COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — El Paso County wants to make it faster for veterans to get connected to health care services. According to the El Paso County Division of Veterans Services more veterans are needing help filing claims, but they do not have enough people to help.
Marshall Bosworth is the Manager for El Paso County Division of Veterans Services and is also a Veterans Service Officer. Bosworth served in the Gulf War and tells News5 it is important to help people who served the country.
“I love what we do. I love helping veterans and their family members,” Bosworth said. “When someone spends 4 years in the military or 40 years in the military we help them file for any disabilities that occurred during that service."
The Veteran Service Officers (VSO) help veterans file PACT Act claims in order to get compensation. The PACT Act Program provides health care and benefits to veterans exposed to toxic substances during their service, like agent orange.
“A lot of repository issues from breathing in all of the smoke and what was in the dust and everything from being over there,” Bosworth said.
He said they are receiving a record number of pact act claims.
“That doubled our appointment times, we went from about four weeks out to eight weeks of appointments,” Bosworth said.
With more people signing up, the county said it could take eight weeks for people to get an appointment with a VSO.
Cory Givhan is a Legal Administrative Specialist with the VA. He said the PACT Act was passed in 2022.
“It created a lot of new presumptive disabilities for veterans that served during the Gulf War due to their burn pit exposure,” Givhan said.
“All the veteran needs to do is have a diagnosis of the disability and through our military records research team, we're able to locate, you know, that this veteran was assigned to this unit, he served here and that burden is taken off the veteran. You know we can show where he served and then it's more likely than not that we're probably granted service connection,” Givhan said.
Bosworth said through the county, his office has access to file claims with the VA. He said some veterans who come in are looking for help, and are very happy to have someone assist them in the process.
However, because of the paperwork and waiting to get an appointment, other veterans are frustrated.
“We deal with some who are angry when they come in and understandably because they may have been denied their benefits for years and years and they are not mad at us. But they are mad,” Bosworth said.
One of those veterans is Brent Finses, who filed PACT Act claims last summer and says the process has been extremely difficult.
"What I have gone through since the 14th of August is almost the stress and depression is almost as bad as I went through in Vietnam,” Finses said.
Finses is a Vietnam veteran. He said he has not received any compensation for the claims he has filed.
“If I had known they had agent orange there I would have brought back dirt to give to the VA to confirm,” Finses said.
Bosworth said they are trying to help veterans.
“The biggest impact we have is to bring those wait times down,” Finses said.
To fix this issue, they are hiring three more Veteran Service Officers.
“The goal of adding this additional staff is to get those wait times back to that four week or less time because we need to get this paperwork submitted as quickly as possible so the VA can work the claim,” Bosworth said.
El Paso County approved the three new positions in the 2024 budget. They've hired two already out of the three positions already, but it will take nearly four months to train the new officers.
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