Veterans and their advocates slammed a new rule by the Department of Veterans Affairs for determining disability compensation, predicting it will lower their payments for service-related illnesses and injuries.The rule, effective immediately, states that a disability level must be based on how well a veteran functions while on medication and not on the underlying impairment itself.
Essentially, the rule is that if treatment is successful, your disability rating can be lowered (thus lowering your monthly compensation for the injury). That will tend to discourage things like taking one's medication as regularly, pushing one's self in physical therapy (which is uncomfortable, even painful, but highly beneficial), and otherwise engaging the process wholeheartedly.
Several of my friends have VA disability ratings, and as high as 100%. Is the person with the 100% disability rating really incapable of doing anything at all? No, that is not the case. What is the case is that every one of these people have suffered injury and life-altering damage, and only through hard work and effort have they been able to regain something akin to what life might have been like had they not chosen to serve in combat. That effort and pain shouldn't be punished.
Perhaps it would be better, if these sorts of savings are a concern for the Federal government, not to start so many wars. Perhaps; but if I were a gambling man, I'd wager we're just about to start another one with Iran. The politicians are always willing to roll the dice with servicemembers' lives, and in fairness those who enlisted knew that when they took the oath. All the same, gambling with their lives brings about a responsibility that the government shouldn't be allowed to shirk.
UPDATE: The VA backs off of this one.
It confuses matters to put this in terms of whether the disability is complete. The question is whether the disruption of one's life from a disability is severe enough to warrant access to the highest level of disability payments available within the system's rules and its funding. I think the rating should take into account the existence of treatments that less the impact of the disability, but it should still consider the cost and impact of the treatments and the irreducible risk of bad consequences if the treatments are faulty or somehow missed, because that's an extra burden, which is what we're compensating for with money. Still, I can live with higher disability awards for people suffering from a severely burdensome condition for which there are no effective treatments. Disability benefits are inherently a need-based system, and their need is greater.
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