“I can’t imagine anyone more worthy of public largess than a veteran,” said Dr. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy group, who has written on P.T.S.D. “But as a clinician, it is destructive to give someone total and permanent disability when they are in fact capable of working, even if it is not at full capacity. A job is the most therapeutic thing there is.”
Common sense proves her wrong. Look at it this way. Would you join the military thinking that if there is a war, all you have to do is risk your life to end up with a check from the VA every month? If you survive at all? Hell no. If you are granted 100% disability from the VA you are making less money than if you were able to work. Aside from the turmoil you go through with PTSD, the ravages on your personal life with everyone you know, nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, panic attacks, short term memory loss plus a long list of others, you also have to face being on medication that comes with their own set of problems.
This is what it breaks down to.
Dependent Status
Veteran Alone (Per Month)
30% $376
40% $541
50% $770
60% $974
70% $1,228
80% $1,427
90% $1,604
100% $2,673
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Dependent Status
Would you want to go through combat to end up with $192.50 a week with a 50% disability rating? How about $668.25 for 100%? If you end up with 100% you have to be suffering a lot and watch your life fall apart. Some may say that kind of money a week is good but they forget that a lot of people make more than that, especially trades people, and the VA doesn't pay overtime or give merit raises. Take a heavy equipment operator in a state where it snows. They make most of their yearly income plowing snow for days on end and they make overtime. Take them off their jobs because of medications they have to be on and there goes that money, plus the difference they would have made just on a regular paycheck alone.
But we're not talking about 100% disability rating for the most part because the percentages awarded at usually 50% or lower. Would you risk your life and end up with PTSD to make less than you could make at your local grocery store?
This ruling does not make it easier to live with PTSD but only takes out having to prove which time your life was on the line ended up being the straw that broke your life.
When work finally started to happen on PTSD, veterans were sent to the VA because they had the best programs and resources. Veterans had to file a claim just to be able to have PTSD covered so they wouldn't have to pay for it.
But Rick Weidman, executive director for policy and government affairs at Vietnam Veterans of America, said most veterans applied for disability not for the monthly checks but because they wanted access to free health care.
“I know guys who are rated 100 percent disabled who keep coming back for treatment not because they are worried about losing their compensation, but because they want their life back,” Mr. Weidman said.
Private health insurance companies refused to cover the treatments because the diagnosis was connected to military service. Once this happened, mental health care coverage would not cover anything to do with PTSD. If the veteran still had an income, they had to pay for their care without a disability rating from the VA. So they filed claims. A service connected disability rating assured them of being taken care of. Medications and therapy were taken care of.
More than two million service members have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001, and by some estimates 20 percent or more of them will develop P.T.S.D.
More than 150,000 cases of P.T.S.D. have been diagnosed by the veterans health system among veterans of the two wars, while thousands more have received diagnoses from private doctors, said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, an advocacy group.
But Mr. Sullivan said records showed that the veterans department had approved P.T.S.D. disability claims for only 78,000 veterans. That suggests, he said, that many veterans with the disorder are having their compensation claims rejected by claims processors. “Those statistics show a very serious problem in how V.A. handles P.T.S.D. claims,” Mr. Sullivan said.
This will also encourage a combat veteran to seek help in healing PTSD. That is what the goal is supposed to be. Isn't it? We want them to recover from what happened to them while they were risking their lives. Right? We want them to seek help as soon as they show signs of PTSD so they get better. Right? Isn't that the part that is missing from all this debate?
Look at all the different programs going on across the country. Are they trying them to heal? Yoga? Martial Arts? Group therapy? Reaching out on their computers to find support and help to heal? If given a choice between recovering their lives or getting a check worth less than $200 a week, the would take healing any day. The goal has not been reached because too many have had their claims denied, which is like a knife in their backs after being told by a VA psychologist their condition is related to their service in combat but the claim has been denied over paperwork issues.
Do we want to stop them from ending up homeless? This helps in that area because when you have a veteran with PTSD and they cannot work, with no income at all, they can't pay to keep that roof over their heads. We talk a lot about homeless veterans but we hardly ever mention the "couch homeless" sleeping on the couch in a friend's home because they have nowhere else to go. Families have kicked them out of the house they used to live in, usually because they just didn't understand what was going on. When the VA is denying their claim, the family ends up doubting the suffering of the veteran. After all, the American public has been conditioned to believe the VA takes care of veterans injured in combat. They don't want to believe any veteran is being turned away.
Bing search Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and you get 5,190,000 results. Bing PTSD and you find 1,840,000 results. Google Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and you find 2,400,000. For PTSD the result is 1,110,000. These results are there for a reason. People want to learn so they understand but above that, they want to heal.
Encouraging them to seek help leads them to healing. Making them fight to prove a claim, adding more stress to their lives, discourages them allowing mild cases of PTSD to get progressively worse to the point where when they are finally helped, they are only stabilized instead of healed.
PTSD still has to be proven but this is a step in the right direction.
VCS in the New York Times: VA to Issue Science Based PTSD Regulations
Written by James Dao
Wednesday, 07 July 2010 20:01
Veterans Affairs to Ease Claim Process for Disability
July 7, 2010 (New York Times) - The Federal government is preparing to issue new rules that will make it substantially easier for veterans who have been found to have post-traumatic stress disorder to receive disability benefits for the illness, a change [based on scientific research] that could affect hundreds of thousands of veterans from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.
The regulations from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which will take effect as early as Monday and cost as much as $5 billion over several years according to Congressional analysts, will essentially eliminate a requirement that veterans document specific events like bomb blasts, firefights or mortar attacks that might have caused P.T.S.D., an illness characterized by emotional numbness, irritability and flashbacks.
For decades, veterans have complained that finding such records was extremely time consuming and sometimes impossible. And in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, veterans groups assert that the current rules discriminate against tens of thousands of service members — many of them women — who did not serve in combat roles but nevertheless suffered traumatic experiences.
Under the new rule, which applies to veterans of all wars, the department will grant compensation to those with P.T.S.D. if they can simply show that they served in a war zone and in a job consistent with the events that they say caused their conditions. They would not have to prove, for instance, that they came under fire, served in a front-line unit or saw a friend killed.
The new rule would also allow compensation for service members who had good reason to fear traumatic events, known as stressors, even if they did not actually experience them.
There are concerns that the change will open the door to a flood of fraudulent claims. But supporters of the rule say the veterans department will still review all claims and thus be able to weed out the baseless ones.
“This nation has a solemn obligation to the men and women who have honorably served this country and suffer from the emotional and often devastating hidden wounds of war,” the secretary of veterans affairs, Eric K. Shinseki, said in a statement to The New York Times. “This final regulation goes a long way to ensure that veterans receive the benefits and services they need.”
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VA to Issue Science Based PTSD Regulations
