After a three-year effort by the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs to improve the process, ill and injured military members still endure a long, complex and often contentious evaluation system when seeking disability ratings and compensation.
The process has been made more convenient and even shortened by an average of six to eight months under a pilot program jointly run by the two departments that continues to be expanded to more bases.
Yet the Defense Department’s personnel chief and the Army’s surgeon general have said that the disability evaluation system remains a disappointment.
More dramatic changes, they suggest, have to occur or else wounded warriors and other disabled service members will remain saddled with a process not befitting their sacrifices to their country.
Clifford Stanley, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, first revealed the depth of his concern to the annual Military Health System conference in January. Stanley said he had been “raising Cain” over the time that injured and ill members spend in limbo awaiting medical appointments and medical review board decisions.
Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, the Army’s top medical officer, told the House military personnel subcommittee in March that the pilot program run since late 2007 “remains complex and adversarial.”
Interviewed in his Pentagon office on Tuesday, Stanley said he agrees with the criticism, though the pilot continues to be improved as it replaces, base by base, the far more flawed existing methods.
The legacy system, still used for 40 percent of members seeking disability ratings, requires each service to conduct its own medical evaluation to identify only “unfitting” conditions and award them a rating. If the rating is 30 percent or higher, the member is retired and draws a lifetime annuity and other retiree benefits.
If the rating is below 30 percent, the member is separated, usually with a lump sum severance payment. Veterans then go to VA where a new evaluation process begins, this time of every service-related condition found.
In 2007, it took an average of 540 days to clear both processes. The pilot program to integrate them uses one set of medical examinations done by VA doctors to VA standards. It has honed the total process down to an average of about 300 days.
Stanley and Schoomaker agree that the new system is an improvement. Yet both leaders say it doesn’t go far enough to simplify and accelerate the process for the 26,000 members moving through it at any given time.
Stanley established a working group to study its weaknesses. Recommendations to improve it will be presented to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki at the end of April.
The ideal system, Stanley said, would produce “a single evaluation based upon one medical record,” and over which Defense and VA officials “have joined hands and made a decision: ‘Here’s the disability rating. Period.’ That’s what we’re looking for.”
But such a change, presuming the one and only rating were set by VA, would make many more military members eligible to be disabled retirees thus driving up retirement and medical costs.
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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