Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Part of the challenge for the people who answer the phones and get the questions is having a lack of understanding of who's on the other end. Typically the advocates end up making those calls and answering some of those questions.
One of the biggest challenges facing veterans across the country that I have seen is that, if the veteran is in crisis and is having mental and physical impairment difficulties, and they are trying to navigate the myriad questions and check boxes, if you will, that have to be filled out in order to get to the next level—“Are you entitled to it? What have you been given so far? Did it work?”, all of those different questions—in many, many cases, veterans just hang up the phone because they decide in their own minds that VAC is not going to help them. It's been said across the country that the system is set up to delay and deny until you die.
I want to pay homage to all of the people in VAC departments across this nation who have helped me personally save the lives of veterans from coast to coast. We can't deny that fact, but these people are faced with a system that is as complex to them as it is to the end-users, who are the veterans who are on the other end of it.
If the veteran's family is stepping in, as Tina alluded to, trying to get help, when they have to sue the government, quite obviously the program is designed for the bureaucracy to succeed and not the end-users. That's the challenge. The mental health piece of that is that we are losing veterans all the time to suicide because they give up. We're a nation that doesn't give up on our people. We are not a nation that should be giving up on our soldiers and our veterans, and whether they're in service or they're out of service, these are the challenges.
The first question is on where the veteran served, and all those different pieces, and someone's opinion might be “I'm sorry, but you don't qualify.” Then they call the next worker, who says, “You qualify, but we're going to need a telephone book-sized amount of paperwork filled out before we can get you to the next stage.” If you're living in your car, that's not going to get you to a very good place.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.