What would it look like? First of all, it would look like a blank card, carte blanche.
I don't believe we should have to prove anything. At the end of the day, we were selected to go. We left healthy; we came back sick. It's not up to me to pay thousands of dollars to get tested, do research, bring reports, and then VAC denies me. Then I have to go back and run after more doctors, and more reports, and pay, and then borrow money from my mother to do tests and tests.
At the end of the day, Veterans Affairs is broken. It's a policy-driven system and it's bureaucrats. There is no scientific advisory anything in there. There is a research department, but they deal with the transition of veterans leaving the forces and going out on civvy street, or this or that.
How is that supposed to help me with complex, chronic, disabling physical and emotional symptoms daily? It doesn't seem to matter that I've proven it time and time again, because I've found the doctors and I've paid the money to get reports. If you have chronic neurodegenerative conditions, they're not going to improve tomorrow. We all know they'll worsen with time, so why do my care providers, every three or six months, have to write reports for Veterans Affairs for me to beg for 10 more treatments?
It's just insanity. It should not be. At the end of the day, too, here are all these medical reports and science given to bureaucrats, who have no medical knowledge, no medical expertise, and we know darn well, because I was involved in the privacy breach, sir, that those files go from Charlottetown to TAC, to a district office, to this person, to that person.
Who are they? Once you put in an application, or even ask for 30 chiropractic or massage sessions, whatever it may be, by the time it gets approved there's a time lapse. This chronic condition, or the condition this veteran is going after, will get worse because they have to wait. As far as I'm concerned, we need a scientific advisory committee of some kind.