john999

To file for SSD you have to be unemployed or under employer to the extent you are at the poverty level. If you retired from your job today you would have to wait 6 months to be eligible for SSD and two years from that date to get medicare. I am no expert but this is bare bones of what you probably need for SSD. You have to be permanent and total from VA for your wife to get ChampVA. Do you have Chapter 35 benefits now? If you are rated 100% then TDIU is moot. Do you get special monthly compensation? You say you are at 260% and I know what you mean. Can you retire on disability from your job? This would give you an exact date to use for SSD. You can't file for TDIU via the 800 number anyway. Who is helping you with this? I think you need someone to help you with your affairs before you get too sick.

I believe I would try to get every bit of compensation I could get, and just keep my mouth shut about the severance pay unless the VA is tacking on interest. Let the VA discover their own error unless there is an interest penalty. If you have to pay it back then you have to pay it back, but don't let that stop you from trying for 100% if you can get it. You get compensation until you die. Your severance pay will be payed off pretty quick even though it hurts for a while. Sooner or later from what you say you will not be able to work. 70% is not even half of what you get if you get TDIU or 100%.

I was hoping he had got a high rating since I know he was living in povety. Nice way to treat a vet. He was medically discharged and then the VA denied his disability.

The VA gives the C&P exam too much weight. If your QTC doctor says you are worse the VA will probably go along with that, but it really helps to have your own medical records to show that you are getting worse. If you think of a scale you want the weight of your positive evidence to hit the ground. You don't want to depend on benefit of doubt. Time is your enemy. If a claim has to go into appeals the years will roll by while you wait.

You can write on the Form 9 that you want a DRO Hearing. That is an option. If that fails you can go to the BVA. Now that is about 3-4 years down the road so let's hope you win this thing at your RO. You are cutting it very close, so I think you need to hand deliver this NOD. If you can't do that it must be sent certified mail/return receipt. The VA sticks to that one year rule for NOD's. I know that is the concensus here regardless of reconsiderations. You want to CYA to the maximum.

Donald You don't offend me. You worry me.

Do the NOD because doing a CUE can take years. I am on year 5.5 and I thought my CUE was obvious as paint. Not so in "reasonable minds" of the VA. The BVA and CAVC denied a CUE where the VA had forged a vet's medical records. Now I don't' think it can get worse than that, but the vet had to go to federal court just to get a remand. I think it has been a decade for that guy.

The way I understand it is when you reach a certain percentage that triggers the consideration of an inferred TDIU claim. The VA should send you the form and then it is up to you to fill it out and return it with the date you last worked. At the same time if the VA knows you are not working due to SC condition that is an inferred claim for TDIU. So you may be able to get an EED for TDIU but you will have to appeal based on what Phil has said. I doubt the VA will just grant the EED on TDIU without a fight.

Vet2010 Your doctor is probably thinking that in ten years the back bones that are going to anchor your fusion will go bad due to extra stress on them. Then ten years later those discs will go bad and on and on unless some new procedure is discovered. You may not have much ROM left. If you were 59 then maybe when you were 70 you might need help again or you might not even be alive. I guess if your quality of life is so poor because of this back pain I think I would shop around for a new doctor. A doctor recently suggested I do a cervical fusion. I got a second opinion. The SECOP said I did not need a cervical fusion. It is a very personal decision about accepting surgery. I had a few and they did not fix my problems. Surgery does not always fix pain and there is even a disease called "failed back surgery syndrome".

NSA The correct facts that were known were not before the rating board when the decision was made. Those facts were my doctor'r report. According to the BVA I met the first two requirements of a CUE, but not the third which was that the facts that were not before the board or rater would have "Undebatably" changed the outcome of the rating. My lawyer did not attack the way the facts of the case were weighed. He attacked the undisputed fact that not all the facts that were available to the rater were considered in the decision. The BVA says that heresay evidence from the VA that I "seemed to get on well with other mental patients" is undebatably equal to an excluded doctor's medical report. My lawyer points out that if that is the standard of "undebatable" then all CUE claims are moot. My lawyers brief is in response to a BVA decision and not a court decision. CUE's come down to arguments over words like "undebatable" and "reasonable minds". These are major concepts in CUE law. These are not words out of a Webster's Dictionary. These are words that thousands if not millions of words have been written about. My claim has been remanded back to the BVA from the CAVC because the BVA used the wrong rating schedule. This is technical again, but all VA law is technical. Look up Cushman vs Shinseki 2009. This is a case where forged documents were used in a rating decision. The VA said it was not undebatable that the rater did not considered the forged documents in their rating. The Federal Court said that any reasonable mind would not agree with that conclusion and remanded it back to the CAVC. I wish Berta or Phil could chime in on this since they have good understanding of CUE. Much better than I do which is why I hired a lawyer. You might disagree with my lawyers reasoning, but if you don't understand it then don't pursue a CUE on your own. Understand that the BVA agreed that the original decision was based only on evidence from a VA doctor and that my doctor's evidence was not considered at all. If the VA can get away with this no vet has a chance because the VA could just ignore your IMO's or any medical records that favor your claim. I have to meet CUE standards. In a normal claim where I would have been supplied appeal rights and had appealed I think the fact that my evidence was excluded would have been a slam/dunk for the decision to have been vacated. The standards for CUE are much higher than for a regular appeal, but they are the only remedy for old claims that were not appealed and became final.

Bronco You know I agree with that. We vets waited decades to be able to get lawyers to represent us at the RO and BVA levels and now some vets think they don't want to pay to win claims because the money is theirs. Yes, the money from a claim is yours, but you have to get it. People have just got to go and read some of these CAVC cases to see how badly the BVA and RO's screw up and what kinds of legal gymnastics it takes to win these cases. When your claim says John Doe vs Shinseki that means you against all the resources of the United States mint. The VA has lawyers that have done hundreds of claims for Uncle. This is who you are up against with your old VSO who has two hundred cases on his desk.

Boots Many of us were the same way. I know I was. I filed a claim in 1972 and was granted a low ball rating in 1973. I did not appeal. I never went back for 20 years. I found out later the VA had really screwed up my rating. Now I am fighting for a correct rating dating back to that time, but it ain't easy. I still blame the VA because they did nothing to help me, and went out of their way to hurt my claim. I was 21 years old and believed that somehow I would get a fair shake. If you are an emotionally ill veteran unless you have great representation the VA takes advantage of that to deny or low ball you. I did not even get my appeal rights. My rating was two pages long with just some letters and a rating at the end of it for 10% and I could not even work, so don't blame yourself.

So do you get your full retirement pay and 100% from the VA? Have you applied for SSD? I know money does not give you your life back, but it is all the VA has to offer.

I would get that NOD to the VA pronto, but if you have discovered military records that were not considered in your earlier rating decisions you have a bigger issue. You may have grouds to file a CUE since service records that should have been before the rater were not there. If I was you I would file the NOD and then go get a lawyer. I am harping on getting lawyers for these old and complicated cases because it could mean big money for you, but you don't want to make a false step.

My CAVC case number is 10-3248.

How did you hurt your back and are you getting any kind of PT for it now? I would think a pool would be the one thing you could do to move around with the water supporting your weight. I have back and neck problems as well. I always have to be careful about what I do and what I commit to do. I wanted to watch a baseball game but I can't stand to sit that long.

Many of us had difficult childhoods and that is why we joined the military. It is a bad reason to join because the military is not interested in your problems only your ability to do your duties under stressful conditions like war. If you crack-up they just get another body to take your place. I wish I had felt a reason to do more besides craving for adventure. That craving usually disappears the first time you realize people are trying to kill you and that you won't be missed.

I don't know but it looks like you will get your C-File which is what you need. Read it carefully for anything that might be seen as an informal claim.

I believe you can win a claim for depression due to chronic pain if the chronic pain is based on SC condition. You need to see a psychiatrist who will write you a report explaining all this. Some notes will probably not do it. You need to pretty much stick to thing where you can draw a straight line from SC condition to secondary condition. The VA will not do that for you.

NSA I don't have a scanner, but you can go to the CAVC website and find my case which includes all my information. It includes the BVA decision and my lawyer's brief and the remand. Just look up King,John. I can tell you most of the details via email or message. It is the progress of a CUE all the way from RO to CAVC. These things can even go to federal court. Cushman vs Shinseki 2009 is also on the court website. This is one of the most important decisions for vets who are claiming their evidence was not reviewed,shredded,altered or forged. This case made it a violation of due process for the VA to do these kinds of things. I never knew that two rating schedules existed for rating emotional disorders in 1972 one for neurotic and one for psychotic disorders. I don't believe the BVA knew it. This is a large sort of mistake. There was no diagnostic code for PTSD, of course at that time. If there was it would have been rated under neurotic disorders which a whole different criteria and rating schedule. I think combat fatigue was a neurotic disorder even if the vet was stiff as a board and hid under his bed all the time. This makes no sense to me. I think that is why they changed it for one reason into just one rating schedule for mental disorders not caused by physical injury like TBI. I don't know if they even had TBI back then as if many RVN vets did not get TBI's.

I have never had a decision that did not contain mistakes and errors. Even the claims I have won contained errors.

The way the VA system works it is a disincentive to work and try to better yourself if you have TDIU or 100% for a mental disorder like PTSD. If you lift a finger to help yourself you and your family lose benefits. Mostly people who are 100% for mental or TDIU can't work much anyway. They have spent years bouncing around until they bounce into the VA out of desparation. I was on SSD before I got TDIU so I was going nowhere but I was 51 and I had a working life for 20 years. If I had gotten TDIU when I was 20 that would have been a bad thing for me and I don't think I would be alive today. If I had gone back to school in that day the VA would have reduced me.

If you requested a traveling board three years ago and the claim is still at the RO I would hire a lawyer. Something is very wrong. There is no way in hell it should be at the RO. I got my board in about 8 months. I did have a lawyer.

The Empire strikes back!

I see! I don't know how on earth they rated you just 10% for IHD given you have the stents. The whole thing gets very complicated since I got 60% for heart problems related to DMII. The VA says I am not part of Nehmer. I don't care since I get the same amount of money.