By Mike Brewer
Special to the Alpine Mountaineer
With a lifelong bent for objectivity and back story truth, I would like to offer some perspective on the Veterans Administration fraud investigations. These are tumultuous times and the myriad of lobbyists and message machine managers are working overtime to skew our view of the Veterans Administration, which indeed has many more administrative problems then clinical. The majority of our mountain veterans are pleased with their care at Loma Linda VA.
The Washington Post had a recent series on VA disability fraud that focused on 70 prosecutions since 2017.
The VA processed 2.52 million rating claims in FY2024. Many of those are a result of the passing of the PACT Act that opened the door for many OEF/OIF and Gulf War veterans who, for years, had been denied care for well-documented disabilities. Thirty-six percent were denied, forcing hundreds of thousands of men and women to revert to the decision review and appeals process.
The approximate 63 fraud investigations opened each year amount to 0.001 percent of all beneficiaries. Place this in the context of the nearly 900,000 denied claims that place a heavier burden on the VA rating officers, who are already understaffed.
By comparison, the Pentagon failed its seventh consecutive audit in 2024 with 4.1 trillion in assets and approximately 63 percent of assets improperly accounted for, pointing to serious control failures, yet it is the VA that remains in the spotlight.
We know there is a long-standing subterranean effort to privatize the VA, which this writer considers a high crime and moral misdemeanor. We simply cannot allow for the monetization of our veterans of war, excluding the current Community Care programs. “Caring for those who have borne the battle,” as Abraham Lincoln offered, was not intended to be an entrepreneurial enterprise.
All corporate entities are flawed, especially one the size of the Veterans Administration. But the fix is not in vilifying the veteran who is simply seeking what they are due under Congressional Code Title 38.
Source: Hill and Ponton
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