[Bartholomew Roberts]

1) seems to be a red herring, as until a claim is denied, and goes past internal VA review, there is no legal case. So, arguing that you cannot pay a lawyer for legal help is a misleading statment, because until final BVA review, you do not have a case, only a disputed claim.

I haven't worked with the VA; but I have worked with Homeland Security in Customs & Immigration. To give a comparison, you can hire a lawyer to help you file challenges to CIS determination of your immigration status even though it is simply a claim and not yet a legal case. While Congress certainly has every constitutional right to exercise its jurisdiction over the military as it sees fit and provide or not provide benefits according to its wisdom, it does offend me that an illegal immigrant being deported can have a lawyer represent him at the administrative level; but a veteran appealing a denial of medical treatment cannot.

Again, I can't speak for the VA; but in the CIS world, this is very important since failure to perfectly fill out the paperwork can create a procedural error that can cause problems with a later legal challenge. On the flipside, it also has helped create an environment where it can be very difficult to even dispute an administrative decision without a lawyer. Would the additional costs to the veterans as a whole outweigh the benefit to those who wish to hire lawyers?

A second aspect of working with CIS, is that an administrative review or decision can take several years before it reaches the status of "final administrative decision" that is appealable to a court. I hope that isn't the case at the VA; but it appears there is a significant length of time where a veteran is at the mercy of the VA, whatever its decision is on a particular issue of medical treatment. Considering how important a prompt response is to effective medical treatment, this seems like a problem to me.

2) This also appears to be a misleading statement, although true enough on the face of it. The VA adjudicator is the ruling authority, just as an arbitrator is binding authority for settling many forms of dispute, short of going to court. Saying they would be both the judge and prosecutor is technically correct, but leaves out the small fact that they are also the defense advocate at the same time.

The VA Adjudicator does serve all of the roles; but considering they will be working closely with the people who deny the claim and receive their money from the VA, I have to think it may contribute to a bias in their decisions.

3) Again, I wonder about this one. While I am no expert, I would think that the rules of law to subpoena witnesses would apply when you go to court. But not until then. And BVA review hearing are not court, they are administrative functions of the VA.

Yes, this one struck me as odd too. I do not know how you could deny a subpoena in these circumstances. The "administrative-only" decision does make sense in this light, though then we have the question of how does the adjudicator reach a decision on denial of medical treatment without hearing this testimony? My guess is that the adjudicator sees an internal report from the VA and that the individual medical personnel cannot be grilled on their report via subpoena at that stage of the process. This rule seems more reasonable to me - particularly if it helps speed the administrative review to a status where it can be appealed easier.

4) Total BS, as Fremmer's research shows, there is a clear process for redress of grievances

I think part of the complaint here is that the redress does not take place until after the final administrative review has been done. Once you have been denied here, you can appeal to CAVC; but CAVC lacks the authority to make the VA do what it orders at the Regional Office level, so you have to appeal to the Washington D.C. Circuit court before you can get an order that the VA has to acknowledge. That basically means that unless you win the administrative review, you have a trial in federal district court and federal appeals court before you can actually get action if the VA wants to be stubborn.

It seems like an obvious fix here would be for Congress to grant CAVC the authority to enforce its orders. I am curious what the details on this are since it seems strange that Congress would grant jurisdiction to hear these cases to a court but then not give the court anyway to enforce its orders at higher levels of decision making within the agency it is supposed to oversee. I suspect there is a good reason for this; I just am not sure why it is structured like that.