House Passes Rep. Negrete McLeod's Veteran Legislation Provision

Press Release

Today, the House of Representatives passed legislation that included a provision authored by Congresswoman Negrete McLeod (CA-35), HR 1623, the Veterans Administration (VA) Claims Efficiency Through Information Act of 2013. Negrete McLeod released the following statement after votes:

"As Veterans Day approaches, we must not forget those veterans who are struggling to find work while living with a service-connected disability," said Negrete McLeod. "The VA's legacy paper system has made it difficult to process claims of older veterans who need additional compensation later in life. Claims of younger veterans can also take longer to process because they have multiple medical conditions. Today's passage of this legislation in the House is an important step towards resolving the backlog of benefit claims in the VA."

As of October 21, 2013, the VA had over 600,000 veterans' benefits claims pending. Almost 60% of these claims were pending over 125 days with an average of 351 days. For the Los Angeles Regional Office, the number of claims pending over 125 days is more than 16,000 with an average of 400 days to complete, almost twice the national average.

Negrete McLeod's provision would require the VA to track the time spent evaluating each medical condition in a disability compensation claim. The VA would then have to report the number of completed claims by region and by medical condition for the current and preceding month and year. With this information, Congress and the VA would direct resources more effectively to specific regional VA offices across the nation struggling to end the claims backlog.

Negrete McLeod's bill was incorporated into Chairman Jeff Miller's (FL-1) bill HR 2189 which establishes a task force to evaluate the backlog of disability claims at the Department of Veteran's Affairs. HR 2189 will now be sent to the U.S. Senate for consideration of a vote.

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