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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 recently by the Chicago
Sun-Times. Disabled
veterans in the Commonwealth receive, on average, $6,978
in annual disability pay. Only Ohio, at $6,860, kept
Virginia veterans from being dead last in the
nation. According
to the report, disability pay nationally averages
better than $8,000. Puerto Rico leads the nation,
with $11,422. Even veterans in the
Philippines—with annual compensation of
$9971—fare far better than Virginia’s disabled
veterans. What
do the numbers look like regionally? Disabled
veterans in North Carolina receive $8,750; in
Tennessee, $8,295; in West Virginia $10,373; in
South Carolina, $8,056. The
disclosures are sure to inflame criticism of the
Bush Administration’s U. S. Department of Veterans
Affairs (VA), which revealed a $1.2 billion funding
shortfall earlier this year. The Roanoke Times
in a lead editorial this week laid the blame for
that one at the feet of congressional Republicans:
“While tens of thousands of American soldiers give
their best, congressional Republicans play shameful
politics.” Virginia’s
ranking in disability payments will likely set the
state’s congressional delegation to scrambling in
search of corrective action, and could become a
point of contention in the run-up to Virginia’s
election of a new governor and a new House of
Delegates in November -- even though it is a federal
program that Virginia only assists in the delivery
of services. 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. Although
one could argue that there are “natural” reasons
for variances in the level of compensation for
disability payments (such as the unusually high
number of veterans in Virginia), which would
mathematically lower the average on a per capita
basis, the record still speaks for itself: The U.S.
Veteran’s Administration is not meeting the needs
of those who have served. But
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 was recruited by Virginia
from a similar post in Oregon in September of
2003, could not be reached for comment at this
writing. Gov.
Mark r. Warner sought—and received—an additional
$1 million in the current budget for nine additional
veterans outreach specialists. They took the field
July 1. And
Warner is widely credited with streamlining delivery
of veterans’ benefits in Virginia following a
top-to-bottom reorganization of the department two
years ago. The fact that many states and local
governments must resort to hiring, with their own
funds, specialists to assist veterans in obtaining
their rightful benefits underscores the neglect the
of veterans in two ways: inadequate staffing at the
federal VA and a complex set of bureaucratic
qualifying procedures that are veteran unfriendly. But
Virginia veteran officials—and their counterparts
across the country--have long struggled with funding
shortfalls at the federal level. Virginia, under Gov.
Warner, also had to provide state funding to
underwrite the establishment of a second veteran’s
cemetery and a second care center, for example. 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. The
National Priorities Project (NPP) estimated in May,
2004 that Virginia’s veterans health care
facilities alone would need $65 million more than
then WAS being proposed 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. A
Veteran’s affairs study in 2002 showed nationally
that 310,000 veterans were 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. 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.” These
policies also violate the sense of decency we feel
as Virginians when we contemplate any sort of
shabbiness shown to our veterans. This report should
provoke a sense of outrage among our elected
representatives in Washington.
--
July 25, 2005
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