Disability system for veterans strays far from its official purpose

[nitpicker]

http://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/disability-system-for-veterans-strays-far-from-its-official-purpose-1.314501

Disability system for veterans strays far from its official purpose

By Alan Zarembo
Los Angeles Times (MCT)
Published: November 16, 2014

The room fell silent for seven minutes as Illinois Rep. Tammy Duckworth upbraided a government contractor.

"Shame on you," the congresswoman scolded Braulio Castillo at an oversight hearing in Washington, D.C., last year, accusing the business owner of gaming the veterans disability system. Castillo had filed a claim with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs after learning that a disability rating would give his technology company preferential standing for federal contracts.
(snip)

Duckworth directed her ire at Castillo, but the real culprit was the broad eligibility criteria of the disability system itself. The contractor had played by the rules for benefits and, as many Washington lawmakers know, those benefits cover ailments from sports injuries to bullet wounds, resulting in disability payouts that totaled $58 billion this fiscal year — up from $49 billion last year.

Routinely criticized in government reviews as out of touch with modern concepts of disability, the system has strayed far from its official purpose of compensating veterans for their lost earning capacity. Yet lawmakers are unwilling to support reforms — or even to criticize the system publicly.
(snip)

Amputees account for roughly 2,000 of the 904,839 Afghanistan and Iraq veterans on the disability rolls as of May. Though the VA did not provide figures on how many combat veterans are among the 3.9 million total beneficiaries, officials said they are a minority. More than 680,000 veterans in the system served during peacetime periods before 1991. The system pays monthly for nearly any medical condition that can be tied to the time a veteran was enlisted. Once benefits are awarded, they are usually for life — even in extreme circumstances. Castillo, for example, was charged this April with murdering his wife. If convicted, VA rules stipulate that his disability rating would drop to 10%, or about $130 a month, while he is in prison.
(snip)

[Sneak the freak]

1. Yes

I personally know several vets who are perfectly able to work who have purposely scammed the system. They teach each other how to do it, and how to benefit from it. It's seems to be a cumulation of smaller injuries or ailments that they use in their claim. I fully support vets who truly can't work, but not the scammers. Here in south TX where we have a large military population, I have seen people with disabled vet license plates, hop out of there cars and run into the store. Please leave those parking spots for this who need them.

[Victor_c3]

2. I've seen the same thing you mention myself.

I have a 70% rating for PTSD and I recently spent 3.5 months in a VA psych ward. There are a lot of guys that I've seen who have higher ratings than me who symptoms that are substantially less severe than my own.

One guy that I saw in the psych ward was hit in the head with a beer bottle in the late eighties during a bar-fight when he was stationed in Germany. He claims that he has PTSD from that incident and was very upset that he didn't also have a TBI (traumatic brain injury) after the VA performed a MRI on him. Another guy fell off of a porch and claimed that gave him PTSD. It's crazy.

Then I spent 13 months in Iraq as an Infantry Platoon Leader and dealt with numerous firefights and small arms engagements, was blown up multiple times by IEDs, had a hand grenade blow up 15 feet from me, lost 5 Soldiers, dealt extensively with dead, dying, and mutilated bodies (I was a combat medic before I became an officer). I can hardly hold a job and I constantly struggle with suicide and all of the other wonderful things that goes with it and I can't get a rating like the guys I mentioned above. My life and my relationships are a mess and I struggle to keep myself out of the psych ward every day. I totally expect that I'll either be locked up in a psych ward or dead within a year.

My wife and coworkers are constantly scared of me as they think I'm going to go all "murder-suicide" on them. My life is a mess.

Sometimes it really gets to me, but I realize that I mostly just need to focus on myself and not worry about the people scamming the system.