New bill aims to simplify veterans claims
MONROE COUNTY, Pa. — The Veterans Affairs Medical Center near Wilkes-Barre provides benefits and services to thousands of veterans in northeastern Pennsylvania each year.
Greg Schultz is the commander of the B. Gregory Krummel VFW Post 3448 near Tobyhanna. He's an Air Force veteran, serving from 1989 to 1998. He says getting those benefits is no easy task, "I started the paperwork, got rejected, started the paperwork again. Got rejected. they wanted times, dates, places, where, when, hows, and whys, and the forms I gave up."
Earlier this year, Congressman Rob Bresnahan introduced the Simplifying Forms for Veterans Claims Act to simplify the forms and make the VA standard forms user-friendly.
The bill was recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives with a 386 to 1 vote. The Republican says he saw that paperwork struggle happened to his own family after his grandfather passed, "What I watched my grandmother go through the process for my own grandfather that was never the way this was designed or intended, it is not supposed to be a gotcha application."
The bill now moves on to the Senate for a vote.
Bresnahan says the legislation would require the VA to contract with a federally funded research group for a study.
Then, provide recommendations for revising VA forms to be more understandable for veterans and their survivors.
"This is not a gigantic undertaking here. To have over 60 pages of forms is just lunacy, so getting rid of the redundancy, streamlining the process, and finding a creative way to be able to accomplish this," said Congressman Bresnahan.
"I'm hoping it simplifies the overwhelmingness of the amount of information that is needed," said Schultz.
Congressman Bresnahan hopes the legislation will go into effect by the end of the year.