Vets' Mental Disability Pay Varies Greatly

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Miami Herald
December 20, 2007 McClatchy Analysis
Disability payments vary greatly from state to state for new veterans with mental illness, a McClatchy analysis found.
By Chris Adams
Veterans coming home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with debilitating mental ailments are discovering that their disability payments from the government vary widely depending on where they live, an exclusive McClatchy news analysis has found.
As a result, many of the recent veterans who are getting monthly payments for post-traumatic stress disorder from the Department of Veterans Affairs could lose tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits over their lifetimes.
The Bush administration has sought to reassure soldiers that they will be treated fairly, but veterans in some parts of the country are far more likely to be well compensated than their compatriots elsewhere are, the analysis found.
McClatchy's analysis is based on three million disability compensation claims records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, as well as separate documents that the VA provided. The analysis is the first to examine the issue of state-to-state variations in compensation for those young veterans who have left the military since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001.
For veterans, their families and their advocates, the issue of disability compensation is hugely important. Disability checks are now worth up to $2,527 a month for a single veteran with no children. Because they last a lifetime, low payments set now -- when veterans are young -- have a dramatic impact.
Prevalent ailment
So far, more than 43,000 recent veterans are on the disability compensation rolls for a variety of mental conditions including post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, depression and anxiety. Of those, more than 31,000 have PTSD, which has emerged as one of the signature injuries from the war on terrorism.
The VA's assessments of those injuries, however, are all over the map.
Of the recent veterans processed by the VA office in Albuquerque, N.M., 56 percent have high ratings for PTSD. Of those handled by the office in Fort Harrison, Mont., only 18 percent do, the McClatchy analysis found.
The analysis found that a recent veteran with PTSD on the rolls in Albuquerque is likely to have a higher payment than a new veteran with PTSD on the rolls in the Montana office.
''There's no reason in the world that a veteran from Ohio should be shortchanged on benefits simply because he is from Ohio,'' said U.S. Rep. Zack Space, a Democrat from Ohio, where veterans had among the lowest compensation rates in the nation. ``And there's no reason a veteran from New Mexico should be getting more benefits simply because he lives in New Mexico.''
A VA benefits official, Michael Walcoff, said the VA was working to minimize unwarranted variations across the country. Judging a condition such as PTSD, however, can be difficult.
So far, 1.5 million Americans have served in the global war on terrorism, and half of them have left active service and moved to veteran status, VA documents show.
Those discharged veterans alone already have produced more than 180,000 disability cases, in which veterans are found to have mental or physical ailments linked to their military service. Most already are receiving monthly compensation checks.
Severity ratings
Because it tends to be quite debilitating -- and generates far higher payments -- PTSD is the most important disability to emerge from the recent wars. The VA workers who decide PTSD cases determine whether a veteran's ability to function at work is limited a little, a lot or somewhere in between. They examine the frequency of panic attacks and the level of memory loss. The process is subjective, and veterans are placed on a scale that gives them scores -- or ''ratings'' -- of zero, 10, 30, 50, 70 or 100.
McClatchy's analysis found that some regional offices are far more likely to give veterans scores of 50 or 70 while others are far more likely to stick with scores of 10 or 30.
Because payments are loaded toward the highest end of the scale -- the difference between the highest rating and the next highest rating is more than $1,000 a month -- the huge gap in ratings has a significant impact on how much the VA is paying, on average, to veterans in different states.
Factoring in all mental and physical disabilities, the average payment for recent veterans ranges from a high of $734 a month in the Little Rock, Ark., office to a low of $435 a month in Honolulu. In Florida, the average is $518.
 
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