People
Dana Montalto
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Decades after combat service, local veteran seeks benefits
February 6, 2024
NBC 5 Responds to the family of a Vietnam veteran trying to access military benefits. The family said the former service member’s discharge from the…
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In a potentially precedent-setting case, Veterans Clinic students work to help LGBTQ widower secure VA benefits
November 8, 2021
Members of the Veterans Legal Clinic at Harvard Law School are representing a same-sex widower in his appeal before the VA and in federal court in a potentially precedent-setting case.
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An op-ed by Dana Montalto, clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Veterans Legal Clinic: A veteran with a fever and hacking cough that suggest a possible coronavirus infection tries to make a doctor’s appointment, only to be turned away by a receptionist who personally decides the would-be patient can’t see a physician. A former service member and sexual assault survivor at risk of suicide is denied access to mental health services by a bureaucratic gatekeeper stationed at the therapist’s front desk. These are two of thousands of examples of veterans seeking the Veterans Affairs healthcare they’re legally entitled to — and being wrongly refused it. This is due to a pervasive misunderstanding, and misapplication, of the rules regarding other-than-honorable discharges.
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Veterans Legal Clinic report documents VA’s systemic denial of health care to veterans with ‘bad paper’ discharges
March 6, 2020
A report published by HLS' Veterans Legal Clinic finds that inadequate training at VA puts more than 400,000 veterans at risk of being unlawfully turned away from treatment for service-related mental health conditions.
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Veterans Group: Lawsuit Prompts Pentagon to Reopen Database
January 27, 2020
The Pentagon will reopen a records database that helps service members who are appealing a less-than-honorable discharge, a veterans group said Friday. The National Veterans Legal Services Program had sued the Defense Department over a lack of access to the database, arguing that the military had been breaking federal law since April. The database contains decisions by military review boards that grant or deny a veteran’s request to upgrade a discharge. Veterans and their lawyers study those decisions in hopes of building successful arguments of their own...Dana Montalto, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Veterans Legal Clinic, told The Associated Press earlier this month that post-9/11 vets have the highest rate of receiving less-than-honorable discharges. She added some veterans can wait years to get a decision from a military review board.