NY Times – On Tuesday, the House Veterans Affairs Committee held one of its perennial hearings on the ever-growing backlog of disability compensation claims pending before the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. The usual polite questioning of V.A. officials was expected, followed by the usual complex answers that few on the committee might be expected to comprehend.

But the affair turned surprisingly contentious, not because of the Republican majority, but thanks to the ranking Democrat on the panel, Representative Bob Filner of California.

After a relatively tame opening statement in which the vice chairman, Representative Gus Bilirakis, a Republican of Florida, called on the V.A. “to break this cycle of unproductively and deliver the benefits that V.A. was created to provide,” Mr. Filner, voice dripping with sarcasm, announced: “Well, here we are again.”

Recalling his first backlog hearing some 20 years ago, Mr. Filner noted with rising irritation that the V.A. has hired, by his count, more than 10,000 new employees in recent years, but has seen the backlog more than double, to over 900,000 pending claims. Yet the Veterans Benefits Administration, the division that handles disability compensation, had done little more than “recycle programs,” he said.

“The definition of insanity is to try the same thing over and over again and expect different results,” he said, sounding a theme he would return to several times during the nearly five-hour hearing.

The congressman, who is running for mayor of San Diego, as veteran-friendly a town as exists in America, was just getting started. After a panel of experts from four major veteran service organizations, including the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, testified about V.B.A.’s problems, Mr. Filner tore into them, too. Heads turned.

Accusing the groups of “playing” the V.A.’s games by allowing themselves to be easily wooed into submission by promises of access to senior officials, Mr. Filner urged the groups to support “radical” change and “blow up” or “break” what he called “this stupid system.”

“What are you afraid of?” he taunted more than once from the depths of his chair, which bounced back and forth with each of his rhetorical lunges.

Gerald Manar, deputy director of National Veterans Service for the V.F.W., responded for the group, ever so politely: “Sir, when you blow up something, you have nothing left.”

The final act came with the testimony of Allison A. Hickey, a retired Air Force brigadier general who has been the under secretary for benefits overseeing V.B.A. for one year. Ms. Hickey, who has been praised by many veterans groups for bringing new energy to her unenviable task, came prepared to list the many ways her agency is trying to cure V.B.A.’s chronic ailments.

But Mr. Filner was having none of it.

“According to your testimony nothing is wrong,” he told her. “Everything is happy.” He accused her of failing to respond to a single issue raised during the previous three hours of testimony, asking, “What the hell were you here for?”

When Ms. Hickey, remaining relatively unruffled throughout the lambasting, asserted that she has a plan for fixing V.B.A., Mr. Filner was incredulous. “There is no plan,” he said, all but daring Ms. Hickey to produce it. She promised she would. (She also promised to provide a list of V.B.A. officials who received performance bonuses.)

At one point, a Democrats on the committee, Representative Tim Walz of Minnesota, tried to rescue Ms. Hickey, praising her Air Force career, which included graduating with the first coed class at the Air Force Academy and becoming a pilot. But this, too, earned the scorn of Mr. Filner.

“I don’t need a lecture about disrespecting her service,” he said to Mr. Walz. “If she can’t do this job, I don’t care what she’s done in the past.”

It was Mr. Walz, though, who made one of the more telling points of the day. Holding up an iPad displaying a tangled flowchart that purportedly explained the claims process, Mr. Walz said, “I challenge anyone on this committee to tell me how this process works.”

No one raised a hand. And even Ms. Hickey had to confess that she and the secretary of veterans affairs, Eric K. Shinseki, have on repeated occasions asked claims officers to walk them through the process.

For all the theater, Mr. Filner was driving toward a policy proposal: creating a new standard whereby the V.B.A. accepts the vast majority of compensation claims on their face, without conducting lengthy reviews or requiring detailed documentation.

The idea would both speed the claims process and make it less adversarial, supporters say. Mr. Filner contends it would make the V.B.A. more like the Internal Revenue Service, which accepts most tax returns as valid, while auditing a small number to weed out fraud.

In a sign of frustration with the existing process, one of the Republicans on the committee, Representative Dan Benishek of Michigan, who is allied with the Tea Party movement, agreed, at least in part, with Mr. Filner.

Noting that many veterans in his district have hearing problems, yet struggle to get their claims approved, Mr. Benishek, a doctor, wondered why a simple test did not suffice.

“Why does that take so long to determine that it’s a disability?” he asked.

Source: NY Times, June 20, 2012, by James Dao