I get a lot e-mails from Korea vets looking for help in regards to processing agent orange claims from their time stationed in Korea along the DMZ where agent orange was sprayed.  Just judging by the interest I get on this site about agent orange claims, it leads me to believe that there is a serious issue at the VA in regards to processing these claims and it will be interesting to see if this new automated system does anything to fix it:

Faced with a crushing influx of disability claims from Vietnam War veterans exposed to the toxic defoliant Agent Orange, the Department of Veterans Affairs said Tuesday it would automate part of the cumbersome system that has left many thousands of veterans waiting many months and sometimes years for payments.The announcement from the VA is a tacit admission that the 80-year-old department is close to being overwhelmed by the volume of claims not only from Vietnam veterans but from those of more recent wars in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq. The backlog of unresolved disability claims has exceeded 1 million, and the department last year cleared the way for at least 200,000 more when it said it would consider claims of Vietnam veterans suffering from Parkinson’s disease, hairy cell leukemia and ischemic heart disease, all of which the have been linked to Agent Orange.

The VA has reached a breaking point in terms of its ability to handle the claims of more than 3 million veterans and this plan would be, at best, an initial step aimed at the most time-consuming claims, according to the department. As the Chicago Tribune reported in December, service-related disability payments to Vietnam veterans soared more than 60 percent from 2003 to 2009, reaching $15.4 billion, or 45 percent of the $34 billion the VA paid in veterans’ disability claims last year. With other diseases being linked to exposure to Agent Orange, the numbers of veterans and the cost to treat them will continue to increase and the VA will be increasingly hard-pressed to handle the demand.  [Stars & Stripes]

Shinseki is a good guy that I believe is working hard to continue to improve the VA, however I have to wonder why the Stars & Stripes journalist had to include some irrelevant Bush bashing in the article?:

The VA said it plans to shorten the average time it takes to consider claims to 90 days or less; with the current bureaucratic logjam claims can take 200 days, not counting appeals. Paul Sullivan, executive director of the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense, said that if Shinseki “failed to act…the VA benefit claims processing system may have collapsed.”

Sullivan said the “underlying cause” of the problem has been building since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it was the “failure of the Bush administration… to beef up the VA” that forced Shinseki to act.

So who are these guys from the Veterans for Common Sense?  According to their webpage one of their two major contributors is the Ploughshares Fund, which is an organization created by San Francisco based woman to advocate for the end of nuclear weapons.  This organization has its funding linked back to you guessed it, George Soros’ Open Society Institute.  So this Veterans for Common Sense group is nothing more than yet another George Soros linked front group, which the Stars & Stripes just throws a quote in their article to bash Bush with.

Even better yet take a look at what the group’s leader Paul Sullivan had to say immediately after the Ft. Hood shootings.  Is this guy a tool or what?