john999

You know something funny? It is getting harder and harder to get a primary care doctor to treat new patients on the outside. The reimbursement rates of medicare and many insurance HMO's and PPO's is so small that the docs just don't make that much money compared to specialists. My internist does not take new patients.

Wings When you say that a cue can occur when the correct facts that were known at the time were not in front of the adjudicator can you give me some examples of what that means? Does that mean that records or facts that should have been considered were not considered such as SMR's or medical reports? What does the VA mean by "facts"? If VA ignored SMR's when they made a decision is that a CUE?

I would prepare to watch out for questions about your childhood, familiy situation, teenage years, problems with the law or with school. You want the VA to know that before the stressors you were a normal person with no personality disorders or pre-existing conditions. After the stressor is when you began to have symptoms of PTSD. Don't let them go on a fishing trip into your life before the military. Just tell them everything was fine before the military and the stressor and now it is not.

What they are saying does not make sense since all records are computerized, unless you have records from long ago that are not in their computer system. You need to go to the local VARO and ask them what the heck is going on since if you get the records yourself they may not accept them. I would go and try and talk to a human being at the VA.

Back in the 1970's the VA began sending me compensation at the 100% rate. I knew this was wrong since I was only rated 10% at the time. I told them they had made a mistake. They denied it. I sent the checks back. They kept sending them. After a while I just put them in my bank account and waited. One day with no explanation I went back to 10% and never heard a word from them.

Larry If you are 100% schedular you don't have to worry about it. It is just for those who are TDIU like me. I would not send the VA a thing is you are schedular unless you are asking for housebound. John

I did not get my employment questionaire as I usually do around the first of January. I sent in the form myself after getting it off the VA website. I fear that the VA may be playing games with these forms. If your form is past due you may want to submit it yourself since if you don't the VA can claim they sent it to you, and try to reduce you. I do not trust these people as far as I can throw them. My VARO has claimed I missed C&P exams in the past after not sending me notification, so it is not out of the question for them to claim they sent me the questionaire when they did not send it.

Allan Good post! I read in the obits every day about some guy 60 years old who was a Vietnam vet.

Larry You are just in shock over that federal court decision about denying claims and not telling the vet. That is pretty shocking.

I believe you can file for disability compensation now before you are discharged. Be sure to bring up all your conditions when you have your discharge physical, and don't let them rush you. Be sure and get copies of everything. When you get to the VA side you want to get the highest ratings possible. Do you believe you will be able to work once you get out of the military? Stick around here and you will get more detailed answers. If you get a high enough rating from the VA you may be able to get your disability check without them just taking it out of your retirement. You most definitely want to have filed for all your conditions within one year of discharge. It sounds to me as if you may be unemployable so you want a high rating from the VA. Are any of the injuries combat related?

It sounds real good for getting SC'ed for these conditions. I think since you already had your C&P for all these conditions the best thing to do is just wait. It will probably not be long before you get decisions. The only questions will be the precentage ratings you get for each condition. When you filed your original claim did you file for all four of these conditions, or did the doctor take it on his own to say they were service connected? Either way the C&P doctor has made the case for you for SC.

If the VA doctor says tinnitus aggravated your depression and gives a rational for it I think you have a good chance of having depression granted as secondary. That is basically what it takes to win a secondary type claim is a medical opinion. Are there other NSC conditions that could be responsible for your depression? The VA might try to hang their hat on NSC conditions to explain your depression, but your secondary claim sounds good to me. What many or most vets don't know is that any disability can and often does cause depression.

How do we know this decision will become common practice thoughout the VA? It is going to create chaos. If they do the denial thing it will make writing NOD's difficult because you won't know why your claims were denied. If you have five claims and one is denied you have to assume the others were denied, but you have no idea why? How can you write a decent NOD. If you do write a generic NOD will you get back a SOC that is specific to all the denied claims? I get a feeling the denied claims will be lost in space. I know why they did this move because the VA pushed them to do it to cut down on the paperwork to write denials for veterans filing large numbers of claims. I think this is something that younger vets are doing now since they are better prepared than us old guys. I think in reality it is unworkable, and does not allow due process.

I say again that when you file multiple claims you need to get a VCAA letter that addresses all the claims. If you don't get that letter then you can almost rest assured that the claims that are not referenced in the VCAA letter are going nowhere, and may just die.

I never heard of any policy or regulation that says your pending claim is cancelled when your folder is moved from one RO to another. I think they are making that up. Did you move from one RO to another? If not then they are just playing the shell game with your claim. I don't advise vets to move while they have pending claims because the inmates may send you correspondence to your old address or get more confused than they are already. Do you have a P.O. box or some permanent mailing address? The VA moves claims all the time from one RO to another that is not as busy to finish work on a claim. As Larry says, if the VA could cancell pending claims by just moving the folder from one RO to another we would all be in deep dodo.

Mustang68 Did you received a VCAA letter for the claim for hearing loss or tinnitus? If you don't get a VCAA letter on a claim then the VA has violated their own regs. If it was an inferred claim you should have still got a VCAA letter.

Rockhound I don't think you need to disprove you have a PD, but rather to prove you have residuals of your psychotic break from the service. I think you have a claim to reopen if you can get a shrink to say you have residuals of schizophrenia.

Yes, I would include the VA's rating criteria so your doctor can directly point to how your symptoms meet the highest criteria. That is the perfect letter. You want to be sure you have something in the letter that says the doctor has reviewed all your medical records including your SMR's if this is a private doctor. What will happen otherwise is you may get SC'ed as secondary but then you will have to reargue the percentage rating you get. If you just want to get SC'ed then including the rating criteria is not so important. I think the VA tends to award the lowest possible percentage rating if there is wiggle room. That has been my experience.

If your doctor's letter is good enough you may not need a C&P exam. I got two conditions SC'ed as secondary without a c&p exam. My VA doctor wrote me a letter and bingo.

I just wonder how the Court of Veteran Appeals could have said their was no CUE "because resonable minds could have believed that he was discharged for being an anti-social personality rather than his being discharged for being a paranoid schizophrenic." The record did not show any indication of anti-social personality. All it takes is a command that wants to not pay a disability pension, and a couple of doctors who want to please their command for this to happen to any of us. It happened to me, but somehow the VA service connected me within one year of discharge. Someone must have slipped up rather than screwing me all the way down the line like they did the guy in the court case.

Skunk The case Delta is talking about should cast light on your claim. Maybe even cast light on Rockhoud's claim.

How do you like the fact that the military kicked this poor guy out on an administrative discharge for anti-social personality disorder when they knew he was a diagnosed schizophrenic? Just about saving a buck at all moral costs. You know if the Court of Veteran Appeals does not call something like this a CUE you have to wonder. How long did it take this vet to get his CUE from start to finish?

I second those who say to file the claim. You want to protect the effective date. Even if they don't do a thing until your appeal is done your new claim's effective date will be established. Probably the only time not to file a new claim is when your older claim is on the verge of being decided at the VARO. For instance, if you have a claim that will result in TDIU or 100% when decided you don't want to file for something that will net you 10% if it means the VA is going to wait until the new claim is developed.

Your VSO showed negligence in telling you not to file a claim. If you had filed a claim within one year it would have been treated as being in the presumptive period. Now you have to prove that your current problems are related to the head and neck injury after 2.5 years have passed since you were discharged. You should be able to do this, but it will be harder. I don't think your claim is doomed, but it makes it harder since you did not get continual care since discharge, and no follow-up. I would file now. You need to get a doctor to look over your medical records, and state that your present symptoms are, in his opinion, the result of your injury in service. Even if you got 0% rating it is very important that you get your injury service connected now. What will your condition be in 20 years? If you wait it will be ten times as hard to prove your claim. The longer you wait the more chance for some intervening injury to occur that the VA will use to deny your claim. If you have a traffic accident and bump your head the VA will probably say that is the cause of your problems. Injuries tend to get worse over time just due to age. What is a pain in the ass now could become incapacitating 20 years from now. File the claim, and get into treatment at the VA right away.

That is a case where I would haunt my congressman's office until I heard something. No way a claim should take that long. Something is wrong and I bet they lost your claim, or it went in the shredder. Do you have proof of when you filed it and what you filed with it?