Disability Claim Backlogs At VA Too

From the Houston Chronicle:

Nearly 400,000 disability claims were pending at the VA as of February, including 135,741 that exceeded the VA's 160-day goal for processing them. The department takes six months, on average, to process a claim, and the waiting time for appeals averages two years.

This already strained system may grow more overburdened in years ahead as many of the troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan return from those wars, experts say. The VA gives veterans from those two conflicts top priority in claims processing.

"The projected number of claims from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will rapidly turn the disability claims problem into a crisis," said Linda J. Bilmes, a Harvard University public policy professor who has studied the claims process and met with VA Secretary Jim Nicholson last month to discuss ways to improve it.