June has been named the official ALS Awareness Month by the ALS Association. ALS stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but is better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. The more familiar term was coined after Major League Baseball player Lou Gehrig’s very public battle with the disease. Gehrig contracted the disease at the age of 36, which ended his career in the Major Leagues and ultimately took his life two years later.
It’s not every day someone is convicted of committing fraud against two major government programs at the same time. In Fort Smith, Arkansas, a woman named Carolyn Faye Summerhill pled guilty and was convicted of fraud against both the Social Security Administration and the Food and Drug Administration’s WIC program. She will be sentenced at a later date, but will face up to 10 years in prison in addition to being forced to pay back over $200,000 to the SSA, the WIC program, as well as several banks.
Long waits are not uncommon to veterans waiting for their cases to be reviewed by Veterans Administration offices across the country. There is a typically heavy load of cases in every office, but in the state of Maine, some veterans are being told they may have to wait up to 2 years for their cases to be seen. The root cause for this is the recent ruling in favor of Agent Orange disability claims.
Illinois’s Republican Representative Judy Biggert is making an effort to keep veterans in her state informed about benefits and medical information that affect them. Last week she, along with a VA Hospital Director, Sharon Helman, and the VA Regional Director Duane Honeycutt, met with about 50 local veterans at the Bolingbrook Municipal Building for a forum on veterans’ concerns.
A 66-year old man from Las Vegas will be spending the next eighteen months in prison, but not for one of the typical kinds of gambling crimes associated with Sin City. Paul Smith risked much more than he realized when he decided to work ‘under the table’ while collecting disability benefits from the Social Security Administration (SSA).
