Jacqueline Peters, widow of a retired Army officer, only recently grasped how “ludicrous” the law has become that limits survivor benefits to spouses of military members who either die in retirement from service-related ailments or while on active duty.
These survivors qualify for Dependency and Indemnity Compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which pays a basic benefit of $1,154 a month. But if they also are covered by military a survivor plan, then those payments must be reduced by an amount equal to the dependency compensation. Widows then are refunded the premiums their husbands had paid for the portion of survivor benefits being offset.
But now there is an exception, the result of a subtle change in law six years ago defense pay officials ignored until three military widows won a lawsuit last year and forced the department to acknowledge what Congress had done. The quirky bottom line is that military widows who remarry after age 57 are exempt from the offset rules.
The situation, says Peters of Newport News, Va., is a little unreal.
“Someone who remarries is certainly not as in need of (full survivor benefits) as is a widow living on a fixed income,” she said.
The offset exemption so far applies to just 704 widows, say defense officials. All of them began to draw their full survivor benefits again either this month or back as early as February. Their benefit is paid in full in addition to their dependency payments.
Many of these 704 widows also will get survivor retro payments back to Dec. 16, 2003, the date Congress, whether lawmakers knew it or not, lifted the ban on receipt of both benefits for this select group.
No one disputes that the original intent of a key provision of the Veterans Benefits Act of 2003 was to restore eligibility for dependency pay to any military surviving spouse who remarries after age 57. Until then, widows were losing that pay for remarriage at any age. But slipped into the 2003 legislation was also language that barred the restored dependency pay for these widows from affecting other government payments.
Defense pay officials had argued that the language wasn’t clear and so continued the offset until this spring.
But lawyers for Patricia Sharp, Margare Haverkamp and Iva Dean Rogers took the issue to federal court, arguing that the plain meaning of the statute exempted them and any other widow who remarries after age 57. The U.S. Court of Appeals agreed and rejected as “unconvincing” the argument that Congress would not have targeted so small a group of widows.
“Perhaps Congress intended to encourage marriage for older surviving spouses,” said the appeals courts. “Perhaps (this) simply represents a first step in an effort to eventually enact full repeal.”
Jacqueline Peters and roughly 54,000 other widows still affected by the offset are waiting for Congress to do right by them, too. It was the lawsuit, Peters said, that made her finally understand how unfair it is that she lost the survivor coverage her husband, retired Lt. Col. Charles W. Peters, had paid premiums on for nearly 30 years.
“When I heard about (the lawsuit) I said, ‘Oh, my Gosh! That’s a tremendous victory. It won’t be very long and they’ll realize that the rest of us are out there.’ ”
Peters’ husband had died of lung cancer in 2006. She collected survivor pay for a year before she learned she could apply for dependency income because her husband’s illness was presumed caused by exposure to Agent Orange. That meant his death was service-related, triggering the tax-free dependency payments.
Congress took a small step to relieve the offset in 2007. It paid 54,000 widows $50 a month starting in October 2008. That was increased last fall to $60. It will climb annually to reach $100 by 2013.
Legislation to wholly repeal the offset has been introduced in every recent Congress. Senate bill, S. 535, from Bill Nelson, D-Fla., has 55 co-sponsors; the House bill, HR 775 from Rep. Solomon Ortiz, D-Texas, has 320. But the pattern has been that the Senate will pass Nelson’s bill with overwhelming support and then it will get tossed by a House-Senate conference committee as being unfunded.
To comment, send e-mail to milupdate@aol.com or write to Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, VA 20120-1111.
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