I would rather there be fraud and everyone gets their claims approved/gets the treatment they need without going broke. That is what government and social safety nets are for.
I would rather there be fraud and everyone gets their claims approved/gets the treatment they need without going broke. That is what government and social safety nets are for.
For sure, but there's probably an answer in between, no? From personal experience, if there's too much fraud in the system you reach a sort of tipping point in which people who otherwise wouldn't...
For sure, but there's probably an answer in between, no?
From personal experience, if there's too much fraud in the system you reach a sort of tipping point in which people who otherwise wouldn't commit fraud get led into it. It's like a very extreme version of schoolkids stealing from the convenience store because everyone else is doing it. When I got out of the military I was told by multiple people that if I didn't get some sort of VA rating I was an idiot. Everyone knew off the top of their heads what the ratings were -- "oh, we basically all have tinnitus and you can get 30% for that. It's impossible to prove." These were people who were otherwise honorable but who looked around and said to themselves "I guess this is what one does."
I was a servicemember. That my brothers and sisters who were broken by their service get taken care of is extremely important to me -- but we've gone way too far, and not out of compassion but for political reasons.
Perhaps, but one extreme is better than the other. One extreme means vets get care and some "overspending" is done on some people who know how to access the channels. The other extreme leaves our...
Perhaps, but one extreme is better than the other. One extreme means vets get care and some "overspending" is done on some people who know how to access the channels. The other extreme leaves our troops on the streets, weakens trust in the nation, and causes a variety of mental health issues on top of physical ones.
In my experience, it's lack of exposure that vets even have such options rather than "fraud". So they'll never use channels they don't have.
For what it's worth, the rate of homelessness among veterans is lower than among representative non-veterans. I'm not sure I agree that veterans don't know of the options available to them. I'm...
The other extreme leaves our troops on the streets...
For what it's worth, the rate of homelessness among veterans is lower than among representative non-veterans. I'm not sure I agree that veterans don't know of the options available to them. I'm sure it happens, but on any sort of significant scale? I doubt it.
But ultimately there is zero reason to pick between the two extremes. It's not like applying more scrutiny to tinnitus claims is a straight road to abandoning veterans to sleep on the streets. I get and appreciate your concern for veteran welfare, but - and this is more philosophical - I think that we as a society have gone too far. It's coming from a good place, but I don't think it's healthy for our society or veterans themselves to put veterans up on such a pedestal. Greater and greater semantic separation between veterans and everyone else is a bad thing. Service to the collective whole should be viewed as something that we all do in some way, not something so praiseworthy and distinct that it earns you special treatment for the rest of your life.
Again, we need to make sure we're taking care of the people who lost limbs, who were sexually assaulted in the course of their service, who suffered psychological injury. And a lot of this is an overcorrection in response to the brutal reception shown to returning Vietnam vets - it's coming from a good place. But for context, in 2023 there were 5,283 workplace fatalities in the US. That's about twice as many fatalities as the US suffered in two decades in Afghanistan. My point is that I don't think it's healthy for our society to treat any one group - in this case veterans - as being so sacrosanct that we can't apply scrutiny to their disability claims.
I agree that we've gone too far because of politics. I'm sure there is an in-between. My original statement was that I would rather fraud than restrictions that preclude too many people who should...
I agree that we've gone too far because of politics. I'm sure there is an in-between. My original statement was that I would rather fraud than restrictions that preclude too many people who should have access to the service.
I'm unconvinced by the scale they're describing, yes lots of anecdotes but they say "millions of claims" out of almost 7 million people. And then they described under 1.2 million people have one...
I'm unconvinced by the scale they're describing, yes lots of anecdotes but they say "millions of claims" out of almost 7 million people. And then they described under 1.2 million people have one of those minor injuries, even assuming they're all different people that doesn't make "millions." And while they say collectively this is billions they don't frame what that in comparison with the overall budget. Unless I missed that.
But they do say that the exaggeration on one end harms the veterans with severe disabilities on the other. I'm not denying there's fraud, though IMO if the VA doesn't know someone is their own employee that's their own damn fault. But I'm not so impressed by the anecdotal evidence. Those are extremes by nature of being prosecuted or identified. It's possible to want to address fraud without them and they give me "welfare queen" vibes.
Taking a larger view of current trends, I am not surprised to see rhetorical groundwork being either restated or reinforced to slash any and all social safety net programs. VA support is one such...
Taking a larger view of current trends, I am not surprised to see rhetorical groundwork being either restated or reinforced to slash any and all social safety net programs. VA support is one such safety net. The Washington Post is owned by Bezos who has already shown he is beholden to trump and will compromise the Post due to that.
From the article: ... ... ... ... Nobody likes claims being denied and the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero, because too much skepticism means more legitimate claims will be denied. But this...
From the article:
Military veterans are swamping the U.S. government with dubious disability claims — including cases of brazen fraud totaling tens of millions of dollars — that are exploiting the country’s sacred commitment to compensate those harmed in the line of duty, according to a Washington Post investigation.
Taxpayers will spend roughly $193 billion this year for the Department of Veterans Affairs to compensate about 6.9 million disabled veterans on the presumption that their ability to work is impaired. VA officials say most veterans’ disability claims are legitimate.
Yet The Post found that millions of the claims are for minor or treatable afflictions that rarely hinder employment, such as hair loss, jock itch and toenail fungus.
...
The Post analyzed 25 years of government data on disability claims and sued VA and the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act, forcing the agencies to disclose thousands of pages of internal records and dozens of surveillance videos. The Post also interviewed scores of current and former U.S. officials and visited military bases around the country to speak with veterans.
The investigation exposed an increasingly costly disability program prone to rampant exaggeration and fraud, which make it harder for veterans with legitimate claims to get their benefits processed. Bipartisan political indifference and a weak array of checks and balances have compounded the dysfunction.
Veterans’ advocates, for-profit companies and VA itself encourage vets to file as many claims as possible to milk the system. The documents and data obtained by The Post spotlighted other obvious signs of waste and abuse, as well as an internal awareness and tolerance of such problems.
...
The easy-to-manipulate regulations have turned the disability program into a rich target for con artists, who are typically prosecuted only in the most egregious and flagrant cases.
Last year, a grand jury indicted an Army veteran on charges of conspiring to defraud the government of $1.1 million by pretending to be paralyzed. According to prosecutors, she spent some of the money on Caribbean vacations and gambling jaunts to Las Vegas. She has pleaded not guilty. In June, a Vietnam War veteran pleaded guilty to ripping off VA by claiming to be blind for 29 years. In fact, he could see well enough to drive and repeatedly renewed his license. The Justice Department said he defrauded taxpayers of nearly $1.2 million.
...
The current disability program was designed 80 years ago to provide a safety net for unemployable veterans wounded or injured during World War II. Today, the vast majority of disabled veterans under age 65 still work and collect paychecks from full-time jobs, records show.
According to the most recent available figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for disabled veterans last year was 4.1 percent, about the same as the population at large. In 2023, more than 100,000 disabled veterans — roughly 1 in 60 — reported an income of $250,000 or higher, according to a Post analysis of VA and census data
Other public disability programs help only people who certify that they are incapacitated or severely impaired in their ability to work. The Social Security Administration, which provides disability aid to more than 15 million people, limits benefits to those who cannot hold a job or are unable to earn more than $19,440 a year.
...
In interviews, several former claims processors and health care providers said that VA leaders have ignored systemic waste and fraud in the disability program since the George W. Bush administration because they fear the political consequences that would result if they scrutinized claims more closely.
“If you’re a politician and you go against veterans and say we shouldn’t be funding them as much, you’re pretty much committing political suicide,” said Shea Wilkes, an Army veteran who is a clinical social worker at the VA hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Nobody likes claims being denied and the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero, because too much skepticism means more legitimate claims will be denied. But this sounds like a pretty bad loophole.
I don’t understand how this is happening. I’ve always heard it takes years to get a disability rating high enough to get an income for it. There are people employed by the VA whose entire job it...
I don’t understand how this is happening. I’ve always heard it takes years to get a disability rating high enough to get an income for it. There are people employed by the VA whose entire job it is to help veterans work through all the red tape. You can’t just show up one day with submerging clearly service related and start getting a check, it’s difficult to do.
It's sort of both. Unclear pathologies and/or insufficient documentation often mean that you get stuck in the system for forever, yeah. And unfortunately a lot of the really pernicious stuff that...
It's sort of both. Unclear pathologies and/or insufficient documentation often mean that you get stuck in the system for forever, yeah. And unfortunately a lot of the really pernicious stuff that people suffer with falls into the former category. But there are also all kinds of issues that are very easy to get approved -- especially, unfortunately, if you're solely looking for a payout and are therefore highly motivated to make sure everything is tight.
Wellp, anecdotally, I know of at least one person who straight up abused the system (along with many other things, just seemed to be their personality/way of doing things), by claiming "you just...
Wellp, anecdotally, I know of at least one person who straight up abused the system (along with many other things, just seemed to be their personality/way of doing things), by claiming "you just say your dick doesn't work. Not like they're going to/can check that".
He faked several other things, but I know he was pulling money from it.
I have always wondering if I should file for VA disability. I most certainly developed tinnitus during my service years (I can clearly see my hearing tests get worse every year from my physical),...
I have always wondering if I should file for VA disability. I most certainly developed tinnitus during my service years (I can clearly see my hearing tests get worse every year from my physical), and I injured my back pretty good (bulging disc) but didn't know it at the time until age has started to catch up with me.
Neither have ever stopped me from working and are livable (lots of people have tinnitus and hearing loss) or mitigable (core exercise has helped prevent further back related injuries, at least for now), but both are undoubtedly service related.
My brother has it. He's considered fully disabled. I didn't know the definitely, but I know he had fairly severe knee and back problems, loss of hearing etc. I mean if you have a disability from...
My brother has it. He's considered fully disabled. I didn't know the definitely, but I know he had fairly severe knee and back problems, loss of hearing etc.
I mean if you have a disability from serving, you deserve to be compensated, so it doesn't hurt to at least get evaluated.
I would get it. I work with a gov contractor who's rated 100% disability from the Army. I don't know the full story, but I do know he can't walk or stand for very long. And it's from his...
I would get it. I work with a gov contractor who's rated 100% disability from the Army. I don't know the full story, but I do know he can't walk or stand for very long. And it's from his experiences in the Army. Like we were on a base not long ago and even walking half a mile was too much for him. So we were driving all over this base everyday (and it was a small base). Guy is only in his mid/late 50s, I'm pretty sure. Now he's done pretty well for himself afterwards, going between GS and contractor over the years. But his QOL was definitely affected. Now is he actually 100% disabled? Clearly not. But as a civilian, non-prior service, I don't know how all that works. So I don't think I should be judging.
I don't know how long you were in, but I work with a lot of guys who are coming up on their 20yrs or who are beyond 20yrs. That's a lot to give up, IMO. I could never do it. I never joined the military because I didn't even want to give a second of my life up, much less 4yrs or whatever the min is. So I feel like disability is the least we owe for retired/separated members, even though active duty and vets get a lot of benefits as it is.
I would rather there be fraud and everyone gets their claims approved/gets the treatment they need without going broke. That is what government and social safety nets are for.
For sure, but there's probably an answer in between, no?
From personal experience, if there's too much fraud in the system you reach a sort of tipping point in which people who otherwise wouldn't commit fraud get led into it. It's like a very extreme version of schoolkids stealing from the convenience store because everyone else is doing it. When I got out of the military I was told by multiple people that if I didn't get some sort of VA rating I was an idiot. Everyone knew off the top of their heads what the ratings were -- "oh, we basically all have tinnitus and you can get 30% for that. It's impossible to prove." These were people who were otherwise honorable but who looked around and said to themselves "I guess this is what one does."
I was a servicemember. That my brothers and sisters who were broken by their service get taken care of is extremely important to me -- but we've gone way too far, and not out of compassion but for political reasons.
Perhaps, but one extreme is better than the other. One extreme means vets get care and some "overspending" is done on some people who know how to access the channels. The other extreme leaves our troops on the streets, weakens trust in the nation, and causes a variety of mental health issues on top of physical ones.
In my experience, it's lack of exposure that vets even have such options rather than "fraud". So they'll never use channels they don't have.
For what it's worth, the rate of homelessness among veterans is lower than among representative non-veterans. I'm not sure I agree that veterans don't know of the options available to them. I'm sure it happens, but on any sort of significant scale? I doubt it.
But ultimately there is zero reason to pick between the two extremes. It's not like applying more scrutiny to tinnitus claims is a straight road to abandoning veterans to sleep on the streets. I get and appreciate your concern for veteran welfare, but - and this is more philosophical - I think that we as a society have gone too far. It's coming from a good place, but I don't think it's healthy for our society or veterans themselves to put veterans up on such a pedestal. Greater and greater semantic separation between veterans and everyone else is a bad thing. Service to the collective whole should be viewed as something that we all do in some way, not something so praiseworthy and distinct that it earns you special treatment for the rest of your life.
Again, we need to make sure we're taking care of the people who lost limbs, who were sexually assaulted in the course of their service, who suffered psychological injury. And a lot of this is an overcorrection in response to the brutal reception shown to returning Vietnam vets - it's coming from a good place. But for context, in 2023 there were 5,283 workplace fatalities in the US. That's about twice as many fatalities as the US suffered in two decades in Afghanistan. My point is that I don't think it's healthy for our society to treat any one group - in this case veterans - as being so sacrosanct that we can't apply scrutiny to their disability claims.
I agree that we've gone too far because of politics. I'm sure there is an in-between. My original statement was that I would rather fraud than restrictions that preclude too many people who should have access to the service.
I'm unconvinced by the scale they're describing, yes lots of anecdotes but they say "millions of claims" out of almost 7 million people. And then they described under 1.2 million people have one of those minor injuries, even assuming they're all different people that doesn't make "millions." And while they say collectively this is billions they don't frame what that in comparison with the overall budget. Unless I missed that.
But they do say that the exaggeration on one end harms the veterans with severe disabilities on the other. I'm not denying there's fraud, though IMO if the VA doesn't know someone is their own employee that's their own damn fault. But I'm not so impressed by the anecdotal evidence. Those are extremes by nature of being prosecuted or identified. It's possible to want to address fraud without them and they give me "welfare queen" vibes.
Taking a larger view of current trends, I am not surprised to see rhetorical groundwork being either restated or reinforced to slash any and all social safety net programs. VA support is one such safety net. The Washington Post is owned by Bezos who has already shown he is beholden to trump and will compromise the Post due to that.
From the article:
...
...
...
...
Nobody likes claims being denied and the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero, because too much skepticism means more legitimate claims will be denied. But this sounds like a pretty bad loophole.
I don’t understand how this is happening. I’ve always heard it takes years to get a disability rating high enough to get an income for it. There are people employed by the VA whose entire job it is to help veterans work through all the red tape. You can’t just show up one day with submerging clearly service related and start getting a check, it’s difficult to do.
It's sort of both. Unclear pathologies and/or insufficient documentation often mean that you get stuck in the system for forever, yeah. And unfortunately a lot of the really pernicious stuff that people suffer with falls into the former category. But there are also all kinds of issues that are very easy to get approved -- especially, unfortunately, if you're solely looking for a payout and are therefore highly motivated to make sure everything is tight.
Wellp, anecdotally, I know of at least one person who straight up abused the system (along with many other things, just seemed to be their personality/way of doing things), by claiming "you just say your dick doesn't work. Not like they're going to/can check that".
He faked several other things, but I know he was pulling money from it.
I have always wondering if I should file for VA disability. I most certainly developed tinnitus during my service years (I can clearly see my hearing tests get worse every year from my physical), and I injured my back pretty good (bulging disc) but didn't know it at the time until age has started to catch up with me.
Neither have ever stopped me from working and are livable (lots of people have tinnitus and hearing loss) or mitigable (core exercise has helped prevent further back related injuries, at least for now), but both are undoubtedly service related.
My brother has it. He's considered fully disabled. I didn't know the definitely, but I know he had fairly severe knee and back problems, loss of hearing etc.
I mean if you have a disability from serving, you deserve to be compensated, so it doesn't hurt to at least get evaluated.
Only you can vouch for youself. The benefits are there for a reason, so you may as well see if you qualify.
I would get it. I work with a gov contractor who's rated 100% disability from the Army. I don't know the full story, but I do know he can't walk or stand for very long. And it's from his experiences in the Army. Like we were on a base not long ago and even walking half a mile was too much for him. So we were driving all over this base everyday (and it was a small base). Guy is only in his mid/late 50s, I'm pretty sure. Now he's done pretty well for himself afterwards, going between GS and contractor over the years. But his QOL was definitely affected. Now is he actually 100% disabled? Clearly not. But as a civilian, non-prior service, I don't know how all that works. So I don't think I should be judging.
I don't know how long you were in, but I work with a lot of guys who are coming up on their 20yrs or who are beyond 20yrs. That's a lot to give up, IMO. I could never do it. I never joined the military because I didn't even want to give a second of my life up, much less 4yrs or whatever the min is. So I feel like disability is the least we owe for retired/separated members, even though active duty and vets get a lot of benefits as it is.