Cold War Veterans Blog

Bush Calls for Simplifying Military Disability System

From this week's New York Times (IAVA quoted):

By GINGER THOMPSON
Published: October 17, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 16 — President Bush on Tuesday proposed a series of changes intended to streamline a military disability system that he said had fallen behind the times and had left too many disabled soldiers falling through the cracks.

The proposals, outlined in a document that Mr. Bush sent to Congress, would pull apart a convoluted system that gave both the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs authority over determining the level of benefits and care provided to injured soldiers, often pitting the two bureaucracies against each other and holding up services.

In an announcement from the Rose Garden, Mr. Bush said that, under his proposal, the agencies’ authorities would be separated. The Pentagon would have the authority to determine whether injured soldiers were fit to return to duty and would provide a pension to those who were considered unfit, based on their rank and years of service.

Soldiers determined to be permanently disabled would move into the V.A. system, and receive care and compensation based on their loss of earnings and the impact of their injuries on their quality of life.

“Medical advances have enabled battlefield medics and hospitals to provide our wounded warriors with care that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago,” Mr. Bush said. “Yet our system for managing this care has fallen behind. It’s an outdated system that needs to be changed.”

In an effort remove the stigma from soldiers who might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, the president’s plan would allow all soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to seek evaluations for the disorder, without having to first prove they have cause for feeling stress.

The plan would also allow the relatives of injured soldiers to take six months of unpaid leave from their jobs within the first two years after the injury occurs.

Karl Zinsmeister, an assistant to the president for domestic policy, said the current disability system covered three million people and cost about $30 billion a year. He said there was no way to calculate the exact cost of the proposed system until it was approved. He said, however, that it was likely to cost “a little more.”

Mr. Bush said, “The need to enact these reforms into law is urgent. I call on both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to come together and pass a good bill that I can sign into law.”

The outlines of Mr. Bush’s proposals came from recommendations made to the administration two months ago by a bipartisan commission led by the former Senator Bob Dole and the former secretary of health and human services, Donna E. Shalala.

The commission, which also included disabled veterans and the wife of a disabled veteran, was appointed after articles in The Washington Post exposed veterans living in shoddy conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center.

Administration officials said the president’s disability plan would apply only to veterans who entered the military after October 2001. In addition to the proposals announced by Mr. Bush on Tuesday, the commission recommended the development of “comprehensive recovery plans” for every seriously injured service member and for the rapid transfer of patient information between the Pentagon and the V.A.

In recent weeks, Republicans and Democrats have expressed concern that the Bush administration was not moving fast enough to address the problems identified by the commission. A report by the Government Accountability Office said that more than half the units set up to oversee the care of injured service members remained understaffed and undertrained.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said the administration’s efforts were “intolerably slow.”

In a briefing after Mr. Bush’s announcement on Tuesday, Mr. Zinsmeister rejected that view, saying the administration had moved in a timely way to enact the Dole-Shalala recommendations. He said some of the most critical reforms required approval from Congress.

“We were frustrated that it took so long,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “But it’s good to see the president stand up and address it publicly and start to drive the train forward.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/washington/17vets.html?ref=washington