Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Shameful

—

by

James A. Bacon
in

Virginia, with nearly 800,000 veterans—better than 1-in-10 of the state’s population—trails 48 states in compensation to its disabled veterans, according to an analysis released this week by the Chicago Sun-Times. Disabled veterans in the Commonwealth receive, on average, $6978 in annual disability pay. Only Ohio, at $6860, kept Virginia veterans from being dead last in the nation.

According to the report, disability pay nationally averages better than $8000. Puerto Rico leads the nation, with $11,422, followed by New Mexico. Even U. S. veterans in the Phillipines—with annual compensation of $9971—fare far better than Virginia’s disabled veterans.

Regionally, disabled veterans in North Carolina receive $8750; in Tennessee, $8295; in West Virginia $10,373; in South Carolina, $8056.

The disclosures are sure to inflame criticism of the Bush Administration’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which revealed a $1 billion funding shortfall earlier this year, will likely set the state’s congressional delegation to scrambling in search of corrective action , and may become a key point of contention in the run-up to Virginia’s election of a new governor and a new House of Delegates in November.

And well it should. There is no excuse—none—for this kind of discrepancy in how disabled veterans are treated state-to-state across the nation.

Share this article

ADVERTISEMENT

(comments below)

ADVERTISEMENT

(comments below)

Comments

  1. Salt Lick Avatar
    Salt Lick

    You’re right, Barnie. Trying to use veterans’ problems as a partisan tool against the Bush adminstration is “shameful.”

  2. Becky Dale Avatar
    Becky Dale

    Could you add some information about your source? I went to Chicago Sun Times website but couldn’t find the article. Googling brought up a special series on the topic from 2004 but apparently there is something released last week. What are you reading?

  3. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Barnie, It is possible that disability payments vary according to age, or severity of disability, or the year in which they incurred their disability, and that those objective indices vary by state? Surely any federal program would hand out compensation based on a geograpically unbiased formula. No Virginia congressman would stand for a practice that arbitrarily paid Virginia veterans less than those of another state on the basis of their place of residence.

    As for “inflaming criticism” of the Bush Adminstration’s Department of Veteran Affairs, is there any evidence that the disparity of pay occurs as the result of Bush administration actions? Or, as seems plausible, could the disparity reflect practices and formulae put into place long ago.

    I’m not saying that your outrage isn’t justified — I don’t have command over the facts — but I will say that you haven’t provided enough information at this point to persuade your readers to share your outrage. If Virginia veterans are getting short-changed, we should all take up their cause. But I’m not yet convinced that our veterans are getting the shaft.

  4. Salt Lick Avatar
    Salt Lick

    Jim — an article from just two days ago addressing your questions:

    http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/06/30/congress.veterans.ap/index.html

  5. Salt Lick Avatar
    Salt Lick

    Sorry, “two days ago” should read “a few days ago.”

  6. Becky Dale Avatar
    Becky Dale

    I’ve found an article:
    http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-wvets14.html

  7. Will Vehrs Avatar
    Will Vehrs

    It appears that there is a large amount of subjective judgment in Veterans Administration case evaluations and that may account for the discrepancies across state lines.

    It’s easy to generalize wildly from national data, but let me suggest a few less than sinister reasons for seemingly low disability payments. Please understand that I’m no expert and if veterans are not being treated fairly, I think that ought to be fixed.

    1. We’re talking average payments. Maybe armed forces pesonnel who suffered the most are getting large awards and those with less serious injuries are getting smaller awards. While there are large numbers of wounded personnel coming out of Iraq, for example, they are still a small percentage of the overall armed forces.

    2. Officers versus enlisted personnel. Virginia probably has more officers among its veteran population than many other states because of the Pentagon. A service-connected disability might not hamper someone with a graduate degree as as it might a high school educated truck mechanic.

    3. While armed service is honorable, not all requests for disability are honorable. Show me a soldier who lost a limb being denied a disability payment and I will be as outraged as anyone. Show me a soldier seeking disability for some vague lower back condition (like that of thousands of civilians) being denied and I will not go to the ramparts.

    4. There are individual screw-ups in every large organization and we can’t judge the whole organization by these individual outrages. We have to ask that the organization recognizes them and tries to stamp them out.

    I agree with Salt Lick. We shouldn’t make this kind of situation a Democrat vs. Republican issue. Both parties have an obligation to ensure a fair system and there are plenty of members of both parties on the Congressional Committees that oversee the Veteran’s Administration.

  8. Barnie Day Avatar
    Barnie Day

    I don’t know that citing state-specific, number-specific data is a wild generalization about anything. And, Jim, maybe there is a valid reason for Virginia’s next-to-last rank. Maybe, too, a valid reason Virginia fell fom 40th to 49th in the last year. And forgive me, Salty,but I thought Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. Heck, I’ll just have to find out who IS in charge. Could you help me with that one?

    In December of last year, a series of Sun-Times stories prompted an investigation by the VA’s inspector general. His conclusion: the discrepancies are largely due to subjectivity on the part of VA employees. Virginia’s Commissioner of Veterans Services, Jon Mangis, who came to his current post from a similar one in Oregon in September of 2003, could not be reached for comment at this writing. But Virginia VA officials—and their counterparts across the country–have long struggled with funding shortfalls.

    A veterans advocacy group’s communication from February of this year warned:

    “The ballooning federal deficit will absorb dollars from spending programs and lawmakers will make cuts wherever possible, even to sick and disabled veterans who are already being denied timely care because of historically inadequate funding levels.”

    According to the Marine Corps League, one Bush Administration 2006 budget proposal would have charged one group of veterans a $250 application fee. Another would have doubled individual prescription medication costs from $7 to $15. That’ll learn this bunch of freeloaders, right Will?

    The National Priorities Project (NPP) estimated in May, 2004 that Virginia’s veterans health care facilities alone would need $65 million more than then being proposed by the Bush Administration to meet its veterans health care needs. At that time, 90,232 disabled Virginia veterans were receiving disability benefits. A year ago, the war in Iraq had cost Virginia taxpayers $4.3 billion, according to NPP’s assessment.

    And Will, just so you know: a VA study in 2002 showed 310,000 veterans waiting for appointments, half for more than six months, and veterans filing disability claims waited an average of six months for service—and sometimes for as long as two years. What a bunch of whiners, huh?

    The VA operates 11 veterans affairs facilities in Virginia—a regional office in Roanoke, the McGuire Medical Center in Richmond, a community clinic in Alexandria, out-patient clinics in Stephens City and Harrisonburg, veterans centers in Norfolk, Roanoke, Richmond and Alexandria, and medical centers in Hampton and Salem

    Steve Robertson, legislative director of the American Legion said of Bush Administration VA proposals, in a Washington Post write-up of the $1 billion shortfall announcement earlier this year:

    “Their policies are inconsistent with a nation at war” and violate the basic military value of “an army of one, teamwork, taking care of each other.”

    But, hey, don’t pay any attention to me and the American Legion. We’re just partisans.

  9. Will Vehrs Avatar
    Will Vehrs

    You know, Barnie, I didn’t accuse you of being a partisan. I admitted I was no expert.

    You posted something without a lot of back-up. Several of us tried to add to the discussion.

    You’ve come back with some more data.

    This can be an exchange, or it can be an exercise in clubbing us like baby seals until we accept your opinion.

    I love you, too.

  10. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Barnie, I’m still unclear about your line of attack here. You seem to be doing two things: Charging the Bush administration with underfunding the VA generally, and charging the Bush administration with short-changing Virginia specifically. The charges that the Bushies are underfunding the VA generally would seem to have some basis in real problems experienced at the VA. But are we expected to believe that the Bushies are deliberately screwing one of the most consistently Republican states in the country? That makes no sense at all.

    Another question: Let’s assume, for purposes of argument that the characterizations of underfunding are totally legitimate and not the all-too-common bureaucratic whining. Is this a new phenomenon? I seem to recall that the VA has been chronically underfunded through one administration after another. In other words, is this problem uniquely attributable to the Bush administration, as you seem keen to portray it?

    Finally, you quote the VA inspector general as saying that the discrepencies in funding “are due to subjectivity on the part of VA employees.” That seems to undermine your own case. The discrepencies-between-states problem resides in the bowels of the bureaucracy; it’s not the result of Bush administration budgetary policies.

  11. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    According to the AP article cited by Salt Lick above: “Most of the deficit stems from surprisingly high demand for health care from veterans who fought during all combat eras. The VA also underestimated the number of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, which accounts for a portion of the deficit.”

    If Virginia has a higher-than-normal percentage of returning veterans, then that might account for the disparity in funding.

  12. Will Vehrs Avatar
    Will Vehrs

    One other thing about this thread is that Barnie moved the goalposts. He started out talking about disability pay differential among states, then moved to a broader criticism of VA services.

    I should have known better than to suggest that possibly some VA claims might not be valid, as now I’m accused of calling veterans “freeloaders.”

    Not that it matters, but I’m a veteran. I would never want to shortchange those I served with who suffered disabling injuries in Viet Nam before I served with them, or in the Gulf after my service ended. Honesty compels me, however, to admit that some I served with attempted to make more of “disabilities” contracted during peacetime than I or others felt was warranted–just as many civilians do with worker comp claims or lawsuits.

    Because that is probably only a tiny fraction of the VA caseload, I withdraw that as a reason for disability differentials.

  13. Barnie Day Avatar
    Barnie Day

    Will, I withdraw ‘freeloaders.’ It was intemperate. Of course so me folks no doubt try to play the system. And I am not blaming or attacking anyone. I sourced the criticism quotes. We can blame it on Harry Truman, for all I care–but I do think some explanation is warranted for the discrepancy. Is it subjective? For the same service, same sacrifice, etc. why should a disabled vet revieve different pay state to state?

  14. Will Vehrs Avatar
    Will Vehrs

    We’ve apparently backed into agreement, Barnie. A veteran with a shrapnel wound to the leg, for example, should get the same disability pay in Virginia as in Nevada. The VA system should be able to process that claim fairly and in a timely manner, with minimal bureaucracy and hassle for the veteran.

Leave a Reply

Read More