Discussion and recommendations from Veterans and Widows on the subject discussed by the VAC subcommittee in expediting claims:

Veterans need help now before we all die, not after continued promises of implementation of electronic medical records using extremely difficult interfaces, artificial intelligence with query language too few are able to utilize, and often delayed progress stretching into not months but years. The Department of Veterans Affairs has done nothing to correct this problem, and continues to promulgate anti-Veteran rules to delay, stall, and deny while it fights Court cases, which rather than reduce claims has exacerbated the backlog. The Courts gave the Department wide latitude to stay Haas, which it has thoroughly abused. Congress must take bold action NOW to mandate ways to catch up.               .

Congress can help to substantially reduce this backlog by mandating the following:

Claim Triage Process:

A civilian fellow with Veterans Affairs (VA) experience recently testified before your sub­committee, and concluded that simple claims should not be part of the complex process that is time consuming and creates delays in presumptive approval that at most require a brief evaluation and decision.

Triage should be performed on all claims. Any presumptive disease claims should go to a team that only does presumptive disorders. This requires the verification of "three data points" only, with emphasis on giving the "Congressional mandated" benefit of the doubt concerning presumption, service connection, and precedence to establish compensation rates.

Examples: Stage four presumptive cancers are automatically 100% by V A rating rules. The Veteran is either going to die or is going to seek treatment for the cancers. Cancer treatment alone is enough to disable someone from working.

In some disorders such as presumed diabetes, it is not the level of created disability but the level of treatment that is required to determine the disability rating. Only the verification of data is required with no C & P. In this case, the validation of four data points and the level of treatment are required. Obvious secondary conditions from the records could be included if there is a straightforward connection to the primary disability. C & Ps to determine levels of disability and other more complicated residuals can then be accomplished and compensated based on the results. Getting the Veteran and his family the needed financial support in a timely manner should be the most important aspect. This also entitles the Veteran to many benefits from their respective States that is continually being delayed.

This process also would allow those claims that are contentious to get the full attention, fact-finding, and "speed of resolution" they deserve, also contributing to the reduction in the backlog of claims.

Congress must not allow the Department of Veterans Affairs special legal privileges. Congress must hold the Department to the same legal standards non-governmental entities and citizens are. The Department ignores evidence presented by Veterans as unverified, impugns the veracity of honorable Veterans, calls every case unique by denying case precedence, and refuses to assist Veterans in accordance with law.

If the Court of Circuit Appeals honors a Veteran's statement in support of a claim that he loaded herbicides in

Udorn, or similarly a declassified report or other evidence confirms use, and the claim is awarded, then the Department must approve all claims for Udorn for similar circumstances. Each case is not unique. It makes no sense to have two Veterans serving side by side to have dissimilar results with one claim approved and the other denied for the same disorder within the adjudication and BV A justice system. Congress provided administrative adjudication

powers to a department of the Executive Branch, not authority to act with judicial prejudice. The triage process looks at similar periods of service, military occupations, duty stations, diseases, Court decisions and then rules in favor of the Veteran. The data fields necessary to search like citations and decisions already exist.

Example: Esophageal cancers are very prevalent in Vietnam Veterans with herbicide exposures, yet the Department "of Veterans Affairs denies esophageal cancers as a presumptive disorder, and then is overruled by BVA and CAVC. These claims take years.

Once the BVA or CAVC has approved the claim for one, then all such like claims should be approved. Through use of "artificial intelligence," the Department can create rule-based criteria for all esophageal cancers. The rules then approve claims for widows and Veterans based on legal precedence and not necessarily subjective nexus with herbicides, particularly when data outside the DV A and 10M indicates this should be presumptive to tactical herbicides. We do not need to prosecute the same case 100,000 times rather than define approval criteria and approve the same 100,000 cases.

Congress must mandate that cases with decisions overturned by the BVA and the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims (CAVC) set legal precedence and the Department of Veterans Affairs must decide favorably in like cases.

Congress must mandate that spouses and families of Veterans who die prior to adjudication of their claims are legally and legitimately no different from the deceased Veteran and the Veteran's claim is "in perpetuity" until settled. There is no other system in the world that treats the legal rights of the claimant's descendents as different from the claimant. At the DVA if the Veteran dies before his claim is approved, the claim is then dead as well. This is a direct conflict of interest and leads to a bias not to perform in a timely manner. The widow then must reenter the claim again and submit for DIC, a process that creates catastrophic financial hardship of potentially many years for what should be a simple validation of beneficiary information and the immediate prioritization to "the head of the line" for deciding the claim.

These suggestions should result in the reduction of massive numbers of claims, associated costs, and delays of six to eighteen months or longer which cause financial hardship on the Veteran and his family or widow for presumptive disorders and like-claims. The Department of Veterans Affairs should approve these claims through a brief evaluation and decision process. Additionally, there is little risk of abuse as these changes are in accordance with law as established by Congress, and the Courts.

To further reduce claims backlog Congress should amend the law for Veterans who served in the toxic chemical swill on the Korean DMZ. Congress identified the period from 1967 to 1971 for civilian contractors that worked "on or near the Korean DMZ" with presumptive disorders while the DOD and DVA only recognize a short period of time for spraying, which nullifies and discounts the laws of chemistry and the half-life of dioxins. This span is nearly four times that of the span for Veterans. We find this total disparity between Civilian versus Veterans an injustice and an unjustifiable issue. The DV A must stop denying those claims, and accept them as compensable.

A group of 14 engineers that served along the Korean DMZ petitioned Congress and indicated they sprayed this toxic swill from 1967 to 1971 on the DMZ and at

Camp

Casey . Many of these engineers have the same presumptive disorders already established for herbicide association and in some cases, there are two automatic presumptive cancer disorders leaving the DMZ with a diagnosis of pustular acne, a hallmark of dioxin exposures. Yet, the VA still denies claims based upon the denial of the laws of chemistry and the very narrow inclusive dates of which Congress itself is in disagreement with regarding civilian contractors.

Many Korean DMZ and herbicide sprayings claims from documented locations should be presumptive and not held and. denied for nefarious reasons and then appealed just creating more and more backlog. It is imperative that Congress remembers that our own government causes most of the mortality and morbidity issues.

Congress must mandate the same inclusive dates that it has established for civilians and the inclusive dates our Veterans and de-classified DOD documents indicate herbicide spraying occurred. The DVA must reverse and approve denied claims based only on erroneous DOD inclusive dates.

Congress must mandate immediate release and inclusion of locations documented and released to the public rather than permitting the Departments, who are in possession of them, not to acknowledge them and update the list maintained" by the DVA.

Next, there is the Blue Water Navy exposure issue. Congress must get involved in this issue before all these seamen are dead and the DVA denies their widows DIC payments.

Congress leaves the Veterans and their expert witnesses no forum from which to present their own scientific and medical evidence. Congress must make this decision and not abdicate its authority to the DOD, DVA, or IOM, who cannot deny conflicts of interest and insertion of biases into final reports. Many Veterans would welcome the opportunity to debate the IOM and DVA in the halls of Congress utilizing some common sense and scientific data but Congress has not afforded Veterans that opportunity. Congress must include in legislation the formation of a Veteran/Citizen's committee that reports these conflicts of interest and recommends resolution in favor of Veterans to the Congress for issues previously presented only by the DV A and the contracted 10M, both of whom have numerous conflicts of interest, as does the DOD.

If the Congress implements all of these recommendations, there would not be delays of years to reduce the backlog of claims. These risk associated with the validity of these recommendations is negligible. Congress and the Nation can be certain that Veterans are asking only for earned benefits and promises kept.

Many scientists as well as Veterans believe that the way dioxins work in the body's cells, any cancer or immune system dysfunction is an expected outcome. The data is there in many studies including, the opinion of a sitting member of Congress, a medical doctor, who under oath, has concluded before the BV A that esophageal cancers are associated.

Our personal beliefs, based on scientific data and biological plausibility is that all cancers, endocrine and immune system disturbances in homoeostasis are associated with herbicides. A quantitative risk analysis based on the top four-dioxin studies results in the SMR delta for all cancers and specific

cancers as very slight. Additionally, the Ranch Hand Study, the government's gold standard used in denial, now admits it missed a two-fold increase in all cancers after spending $140 million dollars, which was ignored by the Air Force chairperson.

We have estimated a reduction of at least 200,000 claims within 6 months by using "artificial intelligence" from BV NCA VC databases and the recommend changes noted herein. Congress provided the Department of Veterans Affairs funding already that doubled the number of employees

in the

Veterans Court
and the result has been a 50% reduction in claims output, obviously a poor investment.

The time for Congressional action is NOW. We respectfully request you include these suggestions in new legislation, or at worst in the Department of Veterans Affairs 2009 Budget Request.

Thank you in advance,

Kurt Priessman, MSgt, USAF (Ret), B.A., M.B.A.
The Bottom Line http://tmai18.spaces.live.com
U-Tapao RTNAB, 71-72

Korat RTAFB, 72-73
Kadena AB, Okinawa, Japan 73-76
Kunsan AB, Korea 77-78

Clark AB, 78

Taegu AB, 78-80
Author: Herbicides Use in (The Relationship to the ROE and Use in and )

Proud Father of SSgt Michael G. Priessman, USAF Kuwait 93-94

Bahrain 95-96
Korea 03-04
Kyrgyzstan 04-05
Kadena 04-06
Baghdad 06

(1)  Grassroots Veterans, widows, and Veterans organizations now question the Congressional wisdom of placing veteran judicial functions under the direct control of our Executive Branch of government. There is a groundswell of veterans that believe individuals in the government should be held criminally liable for their decisions and efforts to hide the truth. The impact of class action suits to overturn the Feres Doctrine and potential Rico Act suits will deluge the Courts of Appeals of the Federal Circuit if action is not taken.

(2)  The Executive Branch judiciary function has taken liberty to freely weight evidence and scientific facts in its own behalf The Executive Branch in the performance of judiciary functions pronounces before the claimants case is brought what is and what is not valid, accepts invalid Executive Branch controlled studies with flawed results from which to base administrative and judicial decisions. Veterans believe these studies are invalid based on federal departmental and agency influence and directions not to associate mortality and morbidity damages to Veterans and their offspring for government causations. Veterans also believe that the continuing mortality and morbidity rates are caused by the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, both part of the Executive Branch.

(3) Our beliefs are based on the common sense notion that it is nonsensical to provide the Executive Branch a process where judicial decisions permit the same branch of government to adjudicate and rule in its own favor when they are the defendants. With the usage of the Feres Doctrine and the processes described, there can be no doubt in the proliferation of collusion rather than the prosecution of the government for collusion.