VA Loan Updates

The media are full of stories of how badly the returning disabled vets from Iraq and Afghanistan are being treated. Walter Reed and other military hospitals and Veterans Affairs will be pilloried, along with the Bush administration, and then things will probably settle down without much change for the returning veterans.The VA, with the blessings of both Republican and Democratic administrations, has established a system that will not get at the root problems that then get built into the system in the form of disability pensions for disabled veterans.

I was severely wounded in the closing days of combat in Germany in World War II. After a year in Army hospitals, I went to college on the GI Bill and then was given a 50 percent disability rating by the VA.

In the 56 years since then, I have never been examined by the VA to see if I am recovered or whether I need the money any more! With the blessings of Congress and the pressure of the veterans’ lobby, these disability pensions have become lifetime entitlements, not helps to getting back to a normal life.

The loss of a limb or a lung does not necessarily create a lifelong disability that keeps a person from becoming productive and successful in later life.

The failure of the VA to see what happens to the veteran in later years has caused the waste of untold millions of taxpayer dollars. These are dollars still being wasted while they are desperately needed for today’s disabled veterans.

If Congress had the guts to pass a couple pieces of needed legislation, these wasted funds could be redirected from recovered, and even affluent, vets of earlier days, and used to help our returning heroes as they adjust to their new limitations.

Disability pensions should be more like workers’ comp benefits, which are for a period of time to help the person recover, not a lifetime entitlement!

Here is how simple it could be: The VA does a computer run of all vets getting a disability pension. Those names are then run through the IRS files, and all the vets earning more than $150,000 (choose your own figure) have their pension stopped.

Those saved funds then go to help the newest disabled vets from the current conflict.

But this simple plan won’t work because our representatives in Congress don’t have the courage to go up against the powerful veterans lobby. Despite this, they will praise themselves as dedicated to helping veterans get new and more benefits. How sad!

This is a time of opportunity to make badly need changes in the policies of the VA and disability pensions. The eyes of America are focused on the poor care of our returning heroes. How do we dare not give them the best that we can?

I believe most of us older veterans who have done well would happily take a shorter vacation or drive a less-costly car if it helped a returning veteran adjust to his or her new limitation more easily.

Our country owes it to our veterans to use the available funds more fairly than is now being done.

— Robert W. Dingman lives in Thousand Oaks.

Found here.

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