Badly written regulations, disinformation on VA web pages, & the use of clerical or general medical workers in reviews have plagued the system against veterans
The truth is that neither the VA nor the Committee’s of Congress know how to write an academically sound competency standard for specialized doctors to process complicated environmental health cases.”
— Sue Frasier, National Activist for The Fort McClellan Veterans Group
WASHINGTON, DC, USA, June 2, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Biden administration has been struggling to attach itself to a new veteran’s preferential treatment bill that’s been moving through the House and Senate Veterans Committees on Capitol Hill. The bill is known as “the PACT Act” across its different variations. The bill pretends to offer up fixes at the VA regarding known failures in the mishandling of
environmental medicine cases right now (which it doesn’t), and to right the course for future toxic exposure cases coming into the VA hereafter (which it doesn’t).The Fort McClellan toxic exposure veterans group says the bill falls short of covering all toxic exposure patient groups fairly and equally across all military-related environmental spill events. They allege that the bill only serves certain patient groups who have the highest exploitation value in the news media as lawmakers approach their mid-term elections. Patient groups who are left out of the PACT Act are not amused. As insiders to the process, the Fort McClellan toxic exposure veteran’s group have a lot to say about what’s wrong with any version of “the PACT Act”.
One of the most glaring VA failure points in veteran’s toxic exposure processing has to do with their own badly written regulatory language. These remain on their procedure books for decades without any revision. Some are written specifically for non-environmental cases. But these same regulations are also used against the veteran’s toxic exposure cases by way of their own agency workforce errors and mishandling. One example of this kind of failure point is found at Title 38, Part 3.159 of the VA’s Code of Federal Regulations. In this clickable example, the VA tries to “dumb down” the competency standard for the VA exam doctors who perform the reviews for veteran’s disability benefits claims. Environmental exposure cases require specialized practice doctors, and not just any old doctor who is in any old practice the way this VA regulation is written to say. The veterans feel like their toxic exposure cases are getting thrown under the bus by the orchestrated loopholes of this regulation that seems to provide cover to VA’s overall workforce incompetence.
In the year 2015, the Fort McClellan toxic exposure veterans conducted a one year “duty to assist” review with VA staff at Washington DC, in the pursuit of invoking this very 3.159 VA regulation. None of the VA reviewers at the time were licensed in the practice of environmental medicine. The review ended as a miserable failure for the veterans. The VA reviewers were not even capable of keeping their contamination zone story straight after the meetings were over with. Since that time, the veteran’s have compiled their own military source paper collection leaving the VA agency sitting in the dust! Those papers are now in the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The VA has managed to hire an entire processing workforce into place that has no specialized academic background or licensing in the practice of environmental medicine or health. Furthermore, none of the licensed lawyers who make up the Claims Representatives universe to help veterans process their disability cases at the VA, are also not specialized in the practice of environmental law or toxic torts. It’s clear to the patient groups that these workforce omissions are exactly what’s failing them across the many mishandled ventures that are put forth by the VA.
The workforce that processes veteran’s disability claims are clerical at best, and have no specialized environmental academic standing or licensing in place at the time they are hired at the VA. This first layer of processing is then further exasperated by a second workforce of general medicine doctors who are themselves not specialized in environmental medicine. The veterans point to these staffing failures as the breaking point for their toxic exposure cases. The veterans say that the VA has been spreading around the false rumor for decades now that general medical doctors are the right practitioners to make toxic exposure “opinions”. The Fort McClellan Veterans stakeholders group flatly rejects these VA’s rumors. They point to the specialized industry workforce that’s in place at the Agency for Toxic Substances under the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services as proof.
Environmental medicine workers are academically trained at the college level to read, process, and apply risk determinations that are made in the contamination zone site papers by licensed environmental industry engineers. The engineering papers make up the body of evidence for the veterans to prove they were exposed to toxic sources. Environmental engineers make toxic exposure declarations in their reports in two different ways. One way is called a Hazard Rating Scale (or Index). The other is a set of population exposure declarations that are made as Exposure Pathway Reports. These are usually embedded as isolated chapters across the range of reports making up the site reviews. The VA has no workforce capacity in place to be able to accept, read, apply, and then rate the veteran’s medical cases based on those critical engineering site papers. In fact, the veterans say that the VA is intellectually incapable (as a workforce) to read across multiple engineering reports to stitch together the complete body of decisions that are made by the engineers.
For several years now, the VA has knowingly posted misinformation on their web pages surrounding the matters of (CBRNE) military experiments and field tests that were secretly done at various military bases across the country during the Cold War Era. The former test sites have related medical patient groups tied to them including Project SHAD, Project 112, Fort McClellan, Edgewood Test Volunteers, and the former trainers out of Aberdeen, MD. The veterans feel ambushed by the accumulation of failures at the VA.
The McClellan Vets patient group is certain that whatever variation of “the PACT Act” comes out, it will still never hold any genuine fixes to what’s known to be broken at the VA for veteran’s toxic exposure processing. For them, it’s just an irrelevant show bill and nothing else.
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