SAN FRANCISCO — More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week while the government stalls in granting returning troops the mental-health treatment and benefits to which they are entitled, veterans advocates claimed in court Monday.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is “an agency that is in denial” about a government health care system and appeals process for patients that is “broken down,” Gordon Erspamer, the lawyer for two advocacy groups, said in an opening statement at the trial of a nationwide lawsuit.
He said veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day — a number acknowledged by a VA official in a Dec. 15 e-mail — and the agency’s backlog of disability claims exceeds 650,000, an increase of 200,000 since the Iraq war started in 2003.
Justice Department lawyer Richard Lepley countered that the VA runs a “world-class health care system” and said the changes the plaintiffs seek in their lawsuit are beyond the judge’s authority.
“Of course, we’re obliged to provide health care,” Lepley said, but “the court does not have standards to determine the speed or the scope or the level of that care.”
U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti, a veteran of World War II, is presiding over a nonjury trial scheduled to last two weeks.
The plaintiffs — Veterans for Common Sense in Washington, which claims 11,500 members, and Veterans United for Truth, a Santa Barbara, Calif., group with 500 members — aren’t seeking monetary damages but want the court to appoint a special master or otherwise intervene to make the VA run more efficiently.
Conti decided in January to reject the argument that civil courts have no authority over the VA’s medical decisions or how it handles grievances. But at a later hearing, Conti indicated that he was uncertain about his authority to require spending on particular types of health care.
The trial follows a Rand Corp. study last week that estimated 300,000 U.S. troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, 18.5 percent of the total, suffered from major depression or post-traumatic stress.
“The time delays are staggering,” Erspamer told Conti on Monday. Although the VA says it decides the typical claim for benefits in six months, he said, the agency takes far longer to review post- traumatic stress claims, and four years or more for the government to hear appeals of denied treatment.
The New York Times contributed to this report.
