USA Today has a story in today's paper about the surging costs associated with veterans care, linked here. This should come as no surprise to anyone who's been following the topic for the last several years. Today's veterans are sustaining severe, disabling injuries and they seem less reluctant than their predecessors were to know about or file for the benefits they're due, which is a good thing. Studies like the recent one from the non-profit Rand Corporation, blogged about here, and books like The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, by Nobel prize-winning economist, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government professor Linda J. Bilmes, taken together show both the number of veterans affected, as well as the cost of caring for the wounded for the rest of their natural lives. The USA Today article suggests that, according to the VA's own estimates, almost 1/4 of OIF/OEF veterans have filed for some form of disability: 181,000 of 755,000 veterans, which is a pretty substantial portion. However, the payout to individual veterans is usually anything but huge. If you've read stories like Army veteran Tony Neff's "All I Want is What I Deserve: A Soldier's Own Story of Service, Injury and Neglect," blogged about here earlier, you've seen the hardship money actually involved. It's not exactly a "get rich quick" scheme for veterans, who can often not even pay their bills based on the disability pay they receive. Not to mention, combat injuries like PTSD can make it hard to hold down a job, keep a marriage or a family together, or stay in school. Truly, the costs are staggering, and it's not surprising that they continue to climb. That said, as a society, we have no other choice but to pay them, and not with reluctance, either, as a tribute to those who served. Fair is fair.
Editor's note: I'm curious to know whether military contractors' future disability payments are included in these totals or not; and whether they become part of the Tricare or VA system's healthcare delivery program after they return. They typically earn much higher pay than deployed military, an understandably sore subject to veterans who serve alongside them; but, contractors are often sometimes former military who are returning to a combat zone after several deployments. Either way, the injuries are piling up and getting more expensive, and in cases like PTSD, cumulative exposure to combat increases the risk of developing the disability.
