Widow wages 23-year battle with VA for survivor benefits
Marine Corps Times
By Rick Maze
Staff writer
December 3, 2013
A 68-year-old widow who has spent 23 years seeking veterans’ survivor benefits will be a key witness Wednesday at a House hearing focusing on the Veterans Affairs Department’s problems in handling complicated claims.
Bettye B. McNutt of Olive Branch, Miss., will tell the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee’s disability assistance and memorial affairs panel that her 8,600-day fight for dependency and indemnity compensation following the Agent Orange-related death of her Vietnam veteran husband is the result of frequent and multiple mistakes by VA.
The focus of the hearing is about error rates as high as 66 percent found in disability claims reviewed by the VA Inspector General. The reviews involve cases of post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injuries and veterans seeking to be rated as 100 percent disabled.
VA’s Nov. 30 weekly status report on claims processing says it has a 89.4 percent accuracy rate on decisions in the previous 12 months and 90.2 percent in the last three months. The report does not separate out the more complicated claims.
“I have been forced to live in poverty, sometimes without heat and electricity, as a widow raising a son orphaned by the Vietnam War,” McNutt says in her prepared statement to the committee. “I am here seeking justice for the other widows and orphans of our Vietnam War veterans, as I am well aware that there are many like me.”
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