WHO'S TAKING CARE OF VETERANS WHO CAN'T TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES?

Here is a sad story of greed and incompetence that puts a veterans' finances and lives at risk.

Story here... http://ktla.trb.com/news/la-me-conserve15nov15,0,7074260.story?coll=ktla-news-1

From the story:  At the end of the month, her money dwindling, Carolyn Osterhout would survive on peanut butter sandwiches.

She had trouble paying for both the Prozac she took for depression and the prescription spray she needed for her asthma. For a time, she went without either.

The widow of an Air Force veteran, Osterhout was not penniless. She had money in the bank and received veterans benefits of more than $1,000 a month.

The source of her troubles was Anne L. Chavis, the court-appointed guardian who controlled her money and was supposed to look after her.

More from the story:  For more than a decade, the Department of Veterans Affairs and California's probate courts entrusted Chavis with dozens of vulnerable adults, most of them disabled veterans and their survivors.

She exploited and neglected many of them with seeming impunity — conduct that highlights the flaws in a broken system.

While supposedly under the supervision of the VA and the courts, Chavis often failed to pay her clients' bills and refused to tell them what she was doing with their money, interviews and records show.

This is more common than you think.

I have been working with a man whose wife, a veteran, has been declared incompetent.  The VA has named an outside party to be the fiduciary.  The husband was not even considered.  And, this fiduciary is not paying the bills or forwarding any funds to the family.  I'll have more on this case as it develops.

Larry Scott

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