performs as well or better than private health care systems, but he said that long before he was asked to \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/11/509318144/trump-announces-david-shulkin-as-pick-for-secretary-of-veterans-affairs\" target=\"_blank\">join the Trump administration\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\" target=\"_blank\">NPR.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/news/11286464/hiring-freeze-and-obamacare-repeal-could-clobber-veterans-affairs","authors":["byline_news_11286464"],"programs":["news_6944","news_72"],"categories":["news_457","news_8","news_13"],"tags":["news_2409","news_1323","news_3890","news_17286","news_237","news_827"],"affiliates":["news_253"],"featImg":"news_11286470","label":"source_news_11286464"},"news_140416":{"type":"posts","id":"news_140416","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"news","id":"140416","score":null,"sort":[1403967637000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"gi-bill-education-funds-flow-to-for-profit-colleges-that-fail-state-aid-standards","title":"GI Bill Funds Flow to For-Profit Colleges That Fail State Aid Standards","publishDate":1403967637,"format":"aside","headTitle":"News Fix | KQED News","labelTerm":{"term":6944,"site":"news"},"content":"\u003cp>\u003cstrong>By Aaron Glantz\u003cbr>\n\u003ca href=\"http://cironline.org/\" target=\"_blank\">The Center for Investigative Reporting\u003c/a>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_140423\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/University-of-Phoenix-framegrab02-1.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-140423\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/University-of-Phoenix-framegrab02-1-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"Nationally, the University of Phoenix received nearly $1 billion from the new GI Bill over the last five years. (Adithya Sambamurthy/CIR)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Nationally, the University of Phoenix received nearly $1 billion from the new GI Bill over the last five years. (Adithya Sambamurthy/CIR)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Over the last five years, more than $600 million in college assistance for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans has been spent on California schools so substandard that they have failed to qualify for state financial aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a result, the GI Bill — designed to help veterans live the American dream — is supporting for-profit companies that spend lavishly on marketing but can leave veterans with worthless degrees and few job prospects, The Center for Investigative Reporting found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not education. I think it’s just greed,” said David Pace, a 20-year Navy veteran who used the GI Bill to obtain a business degree from the University of Phoenix’s San Diego campus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"511dfa846fa8fcfa2073ff5b5b11265e\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although taxpayers spent an estimated $50,000 on Pace’s education, he has the same blue-collar job he landed right after he left the service: running electrical cable for a defense contractor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Financial records analyzed by CIR show that California is the national epicenter of this problem, with nearly 2 out of every 3 GI Bill dollars going to for-profit colleges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://www.phoenix.edu/campus-locations/ca/san-diego-campus/san-diego-campus.html\" target=\"_blank\">University of Phoenix in San Diego\u003c/a> outdistances its peers. Since 2009, the campus has received $95 million in GI Bill funds. That’s more than any brick-and-mortar campus in America, more than the entire 10-campus University of California system and all UC extension programs combined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the University of Phoenix, this is a sign of success.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'It's not education; I think it's just greed.'\u003ccite>David Pace, Navy veteran\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“Veterans choose the University of Phoenix,” said Garland Williams, its vice president for military affairs. “The programs we offer are the ones that they desire and lead to careers that they want to aspire to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The school’s large share of GI Bill funding reflects more than just the number of veterans enrolling. The programs are expensive. An associate degree costs $395 a credit, for instance – nearly 10 times the cost at a public community college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The University of Phoenix won’t say how many of its veterans graduate or find jobs, but the overall graduation rate at its San Diego campus is less than 15 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education, and more than a quarter of students default on their loans within three years of leaving school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those figures fall short of the minimum standards set by the \u003ca href=\"http://sandbox.csac.ca.gov/CalGrant_Inst/CalGrantInstSearch.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">California Student Aid Commission\u003c/a>, which dispenses state financial aid. The commission considers either a graduation rate lower than 30 percent or a loan default rate of more than 15.5 percent clear indicators of a substandard education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No such restrictions govern GI Bill funds. And nearly 300 California schools that received GI Bill money either were barred from receiving state financial aid at least once in the past four years or operated without accreditation, CIR has found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe src=\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads-cironline-org/interactives/substandard/index.html\" width=\"640\" height=\"300\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the $1.5 billion in GI Bill funds spent on tuition and fees in California since 2009, CIR found that more than 40 percent – $638 million – went to schools that have failed the state financial aid standard at least once in the past four years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Four of those schools were University of Phoenix campuses, which together took in $225 million.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the others are massage schools, paralegal programs and auto repair academies. More than a third — 121 schools — have no academic accreditation, like the \u003ca href=\"http://www.humansexualityeducation.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality\u003c/a> in San Francisco and the \u003ca href=\"http://www.farrierschool.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Pacific Coast Horseshoeing School \u003c/a>in Amador County.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is not what advocates hoped for when they pushed a new GI Bill through Congress in 2008. With its approval, the government for the first time since World War II committed to funding the full cost of a college education for veterans — pegged to the price tag for in-state tuition at the most costly public universities, up to $19,000 a year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The advocacy group \u003ca href=\"http://iava.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America\u003c/a> pushed hard for the bill’s passage. The results have been disappointing, said Political Director Kate O’Gorman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Enormous amounts of GI Bill dollars” are going to schools that don’t see veterans as the future of the country, she said. Instead, companies are “seeing the benefit dollars they can line their pockets with.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_140424\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/david-pace03_adi.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-140424\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/david-pace03_adi-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"David Pace works as a maintenance electrician at Naval Base San Diego, despite having a University of Phoenix degree paid for with GI Bill funds. (Adithya Sambamurthy/CIR)\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Pace works as a maintenance electrician at Naval Base San Diego, despite having a University of Phoenix degree paid for with GI Bill funds. (Adithya Sambamurthy/CIR)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Nationally, the University of Phoenix received nearly $1 billion from the new GI Bill over the last five years. In all, 80,000 veterans of America’s recent wars spent their GI Bill money at 89 of its campuses and its online college, Department of Veterans Affairs data show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it’s impossible to tell whether those veterans are receiving a quality education. In fact, no one from any state or federal government knows whether veterans who go to school on the GI Bill graduate or find jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The University of Phoenix’s San Diego campus doesn’t look like a college. It’s a few mid-rise office buildings in a suburban office park, indistinguishable from the life insurance company that occupies the glass-and-steel structure across the street.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a Friday morning in early May, a team of inspectors from the California VA pulled into the parking lot and headed to a conference room, where the college’s staff had laid out piles of student veterans’ transcripts and financial records.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The audit’s purpose is to ensure that GI Bill money is properly spent, but auditors don’t sit in on classes or review the qualifications of instructors. “That’s not a part of the visit at all,” said Latanaya Johnson, one of the agency’s senior inspectors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Auditors look exclusively at paperwork, she said, to make sure schools aren’t billing the government for students who don’t exist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The University of Phoenix is under fire from its accrediting agency. In a\u003ca href=\"https://www.ncahlc.org/download/_PublicDisclosureNotices/FINAL%20UPDATED%20University%20of%20Phoenix%20PDN.pdf\" target=\"_blank\"> public disclosure in October\u003c/a>, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncahlc.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Higher Learning Commission\u003c/a> said the school failed to show that its “learning resources support student learning and effective teaching.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Williams, the University of Phoenix vice president, downplayed the severity of the sanction, noting that the school was given a year to present a correction plan. But he wouldn’t detail specific failures that led to the sanction and, as a private company, the University of Phoenix is exempt from public records laws.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_140427\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/gi-funds.png\">\u003cimg class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-140427\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/gi-funds-300x300.png\" alt=\"The University of Phoenix's San Diego campus has received more GI funds since 2009 than all 10 UC campuses combined. (CIR)\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The University of Phoenix's San Diego campus has received more GI funds since 2009 than all 10 UC campuses combined. (CIR)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Lawmakers in Washington are well aware that GI Bill money is being wasted. In 2012, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, issued a scathing \u003ca href=\"http://www.harkin.senate.gov/help/forprofitcolleges.cfm\" target=\"_blank\">5,000-page report \u003c/a>detailing the practices of 30 large for-profit education firms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But when Harkin and his colleagues try to solve the problem, they run into a wall of opposition from the for-profit industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the failed legislation: a bill that would have blocked schools with no academic accreditation from receiving GI Bill money. Another bill, which would have barred for-profit schools from spending GI Bill funds on advertising, marketing or recruiting, never got out of committee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the new GI Bill became law, the University of Phoenix’s corporate parent has spent $4.8 million on lobbying Congress, the White House and the federal VA, according to official lobbying records. Now, the legislative fight is moving to the state level, where the for-profit education industry also wields considerable clout.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In California, legislation to prevent schools with low graduation rates and high student loan default rates from receiving GI Bill money was gutted of those measures before its first legislative hearing earlier this year. For-profit colleges continued to oppose the bill, however, because it would have forced schools to tell regulators how many veterans graduate and how many find jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In April, the University of Phoenix’s lobbyist, Scott Govenar, sent a letter to Mike Gatto, D-Burbank, chairman of the Assembly Appropriations Committee. It argued that telling state regulators how many veterans graduate and find jobs would be cumbersome and “of little practical value.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill passed the Assembly at the end of May on a 62-4 vote and headed to the state Senate. But by then, the reporting requirement also had been removed, though unaccredited schools would become ineligible for GI Bill funds in 2017.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill’s author, Democrat Jim Frazier of Fairfield, characterized the weakened bill as a first step in a years-long battle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you try to take too big a bite of the apple in some instances, it’s counterproductive because they fail,” he said. “So you try to go in increments.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was edited by Amy Pyle and copy edited by Nikki Frick and Christine Lee.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"For-profit colleges in California make big bucks off veteran education funds, but aren't showing results.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1403916399,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":41,"wordCount":1566},"headData":{"title":"GI Bill Funds Flow to For-Profit Colleges That Fail State Aid Standards | KQED","description":"For-profit colleges in California make big bucks off veteran education funds, but aren't showing results.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":""},"disqusIdentifier":"140416 http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=140416","disqusUrl":"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/06/28/gi-bill-education-funds-flow-to-for-profit-colleges-that-fail-state-aid-standards/","disqusTitle":"GI Bill Funds Flow to For-Profit Colleges That Fail State Aid Standards","path":"/news/140416/gi-bill-education-funds-flow-to-for-profit-colleges-that-fail-state-aid-standards","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>By Aaron Glantz\u003cbr>\n\u003ca href=\"http://cironline.org/\" target=\"_blank\">The Center for Investigative Reporting\u003c/a>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_140423\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/University-of-Phoenix-framegrab02-1.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-140423\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/University-of-Phoenix-framegrab02-1-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"Nationally, the University of Phoenix received nearly $1 billion from the new GI Bill over the last five years. (Adithya Sambamurthy/CIR)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Nationally, the University of Phoenix received nearly $1 billion from the new GI Bill over the last five years. (Adithya Sambamurthy/CIR)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Over the last five years, more than $600 million in college assistance for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans has been spent on California schools so substandard that they have failed to qualify for state financial aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a result, the GI Bill — designed to help veterans live the American dream — is supporting for-profit companies that spend lavishly on marketing but can leave veterans with worthless degrees and few job prospects, The Center for Investigative Reporting found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not education. I think it’s just greed,” said David Pace, a 20-year Navy veteran who used the GI Bill to obtain a business degree from the University of Phoenix’s San Diego campus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although taxpayers spent an estimated $50,000 on Pace’s education, he has the same blue-collar job he landed right after he left the service: running electrical cable for a defense contractor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Financial records analyzed by CIR show that California is the national epicenter of this problem, with nearly 2 out of every 3 GI Bill dollars going to for-profit colleges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://www.phoenix.edu/campus-locations/ca/san-diego-campus/san-diego-campus.html\" target=\"_blank\">University of Phoenix in San Diego\u003c/a> outdistances its peers. Since 2009, the campus has received $95 million in GI Bill funds. That’s more than any brick-and-mortar campus in America, more than the entire 10-campus University of California system and all UC extension programs combined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the University of Phoenix, this is a sign of success.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'It's not education; I think it's just greed.'\u003ccite>David Pace, Navy veteran\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“Veterans choose the University of Phoenix,” said Garland Williams, its vice president for military affairs. “The programs we offer are the ones that they desire and lead to careers that they want to aspire to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The school’s large share of GI Bill funding reflects more than just the number of veterans enrolling. The programs are expensive. An associate degree costs $395 a credit, for instance – nearly 10 times the cost at a public community college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The University of Phoenix won’t say how many of its veterans graduate or find jobs, but the overall graduation rate at its San Diego campus is less than 15 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education, and more than a quarter of students default on their loans within three years of leaving school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those figures fall short of the minimum standards set by the \u003ca href=\"http://sandbox.csac.ca.gov/CalGrant_Inst/CalGrantInstSearch.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">California Student Aid Commission\u003c/a>, which dispenses state financial aid. The commission considers either a graduation rate lower than 30 percent or a loan default rate of more than 15.5 percent clear indicators of a substandard education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No such restrictions govern GI Bill funds. And nearly 300 California schools that received GI Bill money either were barred from receiving state financial aid at least once in the past four years or operated without accreditation, CIR has found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe src=\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads-cironline-org/interactives/substandard/index.html\" width=\"640\" height=\"300\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the $1.5 billion in GI Bill funds spent on tuition and fees in California since 2009, CIR found that more than 40 percent – $638 million – went to schools that have failed the state financial aid standard at least once in the past four years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Four of those schools were University of Phoenix campuses, which together took in $225 million.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the others are massage schools, paralegal programs and auto repair academies. More than a third — 121 schools — have no academic accreditation, like the \u003ca href=\"http://www.humansexualityeducation.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality\u003c/a> in San Francisco and the \u003ca href=\"http://www.farrierschool.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Pacific Coast Horseshoeing School \u003c/a>in Amador County.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is not what advocates hoped for when they pushed a new GI Bill through Congress in 2008. With its approval, the government for the first time since World War II committed to funding the full cost of a college education for veterans — pegged to the price tag for in-state tuition at the most costly public universities, up to $19,000 a year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The advocacy group \u003ca href=\"http://iava.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America\u003c/a> pushed hard for the bill’s passage. The results have been disappointing, said Political Director Kate O’Gorman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Enormous amounts of GI Bill dollars” are going to schools that don’t see veterans as the future of the country, she said. Instead, companies are “seeing the benefit dollars they can line their pockets with.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_140424\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/david-pace03_adi.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-140424\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/david-pace03_adi-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"David Pace works as a maintenance electrician at Naval Base San Diego, despite having a University of Phoenix degree paid for with GI Bill funds. (Adithya Sambamurthy/CIR)\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Pace works as a maintenance electrician at Naval Base San Diego, despite having a University of Phoenix degree paid for with GI Bill funds. (Adithya Sambamurthy/CIR)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Nationally, the University of Phoenix received nearly $1 billion from the new GI Bill over the last five years. In all, 80,000 veterans of America’s recent wars spent their GI Bill money at 89 of its campuses and its online college, Department of Veterans Affairs data show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it’s impossible to tell whether those veterans are receiving a quality education. In fact, no one from any state or federal government knows whether veterans who go to school on the GI Bill graduate or find jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The University of Phoenix’s San Diego campus doesn’t look like a college. It’s a few mid-rise office buildings in a suburban office park, indistinguishable from the life insurance company that occupies the glass-and-steel structure across the street.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a Friday morning in early May, a team of inspectors from the California VA pulled into the parking lot and headed to a conference room, where the college’s staff had laid out piles of student veterans’ transcripts and financial records.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The audit’s purpose is to ensure that GI Bill money is properly spent, but auditors don’t sit in on classes or review the qualifications of instructors. “That’s not a part of the visit at all,” said Latanaya Johnson, one of the agency’s senior inspectors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Auditors look exclusively at paperwork, she said, to make sure schools aren’t billing the government for students who don’t exist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The University of Phoenix is under fire from its accrediting agency. In a\u003ca href=\"https://www.ncahlc.org/download/_PublicDisclosureNotices/FINAL%20UPDATED%20University%20of%20Phoenix%20PDN.pdf\" target=\"_blank\"> public disclosure in October\u003c/a>, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncahlc.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Higher Learning Commission\u003c/a> said the school failed to show that its “learning resources support student learning and effective teaching.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Williams, the University of Phoenix vice president, downplayed the severity of the sanction, noting that the school was given a year to present a correction plan. But he wouldn’t detail specific failures that led to the sanction and, as a private company, the University of Phoenix is exempt from public records laws.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_140427\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/gi-funds.png\">\u003cimg class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-140427\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/gi-funds-300x300.png\" alt=\"The University of Phoenix's San Diego campus has received more GI funds since 2009 than all 10 UC campuses combined. (CIR)\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The University of Phoenix's San Diego campus has received more GI funds since 2009 than all 10 UC campuses combined. (CIR)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Lawmakers in Washington are well aware that GI Bill money is being wasted. In 2012, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, issued a scathing \u003ca href=\"http://www.harkin.senate.gov/help/forprofitcolleges.cfm\" target=\"_blank\">5,000-page report \u003c/a>detailing the practices of 30 large for-profit education firms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But when Harkin and his colleagues try to solve the problem, they run into a wall of opposition from the for-profit industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the failed legislation: a bill that would have blocked schools with no academic accreditation from receiving GI Bill money. Another bill, which would have barred for-profit schools from spending GI Bill funds on advertising, marketing or recruiting, never got out of committee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the new GI Bill became law, the University of Phoenix’s corporate parent has spent $4.8 million on lobbying Congress, the White House and the federal VA, according to official lobbying records. Now, the legislative fight is moving to the state level, where the for-profit education industry also wields considerable clout.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In California, legislation to prevent schools with low graduation rates and high student loan default rates from receiving GI Bill money was gutted of those measures before its first legislative hearing earlier this year. For-profit colleges continued to oppose the bill, however, because it would have forced schools to tell regulators how many veterans graduate and how many find jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In April, the University of Phoenix’s lobbyist, Scott Govenar, sent a letter to Mike Gatto, D-Burbank, chairman of the Assembly Appropriations Committee. It argued that telling state regulators how many veterans graduate and find jobs would be cumbersome and “of little practical value.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill passed the Assembly at the end of May on a 62-4 vote and headed to the state Senate. But by then, the reporting requirement also had been removed, though unaccredited schools would become ineligible for GI Bill funds in 2017.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill’s author, Democrat Jim Frazier of Fairfield, characterized the weakened bill as a first step in a years-long battle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you try to take too big a bite of the apple in some instances, it’s counterproductive because they fail,” he said. “So you try to go in increments.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was edited by Amy Pyle and copy edited by Nikki Frick and Christine Lee.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/news/140416/gi-bill-education-funds-flow-to-for-profit-colleges-that-fail-state-aid-standards","authors":["236"],"programs":["news_6944"],"categories":["news_18540","news_8"],"tags":["news_5982","news_827"],"featImg":"news_140423","label":"news_6944"},"news_137173":{"type":"posts","id":"news_137173","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"news","id":"137173","score":null,"sort":[1401155085000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"memorial-day-a-veteran-stops-to-meet-a-stranger","title":"Memorial Day: A Veteran Stops to Meet a Stranger","publishDate":1401155085,"format":"audio","headTitle":"News Fix | KQED News","labelTerm":{"term":6944,"site":"news"},"content":"\u003cp>Driving to a Memorial Day commemoration in Oakland this morning, Walnut Creek resident John Kopping saw a man with a dirt-stained T-shirt and well-kept beard holding a sign that said simply, \"Homeless Vet.\" As Kopping neared Mountain View Cemetery, he decided to turn around and see whether the man wanted to join him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's how Kopping, an Army veteran, met Iraq/Afghanistan veteran Robert Hackett, a former Marine who's been living on the streets of Oakland for the past couple of weeks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’d been sitting with my sign for a couple of hours and I got $2,\" Hackett said. \"He drove by once and he looked at me with a look, and he came back and told me about this and I wanted to go. I really miss being in the service.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kopping said he wasn't sure if Hackett would come with him, and he knew it might be emotionally painful. Still, he had to ask.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I needed to share it with somebody,\" Kopping said. \"He looked like he needed some help.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both men said they were glad Kopping decided to stop and Hackett decided to accompany him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Listen above as Hackett and Kopping describe their meeting and what they're feeling on Memorial Day.\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"A chance encounter prompts a vet to reach out to one who's struggling with post-service life.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1655251684,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":9,"wordCount":217},"headData":{"title":"Memorial Day: A Veteran Stops to Meet a Stranger | KQED","description":"A chance encounter prompts a vet to reach out to one who's struggling with post-service life.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":""},"disqusIdentifier":"137173 http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=137173","disqusUrl":"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/05/26/memorial-day-a-veteran-stops-to-meet-a-stranger/","disqusTitle":"Memorial Day: A Veteran Stops to Meet a Stranger","audioUrl":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/06/Two-Veterans-Meet-on-Memorial-Day.mp3","templateType":"standard","featuredImageType":"standard","excludeFromSiteSearch":"Include","path":"/news/137173/memorial-day-a-veteran-stops-to-meet-a-stranger","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Driving to a Memorial Day commemoration in Oakland this morning, Walnut Creek resident John Kopping saw a man with a dirt-stained T-shirt and well-kept beard holding a sign that said simply, \"Homeless Vet.\" As Kopping neared Mountain View Cemetery, he decided to turn around and see whether the man wanted to join him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's how Kopping, an Army veteran, met Iraq/Afghanistan veteran Robert Hackett, a former Marine who's been living on the streets of Oakland for the past couple of weeks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’d been sitting with my sign for a couple of hours and I got $2,\" Hackett said. \"He drove by once and he looked at me with a look, and he came back and told me about this and I wanted to go. I really miss being in the service.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kopping said he wasn't sure if Hackett would come with him, and he knew it might be emotionally painful. Still, he had to ask.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I needed to share it with somebody,\" Kopping said. \"He looked like he needed some help.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both men said they were glad Kopping decided to stop and Hackett decided to accompany him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Listen above as Hackett and Kopping describe their meeting and what they're feeling on Memorial Day.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/news/137173/memorial-day-a-veteran-stops-to-meet-a-stranger","authors":["3206"],"programs":["news_6944"],"categories":["news_8"],"tags":["news_237","news_827"],"featImg":"news_10342891","label":"news_6944"},"news_131442":{"type":"posts","id":"news_131442","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"news","id":"131442","score":null,"sort":[1396530017000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"fifty-nine-california-veterans-died-while-in-government-care","title":"VA Pays $200 Million For 1,000 Wrongful Deaths","publishDate":1396530017,"format":"aside","headTitle":"News Fix | KQED News","labelTerm":{"term":6944,"site":"news"},"content":"\u003cp>\u003cstrong>By Aaron Glantz\u003cbr>\n\u003ca href=\"http://cironline.org/\" target=\"_blank\">The Center for Investigative Reporting\u003c/a>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_131446\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/04/opiates_hospital.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-131446\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/04/opiates_hospital-640x365.jpg\" alt=\"In the decade after 9/11, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs paid more than $200 million to nearly 1,000 families in wrongful death cases, including eight deaths that occurred at this VA hospital in Roseburg, Oregon. (Adithya Sambamurthy/CIR)\" width=\"640\" height=\"365\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In the decade after 9/11, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs paid more than $200 million to nearly 1,000 families in wrongful death cases, including eight deaths that occurred at this VA hospital in Roseburg, Ore. (Adithya Sambamurthy/CIR)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>An Iraq War veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder and a history of drug dependency is found dead on the floor of his room at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in West Los Angeles after doctors give him a 30-day supply of the anti-anxiety medication alprazolam and a 15-day supply of methadone. At the VA in San Diego, an intern fails to remove a central-line catheter in a hospitalized veteran, causing his immediate death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In San Francisco, a Vietnam veteran is admitted to the VA with a special notation that he is prone to falling. Hospital staff regularly leave him unattended, and the veteran falls five times over two weeks, injuring his head, finger, ribs and left knee. After each fall, VA doctors prescribe escalating doses of narcotic painkillers until he overdoses and is moved to hospice care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These are some of the deaths that resulted in more than $200 million in wrongful death payments by the Department of Veterans Affairs in the decade after 9/11, according to VA data obtained by The Center for Investigative Reporting.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">“It wasn't about the money, I just thought somebody should be held accountable.”\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>In that time, CIR found the agency made wrongful death payments to nearly 1,000 grieving families, including 59 in California, ranging from decorated Iraq War veterans who shot or hanged themselves after being turned away from mental health treatment, to Vietnam veterans whose cancerous tumors were identified but allowed to grow, to missed diagnoses, botched surgeries and fatal neglect of elderly veterans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It wasn’t about the money. I just thought somebody should be held accountable,” said 86-year-old Doris Street, who received a $135,000 settlement in 2010 as compensation for the 2008 death of her brother, Carl Glaze. The median payment in VA wrongful death cases was $150,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Glaze, a World War II veteran, became paralyzed from the neck down when he fell in the bathroom two days after being admitted to a VA nursing home in Grand Island, Neb. He died nine days later at age 84.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had asked them not to leave him alone, and then they left him in the bathroom,” she said. “We all get upset when these things happen.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a written response to questions, agency spokeswoman Victoria Dillon said that while “any adverse incident for a veteran within our care is one too many,” the wrongful deaths identified by CIR represented a small fraction of the more than 6 million veterans who seek care from the agency every year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency, Dillon said, is “committed to continuous improvement.” When a death occurs, “we conduct a thorough review to understand what happened, prevent similar incidents in the future, and share lessons learned across the system,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The revelations come as the department faces intense scrutiny from members of Congress over the number of preventable deaths at VA facilities. The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs has scheduled a hearing on preventable deaths for April 9.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe src=\"http://wrongful-deaths.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\" width=\"640\" height=\"550\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In September, the committee held a hearing to examine patient deaths at VA hospitals in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Dallas and Jackson, Miss.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the hearing, lawmakers accused the agency of failing to discipline officials responsible for unnecessary deaths, pointing out that it has instead provided performance bonuses to these executives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, after an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease at the agency’s hospital in Pittsburgh left six veterans dead and at least 21 ill, the VA regional director, Michael Moreland, received a nearly $63,000 bonus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A five-page performance evaluation, which led to the bonus, made no mention of the outbreak, which began in 2011. After receiving the bonus, Moreland retired.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not enough for VA to simply compensate the families of those who died,” said Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “In order to provide real closure for those struck by these heartbreaking preventable deaths, VA needs to hold fully accountable the employees who allowed patients to slip through the cracks.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At a budget hearing March 13, lawmakers pressed Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki to provide examples of agency staff who had been disciplined after medical errors resulted in a veteran’s death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shinseki responded more generally, saying 6,000 VA employees had been “involuntarily removed” over the past two years, including six senior managers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Independent legal analysts say the nearly 1,000 wrongful death payments in the decade after 9/11 represent a small percentage of the veterans who have died because of malpractice by the Department of Veterans Affairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike the private sector, where survivors can file cases in state and federal court and often win large punitive damages, families of patients who die under VA care must exhaust a monthslong administrative review process before filing a lawsuit. Even if they succeed, families can win only actual and not punitive damages from the federal government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a result, lawyers are reluctant to take cases, and many families never file – or see a dime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The VA fights every case tooth and nail, and so cases drag on for years,” said Cristobal Bonifaz, a Massachusetts attorney who in 2009 won a $350,000 settlement for the parents of Marine Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey. Lucey was 23 when he hanged himself with a garden hose in his parents’ basement after being turned away from psychiatric care at the VA in Northampton, Mass. The payout came five years after his death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among Bonifaz’s current clients is Tracy Eiswert, who had moved into her car with her two young children after her husband, 31-year-old Iraq War veteran Scott Eiswert, shot himself in the head in 2008. The Nashville, Tenn., VA had denied his disability claim for post-traumatic stress disorder.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Three months after his death, the VA reversed itself, saying it was “clearly and unmistakably in error” for failing to grant Scott Eiswert’s disability claim, and the agency began sending Tracy Eiswert survivor benefits checks of $1,195 a month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the reversal, Tracy Eiswert decided to press ahead with a wrongful death lawsuit against the VA, in part because of the toll her husband’s suicide took on their children. “We’re still living with it today,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA declined to comment on Scott Eiswert’s death. In court, the VA has defended itself on a legal technicality, arguing that Tennessee law supersedes federal law in the case and that the Eiswert family failed to follow procedures prescribed in the state statute.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Filed in 2010, the case is still pending.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>CIR intern Nicholas B. Hirsch contributed to this story. It was edited by Amy Pyle, copy edited by Sheela Kamath and Nikki Frick, and produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting, an award-winning, nonprofit newsroom in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more, visit cironline.org/veterans. Glantz can be reached at aglantz@cironline.org, and follow him on Twitter at @Aaron_Glantz.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"In the decade after 9/11, the VA made wrongful death payments for nearly 1,000 U.S. vets, including 59 in California.\r\n","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1396541005,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":31,"wordCount":1256},"headData":{"title":"VA Pays $200 Million For 1,000 Wrongful Deaths | KQED","description":"In the decade after 9/11, the VA made wrongful death payments for nearly 1,000 U.S. vets, including 59 in California.\r\n","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":""},"disqusIdentifier":"131442 http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=131442","disqusUrl":"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/04/03/fifty-nine-california-veterans-died-while-in-government-care/","disqusTitle":"VA Pays $200 Million For 1,000 Wrongful Deaths","customPermalink":"2014/04/02/VA-veteran-wrongful-death-payments/","path":"/news/131442/fifty-nine-california-veterans-died-while-in-government-care","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>By Aaron Glantz\u003cbr>\n\u003ca href=\"http://cironline.org/\" target=\"_blank\">The Center for Investigative Reporting\u003c/a>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_131446\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/04/opiates_hospital.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-131446\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/04/opiates_hospital-640x365.jpg\" alt=\"In the decade after 9/11, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs paid more than $200 million to nearly 1,000 families in wrongful death cases, including eight deaths that occurred at this VA hospital in Roseburg, Oregon. (Adithya Sambamurthy/CIR)\" width=\"640\" height=\"365\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In the decade after 9/11, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs paid more than $200 million to nearly 1,000 families in wrongful death cases, including eight deaths that occurred at this VA hospital in Roseburg, Ore. (Adithya Sambamurthy/CIR)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>An Iraq War veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder and a history of drug dependency is found dead on the floor of his room at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in West Los Angeles after doctors give him a 30-day supply of the anti-anxiety medication alprazolam and a 15-day supply of methadone. At the VA in San Diego, an intern fails to remove a central-line catheter in a hospitalized veteran, causing his immediate death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In San Francisco, a Vietnam veteran is admitted to the VA with a special notation that he is prone to falling. Hospital staff regularly leave him unattended, and the veteran falls five times over two weeks, injuring his head, finger, ribs and left knee. After each fall, VA doctors prescribe escalating doses of narcotic painkillers until he overdoses and is moved to hospice care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These are some of the deaths that resulted in more than $200 million in wrongful death payments by the Department of Veterans Affairs in the decade after 9/11, according to VA data obtained by The Center for Investigative Reporting.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">“It wasn't about the money, I just thought somebody should be held accountable.”\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>In that time, CIR found the agency made wrongful death payments to nearly 1,000 grieving families, including 59 in California, ranging from decorated Iraq War veterans who shot or hanged themselves after being turned away from mental health treatment, to Vietnam veterans whose cancerous tumors were identified but allowed to grow, to missed diagnoses, botched surgeries and fatal neglect of elderly veterans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It wasn’t about the money. I just thought somebody should be held accountable,” said 86-year-old Doris Street, who received a $135,000 settlement in 2010 as compensation for the 2008 death of her brother, Carl Glaze. The median payment in VA wrongful death cases was $150,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Glaze, a World War II veteran, became paralyzed from the neck down when he fell in the bathroom two days after being admitted to a VA nursing home in Grand Island, Neb. He died nine days later at age 84.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had asked them not to leave him alone, and then they left him in the bathroom,” she said. “We all get upset when these things happen.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a written response to questions, agency spokeswoman Victoria Dillon said that while “any adverse incident for a veteran within our care is one too many,” the wrongful deaths identified by CIR represented a small fraction of the more than 6 million veterans who seek care from the agency every year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency, Dillon said, is “committed to continuous improvement.” When a death occurs, “we conduct a thorough review to understand what happened, prevent similar incidents in the future, and share lessons learned across the system,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The revelations come as the department faces intense scrutiny from members of Congress over the number of preventable deaths at VA facilities. The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs has scheduled a hearing on preventable deaths for April 9.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe src=\"http://wrongful-deaths.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\" width=\"640\" height=\"550\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In September, the committee held a hearing to examine patient deaths at VA hospitals in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Dallas and Jackson, Miss.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the hearing, lawmakers accused the agency of failing to discipline officials responsible for unnecessary deaths, pointing out that it has instead provided performance bonuses to these executives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, after an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease at the agency’s hospital in Pittsburgh left six veterans dead and at least 21 ill, the VA regional director, Michael Moreland, received a nearly $63,000 bonus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A five-page performance evaluation, which led to the bonus, made no mention of the outbreak, which began in 2011. After receiving the bonus, Moreland retired.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not enough for VA to simply compensate the families of those who died,” said Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “In order to provide real closure for those struck by these heartbreaking preventable deaths, VA needs to hold fully accountable the employees who allowed patients to slip through the cracks.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At a budget hearing March 13, lawmakers pressed Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki to provide examples of agency staff who had been disciplined after medical errors resulted in a veteran’s death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shinseki responded more generally, saying 6,000 VA employees had been “involuntarily removed” over the past two years, including six senior managers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Independent legal analysts say the nearly 1,000 wrongful death payments in the decade after 9/11 represent a small percentage of the veterans who have died because of malpractice by the Department of Veterans Affairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike the private sector, where survivors can file cases in state and federal court and often win large punitive damages, families of patients who die under VA care must exhaust a monthslong administrative review process before filing a lawsuit. Even if they succeed, families can win only actual and not punitive damages from the federal government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a result, lawyers are reluctant to take cases, and many families never file – or see a dime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The VA fights every case tooth and nail, and so cases drag on for years,” said Cristobal Bonifaz, a Massachusetts attorney who in 2009 won a $350,000 settlement for the parents of Marine Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey. Lucey was 23 when he hanged himself with a garden hose in his parents’ basement after being turned away from psychiatric care at the VA in Northampton, Mass. The payout came five years after his death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among Bonifaz’s current clients is Tracy Eiswert, who had moved into her car with her two young children after her husband, 31-year-old Iraq War veteran Scott Eiswert, shot himself in the head in 2008. The Nashville, Tenn., VA had denied his disability claim for post-traumatic stress disorder.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Three months after his death, the VA reversed itself, saying it was “clearly and unmistakably in error” for failing to grant Scott Eiswert’s disability claim, and the agency began sending Tracy Eiswert survivor benefits checks of $1,195 a month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the reversal, Tracy Eiswert decided to press ahead with a wrongful death lawsuit against the VA, in part because of the toll her husband’s suicide took on their children. “We’re still living with it today,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA declined to comment on Scott Eiswert’s death. In court, the VA has defended itself on a legal technicality, arguing that Tennessee law supersedes federal law in the case and that the Eiswert family failed to follow procedures prescribed in the state statute.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Filed in 2010, the case is still pending.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>CIR intern Nicholas B. Hirsch contributed to this story. It was edited by Amy Pyle, copy edited by Sheela Kamath and Nikki Frick, and produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting, an award-winning, nonprofit newsroom in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more, visit cironline.org/veterans. Glantz can be reached at aglantz@cironline.org, and follow him on Twitter at @Aaron_Glantz.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/news/131442/fifty-nine-california-veterans-died-while-in-government-care","authors":["236"],"programs":["news_6944"],"categories":["news_6188","news_8"],"tags":["news_1416","news_5982","news_827"],"featImg":"news_131446","label":"news_6944"},"news_104557":{"type":"posts","id":"news_104557","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"news","id":"104557","score":null,"sort":[1374764400000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"her-war-thousands-of-women-veterans-return-to-no-home","title":"Her War: The Aftermath of Military Sexual Assault","publishDate":1374764400,"format":"aside","headTitle":"News Fix | KQED News","labelTerm":{"term":6944,"site":"news"},"content":"\u003cp>\u003cstrong>By Mimi Chakarova, \u003ca href=\"http://cironline.org/\">Center for Investigative Reporting\u003c/a>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/vfvjqtnmCJI\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 1990, the number of women veterans in the United States has doubled to 1.8 million. But a lot of female veterans, especially those who are younger, don’t consider themselves veterans at all — they incorrectly assume that a \"vet\" must have served in combat. Thus, many of their stories remain hidden from the public eye.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robert Rosenthal, who runs the Center for Investigative Reporting, spoke with me last summer about doing a documentary on the increasing number of women veterans who end up on the street. I was interested in this issue because of my previous work as a filmmaker and photojournalist documenting violence against women, and my work filming in Baghdad's Red Zone in 2009. I decided to focus on the Greater Los Angeles area because the region has one of the highest numbers of homeless veterans in the country – over 8,500 – with many living in hellish conditions on LA's notorious Skid Row.\u003c!--more-->\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I wound up doing profiles of eight women vets, some who had returned from Iraq and had served in combat units, and others who were stationed in Germany during the Cold War. One recurring theme that emerged was the majority had experience what the armed services calls \"\u003ca href=\"http://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/pages/military-sexual-trauma-general.asp\">Military sexual trauma\u003c/a>\" while on duty. Most had been raped by their immediate supervisors and had remained silent for years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How I met Renee\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here is how I met Renee Banton, the 'star' of the film. While going through reports on homeless vets in California, I read about a place called \"New Directions\" in West LA, which was the first in the country to offer a specific program for women veterans facing addiction and homelessness. Renee was listed as the main contact person, so I gave her a call. I left several messages, but no luck. So I decided to do what I always taught my journalism students at Berkeley to try if someone doesn't return your call: just show up. I drove to LA, but was able to reach Renee on the phone on the way there. She said she was really swamped but could spare 15 minutes in the morning. I met her at a residential home for women veterans, and because of the honesty with which she told her story, I knew immediately that she would be the thread in the film.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_104604\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2015/07/06_CHAKAROVA.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-104604\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2015/07/06_CHAKAROVA-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Renee revisits Skid Row after nine years of sobriety. "I don't belong here any more," she said when she walked back to where I was standing. (Mimi Chakarova/Center for Investigative Reporting)\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Renee revisits Skid Row after nine years of sobriety. \"I don't belong here any more,\" she said when she walked back to where I was standing. (Mimi Chakarova/Center for Investigative Reporting)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In her early 20s, Renee was an Air Force accountant who was sexually assaulted on base by a colleague. The following day, she went to her supervisor to report the assault.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Didn't you say you fought him off?\" asked her supervisor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Renee nodded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"So, what’s the problem then?\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A month later, Renee was assaulted again by the same person.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After completing her service, Renee returned to Los Angeles and gradually started to unravel. She drank, got high. More and more she wanted to disappear. And one day, after collecting her last check from her job, she decided to get off the bus while passing through Skid Row. She cashed her check, purchased crack, and for the next 12 years was an addict forced to find ways to survive on the streets. She sold her body, begged, and lived with drug dealers who used her as much as she used them. She built cardboard shelters to stay warm at night. She learned to always stash her drugs or smoke them real fast because police horses were trained to sniff them out. She learned to always pay the dealers on time. And she learned that sometimes, people get thrown out of buildings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Renee told me her story without pausing. There was no hesitation, no question she wouldn’t answer honestly. So I asked her if she would allow me to film her for one month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Will it help other people?\" she asked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Yes.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Then when do we get started?\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was naive. I thought I could go under a bridge or to a beach or park and meet a whole group of women vets, who stuck together through the hard times. I thought I could stay with them and document their stories. That wasn’t the case. They were invisible. Homeless women stay hidden, travel alone or with their children, and many won’t tell you they’ve served in the military because they don't identify as vets or because they are unable to connect with the past. Many suffer from PTSD and hard addiction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Filming the invisible\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Renee told me it would be difficult to find them — and even harder to get them to tell their story on camera. But it was important for me to show the women’s faces because it chips away at the maddening stigma that perpetuates sexual abuse in the military. The VA and the Pentagon estimate that one out of five women vets have experienced military sexual trauma. But service providers on the ground estimate the number is even higher. I knew it would take time to gain their trust and that I had to be patient. What helped was that I was doing this alone, and that I had prior experience interviewing women who had been sexually abused, and that I understood the shame many feel. Over several weeks, I found two women vets on Skid Row, and another two in Long Beach. And little by little, with the help of Renee and other outreach workers who advised me on locations and the right questions to ask, I was able to get a sense of how women veterans become homeless, why they stay invisible and the complexity of the trauma many of them endure in silence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Along with my editor, Stephanie Mechura, my biggest challenge in producing “Her War” was to create a narrative structure that didn't oversimplify the issue. Whenever addiction and homelessness are discussed in this country, the general public tends to stop listening. On top of that, the topic of women in the military has always been a divisive and heated one. Many have preconceived notions of what type of women join the armed forces and why. We had to address the main questions the viewer might pose through the narration and connect the dots of what happens to women veterans while in service and especially after they return home. And Renee Banton became that very central and crucial thread throughout the film. I can proudly say now that she is no longer an unrecognized hero.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/mnU8pvsergo\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen>\u003c/iframe>\u003cbr>\nDirector Jon Bernson’s play, “A Guide to the Aftermath,” is a theatrical interpretation of Mimi Chakarova’s reporting on homeless female veterans on Skid Row.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>To see the \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_bs9FD8a7Y\" target=\"_blank\">full version\u003c/a> of “Her War,” please visit The I Files – CIR’s Investigative YouTube Channel.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>For the \"Life After War: A KQED and CIR special series, please visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/news/bayarea/lifeafterwar/index.jsp\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":null,"status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1374878767,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":true,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":26,"wordCount":1194},"headData":{"title":"Her War: The Aftermath of Military Sexual Assault | KQED","description":"By Mimi Chakarova, Center for Investigative Reporting Since 1990, the number of women veterans in the United States has doubled to 1.8 million. But a lot of female veterans, especially those who are younger, don’t consider themselves veterans at all — they incorrectly assume that a "vet" must have served in combat. Thus, many of","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":""},"disqusIdentifier":"104557 http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=104557","disqusUrl":"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2013/07/25/her-war-thousands-of-women-veterans-return-to-no-home/","disqusTitle":"Her War: The Aftermath of Military Sexual Assault","customPermalink":"2013/07/25/her-war-women-veterans-homeless/","path":"/news/104557/her-war-thousands-of-women-veterans-return-to-no-home","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>By Mimi Chakarova, \u003ca href=\"http://cironline.org/\">Center for Investigative Reporting\u003c/a>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/vfvjqtnmCJI\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 1990, the number of women veterans in the United States has doubled to 1.8 million. But a lot of female veterans, especially those who are younger, don’t consider themselves veterans at all — they incorrectly assume that a \"vet\" must have served in combat. Thus, many of their stories remain hidden from the public eye.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robert Rosenthal, who runs the Center for Investigative Reporting, spoke with me last summer about doing a documentary on the increasing number of women veterans who end up on the street. I was interested in this issue because of my previous work as a filmmaker and photojournalist documenting violence against women, and my work filming in Baghdad's Red Zone in 2009. I decided to focus on the Greater Los Angeles area because the region has one of the highest numbers of homeless veterans in the country – over 8,500 – with many living in hellish conditions on LA's notorious Skid Row.\u003c!--more-->\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I wound up doing profiles of eight women vets, some who had returned from Iraq and had served in combat units, and others who were stationed in Germany during the Cold War. One recurring theme that emerged was the majority had experience what the armed services calls \"\u003ca href=\"http://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/pages/military-sexual-trauma-general.asp\">Military sexual trauma\u003c/a>\" while on duty. Most had been raped by their immediate supervisors and had remained silent for years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How I met Renee\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here is how I met Renee Banton, the 'star' of the film. While going through reports on homeless vets in California, I read about a place called \"New Directions\" in West LA, which was the first in the country to offer a specific program for women veterans facing addiction and homelessness. Renee was listed as the main contact person, so I gave her a call. I left several messages, but no luck. So I decided to do what I always taught my journalism students at Berkeley to try if someone doesn't return your call: just show up. I drove to LA, but was able to reach Renee on the phone on the way there. She said she was really swamped but could spare 15 minutes in the morning. I met her at a residential home for women veterans, and because of the honesty with which she told her story, I knew immediately that she would be the thread in the film.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_104604\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2015/07/06_CHAKAROVA.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-104604\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2015/07/06_CHAKAROVA-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Renee revisits Skid Row after nine years of sobriety. "I don't belong here any more," she said when she walked back to where I was standing. (Mimi Chakarova/Center for Investigative Reporting)\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Renee revisits Skid Row after nine years of sobriety. \"I don't belong here any more,\" she said when she walked back to where I was standing. (Mimi Chakarova/Center for Investigative Reporting)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In her early 20s, Renee was an Air Force accountant who was sexually assaulted on base by a colleague. The following day, she went to her supervisor to report the assault.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Didn't you say you fought him off?\" asked her supervisor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Renee nodded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"So, what’s the problem then?\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A month later, Renee was assaulted again by the same person.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After completing her service, Renee returned to Los Angeles and gradually started to unravel. She drank, got high. More and more she wanted to disappear. And one day, after collecting her last check from her job, she decided to get off the bus while passing through Skid Row. She cashed her check, purchased crack, and for the next 12 years was an addict forced to find ways to survive on the streets. She sold her body, begged, and lived with drug dealers who used her as much as she used them. She built cardboard shelters to stay warm at night. She learned to always stash her drugs or smoke them real fast because police horses were trained to sniff them out. She learned to always pay the dealers on time. And she learned that sometimes, people get thrown out of buildings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Renee told me her story without pausing. There was no hesitation, no question she wouldn’t answer honestly. So I asked her if she would allow me to film her for one month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Will it help other people?\" she asked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Yes.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Then when do we get started?\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was naive. I thought I could go under a bridge or to a beach or park and meet a whole group of women vets, who stuck together through the hard times. I thought I could stay with them and document their stories. That wasn’t the case. They were invisible. Homeless women stay hidden, travel alone or with their children, and many won’t tell you they’ve served in the military because they don't identify as vets or because they are unable to connect with the past. Many suffer from PTSD and hard addiction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Filming the invisible\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Renee told me it would be difficult to find them — and even harder to get them to tell their story on camera. But it was important for me to show the women’s faces because it chips away at the maddening stigma that perpetuates sexual abuse in the military. The VA and the Pentagon estimate that one out of five women vets have experienced military sexual trauma. But service providers on the ground estimate the number is even higher. I knew it would take time to gain their trust and that I had to be patient. What helped was that I was doing this alone, and that I had prior experience interviewing women who had been sexually abused, and that I understood the shame many feel. Over several weeks, I found two women vets on Skid Row, and another two in Long Beach. And little by little, with the help of Renee and other outreach workers who advised me on locations and the right questions to ask, I was able to get a sense of how women veterans become homeless, why they stay invisible and the complexity of the trauma many of them endure in silence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Along with my editor, Stephanie Mechura, my biggest challenge in producing “Her War” was to create a narrative structure that didn't oversimplify the issue. Whenever addiction and homelessness are discussed in this country, the general public tends to stop listening. On top of that, the topic of women in the military has always been a divisive and heated one. Many have preconceived notions of what type of women join the armed forces and why. We had to address the main questions the viewer might pose through the narration and connect the dots of what happens to women veterans while in service and especially after they return home. And Renee Banton became that very central and crucial thread throughout the film. I can proudly say now that she is no longer an unrecognized hero.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/mnU8pvsergo\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen>\u003c/iframe>\u003cbr>\nDirector Jon Bernson’s play, “A Guide to the Aftermath,” is a theatrical interpretation of Mimi Chakarova’s reporting on homeless female veterans on Skid Row.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>To see the \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_bs9FD8a7Y\" target=\"_blank\">full version\u003c/a> of “Her War,” please visit The I Files – CIR’s Investigative YouTube Channel.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>For the \"Life After War: A KQED and CIR special series, please visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/news/bayarea/lifeafterwar/index.jsp\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/news/104557/her-war-thousands-of-women-veterans-return-to-no-home","authors":["236"],"programs":["news_6944"],"tags":["news_851","news_4635","news_80","news_440","news_237","news_827"],"featImg":"news_104604","label":"news_6944"},"news_91314":{"type":"posts","id":"news_91314","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"news","id":"91314","score":null,"sort":[1363191583000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"oakland-va-office-makes-veterans-wait-618-days-for-disability-pay","title":"Oakland VA Office Makes Veterans Wait 618 Days for Disability Pay","publishDate":1363191583,"format":"aside","headTitle":"News Fix | KQED News","labelTerm":{"term":6944,"site":"news"},"content":"\u003cp>\u003cem>by Aaron Glantz, \u003ca href=\"https://www.baycitizen.org/profile/aaron-glantz/\">The Bay Citizen\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Department of Veterans Affairs has\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>failed to provide\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>key information to Congress and the public that shows\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>the agency’s ability to quickly provide service-related benefits has virtually collapsed under President Barack Obama.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Infographic: \u003ca href=\"https://www.baycitizen.org/news/veterans/infographic-vets-wait-longer/\" target=\"_blank\">Veterans waiting longer\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.baycitizen.org/news/veterans/infographic-vets-wait-longer/\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cimg src=\"https://yeti-cir-test.s3.amazonaws.com/uploaded/images/2013/3/infographic-thumb-vets-waiting-longer/original/vets-wait-longer-thumb.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"280px\" height=\"345\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Internal VA documents, obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting and authenticated by the agency, reveal that delays newly returning veterans face before receiving disability compensation and other benefits are far longer than the agency has publicly acknowledged. The documents also offer insight into some of the reasons for those delays.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency tracks and widely reports the average wait time: 273 days. But the \u003ca href=\"https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/612900-budget-performance-split.html\" target=\"_blank\">internal\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>data\u003c/a> indicates that veterans filing their first claim, including those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, wait nearly two months longer, between 316 and 327 days. Those filing for the first time in \u003ca href=\"https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/612975-avgprocessingdays.html\" target=\"_blank\">America’s major population centers\u003c/a> wait up to twice as long – 642 days in New York, 619 days in Los Angeles and 618 days at the Oakland office, which serves Northern and Central California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The ranks of veterans \u003ca href=\"https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/612895-waiting-oneyear.html\" target=\"_blank\">waiting more than a year\u003c/a> for their benefits grew from 11,000 in 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, to 245,000 in December – an increase of more than 2,000 percent.\u003c!--more-->\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a candidate, Obama had promised to revamp a “broken VA bureaucracy,” but the documents reveal that many of the administration’s attempts – including efforts to boost staffing and computerize claims processing – have fallen apart in the implementation. Calls to the White House press office were not returned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite agency promises to eliminate the claims backlog by 2015, the internal\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>documents show the VA expects the number of veterans waiting – currently about 900,000 – to continue to increase throughout 2013 and \u003ca href=\"https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/612897-va-strategic-plan-jan-2013.html\" target=\"_blank\">top a million\u003c/a> by the end of this month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s about what’s due to you, about being taken care of physically and mentally,” said Aundray Rogers, an Army veteran of the Iraq War and president of the veterans club at City College of San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rogers, who waited more than two years for the VA to grant his disability claim for post-traumatic stress disorder, said he regularly has flashbacks of explosions and carnage while on campus and in class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He is in the process of appealing the VA’s decision that he is 20 percent disabled. The low rating, which entitles him to $255 a month, “takes away from the validity” of his wartime experience, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Washington, U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said he was not surprised that the VA’s internal documents painted a much gloomier picture than the agency’s public pronouncements.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One of the biggest oversight challenges we’ve encountered is just getting VA to engage in an honest conversation,” Miller said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency’s biggest problem, he said, is a “culture of complacency.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA downplayed the importance of the internal documents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency still intends to meet its goal of resolving nearly all claims within four months by 2015, VA spokesman Joshua Taylor said. He blamed the skyrocketing delays on a 50 percent increase in the number of claims filed, a combination of an uptick in returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and Vietnam veterans requesting compensation, for illnesses newly connected to Agent Orange. The VA also has made it easier for veterans to file claims for PTSD and Gulf War illness, Taylor said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a separate emailed statement, the agency argued that it “consistently provides our numbers during Congressional hearings and briefings. What is not available online or in these reports is generally available on request.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA typically takes months to respond to the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Freedom of Information Act requests, often stating that information requested must be manually tabulated. Yet\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>the internal documents show the agency tracks its performance at an extremely granular level of detail. The agency also failed to provide this information to attorneys in Veterans for Common Sense v. Shinseki, a federal class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. The lawsuit died when the Supreme Court refused to review the appeal in January.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They have a lot more detailed information than we were led to believe,” said Ryan Hassanein, a partner at Morrison & Foerster, the law firm that represented the veterans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lawmakers who have been working on the issue said they hadn’t seen the documents before. Rep. Barbara Lee, an Oakland Democrat, who met senior VA officials Feb. 27 to discuss problems at the Oakland office, said she was informed that the agency was making slow but steady progress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m not going to be an apologist for the president or the VA, but this was a long festering mess when they came in,” said Rep. Mike Thompson, a St. Helena Democrat and Vietnam veteran who attended the same meeting. “I think they have made improvements.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA’s internal documents tell a different story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In April, 16 members of Congress sent VA Secretary Eric Shinseki a letter demanding that the agency “send immediate help” to the Oakland office.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, the number of veterans waiting more than a year for their benefits from the Oakland office has increased by nearly 6,000, to 19,077, and the average wait has increased from 326 days to 441, according to internal documents. The typical wait time for Northern California veterans filing new claims, including those returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, increased from 521 days to 618.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During that time, the total volume of claims pending also dropped slightly as the agency began mailing thousands of local veterans’ claims to offices in Nebraska and Oklahoma.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting shed light on why the agency is failing to make headway despite public and political pressure and its own promises.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They show that while the agency has spent four years and \u003ca href=\"https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/612897-va-strategic-plan-jan-2013.html\" target=\"_blank\">$537 million\u003c/a> on a new computer system, 97 percent of all veterans’ claims remain on paper. Since those numbers were tallied by the agency in January, the VA’s two top technology officers have announced their resignations, saying they had accomplished their goals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Feb. 27, the agency’s principal deputy undersecretary for benefits also announced he was quitting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In interviews, workers at five VA offices said they were exhausted by the ever-growing piles of paperwork, with files becoming so thick that employees frequently have asked veterans to resend medical records or military service documents simply because the claims workers could not locate them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cindy Indof, who handles appeals at the VA office in Columbia, S.C., said it is not uncommon for her to see the same medical information in a veteran’s claim repeated two or even three times. The growth in paperwork, she said, is compounded by a points system that gives performance bonuses to workers for sending letters to veterans but not for spending extra time reading a claims file.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Taylor, the VA spokesman, said the computer system would be launched at all regional offices by the end of the year. “The transition is under way. We’re at the midpoint. We’re not at the endpoint yet,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency’s public pronouncements about hiring 3,300 additional claim processors since 2010 to cope with the influx of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans also were misleading, the documents show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because of turnover and the loss of more than 2,000 workers temporarily paid through stimulus funds, staffing at the VA’s 58 regional offices actually has increased by fewer than 300 people since September 2010 – even as the volume of new claims increased dramatically.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At a majority of the regional offices – including Oakland– the VA employs fewer people than it did two years ago, according to the VA’s internal documents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have a workforce that is completely burnt out, and there is no help in sight,” said Darren Foster, a Gulf War veteran who worked for the VA for 15 years before leaving in October. He now processes workers’ compensation claims for the Labor Department, in an office that he says is more efficient and better managed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a hard decision to leave,” Foster said. “I love helping veterans. But I just couldn’t do it anymore.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was edited by Amy Pyle and copy edited by Nikki Frick and Christine Lee.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":null,"status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1363191583,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":40,"wordCount":1482},"headData":{"title":"Oakland VA Office Makes Veterans Wait 618 Days for Disability Pay | KQED","description":"by Aaron Glantz, The Bay Citizen The Department of Veterans Affairs has failed to provide key information to Congress and the public that shows the agency’s ability to quickly provide service-related benefits has virtually collapsed under President Barack Obama. Infographic: Veterans waiting longer Internal VA documents, obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting and authenticated","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":""},"disqusIdentifier":"91314 http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=91314","disqusUrl":"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2013/03/13/oakland-va-office-makes-veterans-wait-618-days-for-disability-pay/","disqusTitle":"Oakland VA Office Makes Veterans Wait 618 Days for Disability Pay","path":"/news/91314/oakland-va-office-makes-veterans-wait-618-days-for-disability-pay","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>by Aaron Glantz, \u003ca href=\"https://www.baycitizen.org/profile/aaron-glantz/\">The Bay Citizen\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Department of Veterans Affairs has\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>failed to provide\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>key information to Congress and the public that shows\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>the agency’s ability to quickly provide service-related benefits has virtually collapsed under President Barack Obama.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Infographic: \u003ca href=\"https://www.baycitizen.org/news/veterans/infographic-vets-wait-longer/\" target=\"_blank\">Veterans waiting longer\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.baycitizen.org/news/veterans/infographic-vets-wait-longer/\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cimg src=\"https://yeti-cir-test.s3.amazonaws.com/uploaded/images/2013/3/infographic-thumb-vets-waiting-longer/original/vets-wait-longer-thumb.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"280px\" height=\"345\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Internal VA documents, obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting and authenticated by the agency, reveal that delays newly returning veterans face before receiving disability compensation and other benefits are far longer than the agency has publicly acknowledged. The documents also offer insight into some of the reasons for those delays.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency tracks and widely reports the average wait time: 273 days. But the \u003ca href=\"https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/612900-budget-performance-split.html\" target=\"_blank\">internal\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>data\u003c/a> indicates that veterans filing their first claim, including those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, wait nearly two months longer, between 316 and 327 days. Those filing for the first time in \u003ca href=\"https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/612975-avgprocessingdays.html\" target=\"_blank\">America’s major population centers\u003c/a> wait up to twice as long – 642 days in New York, 619 days in Los Angeles and 618 days at the Oakland office, which serves Northern and Central California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The ranks of veterans \u003ca href=\"https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/612895-waiting-oneyear.html\" target=\"_blank\">waiting more than a year\u003c/a> for their benefits grew from 11,000 in 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, to 245,000 in December – an increase of more than 2,000 percent.\u003c!--more-->\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a candidate, Obama had promised to revamp a “broken VA bureaucracy,” but the documents reveal that many of the administration’s attempts – including efforts to boost staffing and computerize claims processing – have fallen apart in the implementation. Calls to the White House press office were not returned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite agency promises to eliminate the claims backlog by 2015, the internal\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>documents show the VA expects the number of veterans waiting – currently about 900,000 – to continue to increase throughout 2013 and \u003ca href=\"https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/612897-va-strategic-plan-jan-2013.html\" target=\"_blank\">top a million\u003c/a> by the end of this month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s about what’s due to you, about being taken care of physically and mentally,” said Aundray Rogers, an Army veteran of the Iraq War and president of the veterans club at City College of San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rogers, who waited more than two years for the VA to grant his disability claim for post-traumatic stress disorder, said he regularly has flashbacks of explosions and carnage while on campus and in class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He is in the process of appealing the VA’s decision that he is 20 percent disabled. The low rating, which entitles him to $255 a month, “takes away from the validity” of his wartime experience, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Washington, U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said he was not surprised that the VA’s internal documents painted a much gloomier picture than the agency’s public pronouncements.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One of the biggest oversight challenges we’ve encountered is just getting VA to engage in an honest conversation,” Miller said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency’s biggest problem, he said, is a “culture of complacency.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA downplayed the importance of the internal documents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency still intends to meet its goal of resolving nearly all claims within four months by 2015, VA spokesman Joshua Taylor said. He blamed the skyrocketing delays on a 50 percent increase in the number of claims filed, a combination of an uptick in returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and Vietnam veterans requesting compensation, for illnesses newly connected to Agent Orange. The VA also has made it easier for veterans to file claims for PTSD and Gulf War illness, Taylor said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a separate emailed statement, the agency argued that it “consistently provides our numbers during Congressional hearings and briefings. What is not available online or in these reports is generally available on request.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA typically takes months to respond to the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Freedom of Information Act requests, often stating that information requested must be manually tabulated. Yet\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>the internal documents show the agency tracks its performance at an extremely granular level of detail. The agency also failed to provide this information to attorneys in Veterans for Common Sense v. Shinseki, a federal class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. The lawsuit died when the Supreme Court refused to review the appeal in January.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They have a lot more detailed information than we were led to believe,” said Ryan Hassanein, a partner at Morrison & Foerster, the law firm that represented the veterans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lawmakers who have been working on the issue said they hadn’t seen the documents before. Rep. Barbara Lee, an Oakland Democrat, who met senior VA officials Feb. 27 to discuss problems at the Oakland office, said she was informed that the agency was making slow but steady progress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m not going to be an apologist for the president or the VA, but this was a long festering mess when they came in,” said Rep. Mike Thompson, a St. Helena Democrat and Vietnam veteran who attended the same meeting. “I think they have made improvements.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The VA’s internal documents tell a different story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In April, 16 members of Congress sent VA Secretary Eric Shinseki a letter demanding that the agency “send immediate help” to the Oakland office.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, the number of veterans waiting more than a year for their benefits from the Oakland office has increased by nearly 6,000, to 19,077, and the average wait has increased from 326 days to 441, according to internal documents. The typical wait time for Northern California veterans filing new claims, including those returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, increased from 521 days to 618.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During that time, the total volume of claims pending also dropped slightly as the agency began mailing thousands of local veterans’ claims to offices in Nebraska and Oklahoma.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting shed light on why the agency is failing to make headway despite public and political pressure and its own promises.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They show that while the agency has spent four years and \u003ca href=\"https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/612897-va-strategic-plan-jan-2013.html\" target=\"_blank\">$537 million\u003c/a> on a new computer system, 97 percent of all veterans’ claims remain on paper. Since those numbers were tallied by the agency in January, the VA’s two top technology officers have announced their resignations, saying they had accomplished their goals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Feb. 27, the agency’s principal deputy undersecretary for benefits also announced he was quitting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In interviews, workers at five VA offices said they were exhausted by the ever-growing piles of paperwork, with files becoming so thick that employees frequently have asked veterans to resend medical records or military service documents simply because the claims workers could not locate them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cindy Indof, who handles appeals at the VA office in Columbia, S.C., said it is not uncommon for her to see the same medical information in a veteran’s claim repeated two or even three times. The growth in paperwork, she said, is compounded by a points system that gives performance bonuses to workers for sending letters to veterans but not for spending extra time reading a claims file.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Taylor, the VA spokesman, said the computer system would be launched at all regional offices by the end of the year. “The transition is under way. We’re at the midpoint. We’re not at the endpoint yet,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency’s public pronouncements about hiring 3,300 additional claim processors since 2010 to cope with the influx of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans also were misleading, the documents show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because of turnover and the loss of more than 2,000 workers temporarily paid through stimulus funds, staffing at the VA’s 58 regional offices actually has increased by fewer than 300 people since September 2010 – even as the volume of new claims increased dramatically.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At a majority of the regional offices – including Oakland– the VA employs fewer people than it did two years ago, according to the VA’s internal documents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have a workforce that is completely burnt out, and there is no help in sight,” said Darren Foster, a Gulf War veteran who worked for the VA for 15 years before leaving in October. He now processes workers’ compensation claims for the Labor Department, in an office that he says is more efficient and better managed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a hard decision to leave,” Foster said. “I love helping veterans. But I just couldn’t do it anymore.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was edited by Amy Pyle and copy edited by Nikki Frick and Christine Lee.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/news/91314/oakland-va-office-makes-veterans-wait-618-days-for-disability-pay","authors":["237"],"programs":["news_6944"],"tags":["news_152","news_80","news_18","news_828","news_237","news_827"],"label":"news_6944"}},"programsReducer":{"possible":{"id":"possible","title":"Possible","info":"Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. 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Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. 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You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>","imageSrc":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg","imageAlt":"KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn","officialWebsiteLink":"/mindshift/","meta":{"site":"news","source":"kqed","order":"2"},"link":"/podcasts/mindshift","subscribe":{"apple":"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mindshift-podcast/id1078765985","google":"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5","npr":"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/464615685/mind-shift-podcast","stitcher":"https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share","spotify":"https://open.spotify.com/show/0MxSpNYZKNprFLCl7eEtyx"}},"morning-edition":{"id":"morning-edition","title":"Morning Edition","info":"\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. 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