Wounded veterans are being forced to wait longer and longer for a disability check, according to new data from the Department of Veterans Affairs information obtained by McClatchy Newspapers. According to McClatchy, veterans must wait an average of 183 days for a claim to be decided - up from 177 days a year before.
Is this surprising? Not really.
Remember, the man President Bush put in charge of processing disability claims, Veterans Benefits Administration chief Daniel Cooper recently appeared in a fundamentalist Christian video and said Bible Study was "More important than doing [my] job."
Their complaint stems from an appearance Cooper made in a fund raising video for the evangelical group Christian Embassy, which carries out missionary work among the Washington elite as part of the Campus Crusade for Christ.
In the video, Cooper says of his Bible study, "it's not really about carving out time, it really is a matter of saying what is important. And since that's more important than doing the job -- the job's going to be there, whether I'm there or not."
Long wait times for disability checks is a leading reason veterans become homeless.
Also, be sure to check out my new story published in the Nation Magazine on efforts to improve the GI Bill.
