Disabled vets forced to battle Social Security for benefits

Disabled vets forced to battle Social Security for benefits

Servicemen deemed fully disabled by the VA are rejected repeatedly by the federal agency

Fredrick D. Joe/The Oregonian
Jerry Valentine visits the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Portland. He has been trying to get disability benefits from the Social Security Administration.
Video

Jerry Valentine recovered from a head wound caused by an exploding rocket in Vietnam 39 years ago. He spent a lifetime working before nightmares of his war experiences left him unable to keep a job. Valentine talks about what it is like for Social Security to deny him disability benefits even though another federal agency — the Veterans Administration — has concluded his post-traumatic stress prevents him from holding a job.


Four vets’ battle
At last count, 144,082 veterans had filed Social Security disability claims. Most had been denied twice and filed appeals. Getting a hearing with the agency’s judges takes a national average of 514 days. Here are four disabled combat vets battling a new enemy on the homefront.


» Bob Pine

» Harry Rose

» Herb Eash

» Bill Bloom


Previously
Fight to the death

Portland's Social Security office has some of the nation's longest delays for disability benefits, and in the years-long waits some die before seeing a dime.
By Bryan Denson and Brent Walth
The Oregonian
Jerry Valentine dreads sleep. Nightmares have tormented him since 1969, when a firefight on a muddy river in Vietnam left him with a hole in his skull.

The worst of the dreams began eight years ago, bringing gore and guilt to his bedroom nearly every night. They left him so wrung out in the morning he could no longer work.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs determined in 2005 that the Navy veteran, now 61, suffers such severe post-traumatic stress disorder that he can’t hold a job. The VA rated him 100percent disabled and pays him a benefit of about $2,900 a month.

Like most working Americans, Valentine is covered by Social Security’s disability insurance, and he figured he was eligible. But Social Security told him he wasn’t disabled, no matter what the VA says — even though both agencies define disability in similar ways.

It’s a paradox thousands of disabled veterans face every year: They’ve proven they can’t work — but Social Security refuses to buy it.

The VA annually rates nearly 8,000 veterans as 100 percent disabled. Many who also seek Social Security disability benefits find themselves among the record 767,595 claims now backlogged in the agency’s hearings offices. At last count, about one in 10 were vets.

“I can’t sleep, and I can’t work,” says Valentine, who lives in the suburbs southwest of Portland. “How can being disabled be different for another government agency?”

No one knows how many vets rated unemployable by the VA get turned down for benefits by Social Security. But advocates for the disabled say the problem is widespread.

More than 100 members of Congress are backing bills in the House and Senate that would compel Social Security to accept the VA’s rulings on vets whose service-related disabilities prevent them from working.

“The problem is only going to get worse given all the people we have coming back from our current wars,” says Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., who introduced the House bill last year. “They shouldn’t be forced to fight the government for their benefits twice.”

One vet’s path

Shortly before dark on April 13, 1969, a shoulder-fired rocket shot out of a dense jungle south of Saigon, sailed low over the Vam Co Dong River and exploded near a Navy patrol boat.

Jerry Valentine stood at the boat’s helm when shrapnel swept beneath the vessel’s canvas canopy and struck him in the head, exposing his brain.

Look closely at Valentine’s forehead and you’ll see surgical scars that cover a plastic plate. Time has faded his sutures and the emotional wounds of war. He recovered and spent more than 30 years working tough-guy jobs — fishing boat skipper, personal fitness trainer and diesel parts salesman.

But in the summer of 2000, his brother Dee Valentine suffered a traumatic head injury in a central Oregon construction accident. Jerry and his family made the difficult decision to remove Dee from life support, and he soon died.

Nightmares of the war that had occasionally visited Valentine now came almost nightly. They carried him back to Vietnam with Dee, who had never served in combat.

“I was constantly screwing up and getting him killed,” Jerry says of his nightmares. “He was stepping into my line of fire or a sniper would get him. I was watching his head explode. Every dream it was a head injury that killed him.”

Valentine thrashed in bed so violently he sometimes injured himself. His wife, Tamara, once woke to find her husband’s hand clamped over her head. “Don’t look in their eyes,” he warned. “They can see you.” The Valentines eventually decided to sleep in separate bedrooms.

When Valentine showed up for work at Cummins Northwest, a diesel engine company on Swan Island, he was too exhausted to handle his job at the parts counter. He went on medical leave and a psychologist, after regular therapy with Valentine, diagnosed him with chronic and severe PTSD, with symptoms of depression.

Valentine’s leave ran out and he returned to work in October 2001. But he was a complete wreck. He fell asleep on his stool at the counter, failed to hear the phone ringing or forgot about callers he’d put on hold.

“He’d have that thousand-yard stare all day,” says Lane Anthony, his former supervisor.

Valentine grew depressed when he tanked on his job performance evaluations. Anthony says he fudged a couple of those reviews, rating him far better than he deserved, to see if it would help. But it didn’t.

Colleagues unaware of his nightly terrors labeled him lazy. He figured it was only a matter of time before Cummins canned him. Valentine’s psychologist urged him to quit — something he didn’t want to do. But finally, in March 2004, he resigned.

Valentine later earned his disability rating from the VA and sought the same acknowledgment from Social Security. He had every reason to believe it would be simple to get benefits.

“Kafka-esque situations”

Social Security and the VA use similar criteria to evaluate those who file claims for disability benefits. The agencies look at physical impairments, mental limitations and ability to work full-time jobs. Both require medical documentation to support the claims.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2002 that Social Security had wrongly denied benefits to Thomas E. McCartey, a veteran whom the VA had found unable to work because of his disabilities. McCartey suffered from depression and a back injury and had been so despondent he locked himself in a house for a year and tried to starve himself to death.

“He had two government agencies telling him two different things,” says Eugenie Mitchell, the Sacramento lawyer who represented McCartey. “It’s one of those Kafka-esque situations for an ordinary guy.”

The court ruled that Social Security must give “great weight” to the VA’s findings before coming to a conclusion.

Linda Ziskin, Valentine’s appellate lawyer, says Social Security judges are inconsistent in following the law. “In some cases they don’t follow it and in some other cases they just don’t understand it,” she says. “Either way, the disabled vet is not getting the Social Security benefits that he or she deserves.”

Social Security has turned down Valentine repeatedly for benefits. One denial came after a 2006 hearing in Portland before Linda Haack, one of the agency’s administrative law judges.

Haack’s job was to decide whether Valentine’s medical problems met her agency’s standard for disability benefits. Social Security defines a disability as a severe impairment that keeps someone out of “substantial gainful activity” for 12 consecutive months.

Haack downplayed the VA’s rating of Valentine. She also gave little weight to letters submitted by psychologist Lynn Van Male, who often treated him at the VA, and the testimony of his wife, Tamara, who witnessed his terror-filled nights.

In the end, the supervisor who tried to help Valentine by puffing up his job evaluations hurt his case.

Haack told Valentine in his hearing that she couldn’t understand how he could claim sleep deprivation hurt his job performance at a time when his supervisor rated his work outstanding. Noting this discrepancy, she said, “I have to really doubt your credibility.”

“He wanted to just give up on life after that,” Tamara Valentine says.

Social Security officials decline to comment on individual cases. But spokesman Mark Hinkle points out that the agency expedites any claim made by a veteran disabled on active duty since Oct. 1, 2001. Those claims are “kicked up to the front of the line,” he says.

The expedited claims offer no help to vets disabled on duty before the invasion of Afghanistan.

Sarbanes, the Maryland congressman, says he understands two independent federal agencies — with their own rules, procedures and bureaucratic cultures — might not always agree on individual cases.

“If you look at it through the eyes of the veteran, it’s all part of the same system,” Sarbanes says. “The veteran — and frankly, the taxpayers — have the rightful expectation that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing and that they are working together.”

Valentine says he’ll fight on. His case, rejected by a U.S. District Court judge in Portland, recently landed in federal appeals court.

It’s not that Valentine is desperate for the money. He and Tamara live in a nice tree-shaded neighborhood just off Interstate 5, near Lake Oswego. They take care of expenses with Jerry’s VA benefits and Tamara’s salary as a manager at Thermo King Northwest Inc.

But Valentine says he’s hurt that the government he served in Vietnam, the government he very nearly died for, thinks he’s trying to rip off his country.

“I think my country’s ripping me off — and a lot of other people,” he says. “You pay into (Social Security) all your life so when you need it, it will be there. And then they won’t give it back to you.”

Do you have a story about dealing with the Social Security disability system? We’d like to hear from you by e-mail at disability@news.oregonian.com or by phone at 503-294-5013. This story is the second installment of an ongoing investigation by The Oregonian into Social Security’s unprecedented backlog of disability claims.

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