I wanted to be truthful and didn't know off the top of my head what, say, the median time for a claim to be accepted was.
I remember it being something like 2-5 months to get a response, so multiply that by the number of appeals (up to 4, I think) and my ballpark estimate is that the median time-to-acceptance for all eventually-accepted claims is around 6-18 months.
So, I figured saying "could take months" was a more honest thing than saying "could take years." If the median time were greater than a year, after all, "it could take months" is still true, but the converse isn't true! If I had said "years" instead of "months" and was wrong, someone could easily have replied, saying, "You're exaggerating. The median time to acceptance is 9 months, not years. The claims that take years are exceptional cases."
In any case, I didn't know, so I wanted to err on the side of intellectual honesty. That'll teach me. :P
Heh, sorry about my reply. I was just speaking from being on the end of having a parent who went through the process. I seem to remember it taking on the order of more than a year. Good news is it is retroactive from when you apply though. This was over 20 years ago, things might have changed since.
I wanted to be truthful and didn't know off the top of my head what, say, the median time for a claim to be accepted was.
I remember it being something like 2-5 months to get a response, so multiply that by the number of appeals (up to 4, I think) and my ballpark estimate is that the median time-to-acceptance for all eventually-accepted claims is around 6-18 months.
So, I figured saying "could take months" was a more honest thing than saying "could take years." If the median time were greater than a year, after all, "it could take months" is still true, but the converse isn't true! If I had said "years" instead of "months" and was wrong, someone could easily have replied, saying, "You're exaggerating. The median time to acceptance is 9 months, not years. The claims that take years are exceptional cases."
In any case, I didn't know, so I wanted to err on the side of intellectual honesty. That'll teach me. :P
Also, I don't know if you (and the other person who replied with the same comment) have ever heard of Wiio's Laws: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html
One corollary of those laws is this: "If nobody barks at you, your message did not get through." :)