Insult to Injury
New data reveal an alarming trend: Vets' disabilities are being downgraded
The inspector general's team made 41 recommendations in all, finding among other things that the Army lacks a formal course for training the liaison officers who are supposed to guide soldiers through the PEB process, that the disposition of cases lags badly, that the computerized information systems are antiquated, and that the two key medical and personnel databases are not integrated and cannot communicate with each other. The report has been forwarded to the action team that Army Vice Chief of Staff Richard Cody convened-one of many official groups formed since the revelations of substandard conditions and bureaucratic delays at Walter Reed.
Veterans' advocates are skeptical that the administration or the military bureaucracy will make major changes anytime soon. In testimony to Congress last month, Veterans for America director of veterans' affairs Steve Robinson recommended taking the entire ratings process away from the Pentagon and giving it to the Department of Veterans Affairs. "It's hard to ignore the fact that in time of war they are giving out less disability," he says. "Is it policy? I don't know. But it is a fact."
Congress has not responded to this problem. Says Rep. Vic Snyder, the Arkansas Democrat who chairs the House Armed Services subcommittee on military personnel: "This whole issue of disability ratings is very complex. It is not well understood by many people, including many in Congress. That is why we set up the [ Veterans' Disability Benefits] Commission in 2004. We are hoping it will help us sort this out."
A lot is riding on the commission. Its chairman is Lt. Gen. Terry Scott, who retired in 1997 and ran Harvard's Kennedy School of Government's National Security Program until 2001. After the Pentagon data on the disability process were presented to the commission last week, Scott said "we still don't understand the whys and wherefores" of the skewed ratings. The core problem, he believes, is that "the military was not designed to look after severely wounded people for a long time." The commission has not yet decided what changes it will recommend, but he said there is a general sense that "one physical exam at the end of service should be enough for both agencies, DOD and VA."
Cash and staff. Any solutions that call for transferring more responsibility to the Department of Veterans Affairs will have to be matched by enormous infusions of cash and staff. Already, the VA is reeling under a backlog of over 600,000 claims from retired veterans, which the agency predicts will grow by an additional 1.6 million in the next two years. Harvard Prof. Linda Bilmes, an economist who has published two studies on the costs of the Iraq war and the associated veterans' costs, projects that as much as $150 billion more will be required to deal with the wounded returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, people like Danny Soto want to know who is going to stop the military boards from giving out ratings like the 10 percent given to one soldier for a skull fracture and traumatic brain injury, when the VA later assigned a 100 percent rating. Soto is also frustrated by a recent case in which a soldier whose legs had been severely injured in a blast in Iraq was given only a 20 percent disability rating for pain and by the treatment of a man who has a bullet hole through his eye and suffers from seizures. As Soto sat with that soldier in front of the board, he asked why he had been placed on the temporary list. "At what point do you think he is going to fall below 30 percent?"
Soto is unsparing in his criticism of the bureaucracy. "This system," he says, " is so broke." Old soldiers say the root of the problem is an Army culture that preaches a "suck it up" attitude. "If you ask for what you are due, you are perceived to be whining or trying to pad your pocket," says a retired command sergeant major. "If you're not bleeding, you're not hurt. That's what we were taught."
With Edward T. Pound
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