These benefits (and the gaming of them) are not about receiving medical care. These veterans already get free medical care from the VA. It's about monetary payments. They game the VA disability system to get paid.

To actually be seen, you mostly need a disability rating. Every veteran has 'free medical care' much in the way that every poor person has free medical care. It exists on paper, but it's impossible to obtain.

I’m not sure how “gaming” it is possible when the VA either performs (or contracts out) medical exams for a veteran’s specific claim and determines whether the veteran is eligible or not. It’s not like they just take a veteran’s word for it.

I work on a military base and can attest to this. Many prior enlisted (veterans) feel that they get shafted (screwed or taken advantage of) by the contract between themselves and USG during their service. Their pay is low and transitioning back to a civilian lifestyle is incredibly difficult, despite their compulsory, Congress-mandated transition assistance training. Maximizing their disability claims is one way of getting what they deserve.

The VA has a disability rating system that goes from 0% to 100%. Obtaining a 100% disability rating guarantees a certain amount of monthly income for life. The step increase in pay from 80% disability to 100% disability is large. There’s also a logarithmic function that makes it increasingly difficult to raise your disability rating after each disability claim. Hypothetically, losing your left leg might qualify for 50% disability, losing a second leg might qualify for 75%, and then losing an arm might qualify for 87.5%. Pretty horrendous.

That being said, many service members aim to hack the system by making disability claims for everything under the sun. Service members often collect disabilities such as arthritis, lumbar disc degradation, knee injuries, sleep apnea, and depression. Like Pokémon - gotta catch ‘em all.

They can make a claim but it’s ultimately up to the VA’s doctors to determine whether they meet the criteria or not.

That’s not hacking the system - they can’t get examined for something unless they first make a claim. The VA doesn’t perform preemptive exams to see what a veteran may or may not be afflicted with and informing the veteran so they can make the most conservative subset of possible claims.

Yet this article is claiming the opposite... there is some non-zero number of pilots receiving VA funds (for PTSD and similar health concerns) while not reporting those issues to the FAA.

A lot of us veterans were paid below the poverty line most of the time we were in the service. Disability benefits are one way many seek to get what they're owed.

Can you provide specific details on this? My understanding is that even if you were continually at the rank of E-1 (which would never happen), your salary + housing + subsistence would put you well over the poverty line.

The 2020 poverty line for 2 people was 17,240.

The 2020 salary for E-1 was 1,732.94/month or 20,795.28.

This doesn't take into account any housing or other additional allowances.

Sorry, I don't see how a veteran spent their career in the military below the poverty line.

Also, consider there hasn't been a draft for 50 years. No one has forced anyone to take military pay.

1. Housing isn't necessarily provided, can depend on rank, marital status, and other factors like the amount of military-provided housing provided on a post (it's often not enough, or of extremely low and even dangerous quality)

2. Salary is provided to the person who is in the service. Unfortunately, the areas that military bases are in are generally not economically productive areas. This especially hurts the spouses who'd otherwise have jobs because they're living in a career desert, and there's not a lot of households today that can survive on a single income. In fact, it was only just this year that the Biden admin finally recognized this: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

3. Substinence (I'm going to put healthcare in this category) – so let's say I'm a soldier who gets injured on the job. Not only is military healthcare awful (https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/healthcare/military-hospita...) but often times they won't even properly care for you to the point you could die: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/pentagon-denies-cl... and so you seek second opinions in severe cases, which you have to pay out-of-pocket. Combine this with the fact that the VA will deny real claims for literal decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honoring_our_PACT_Act_of_2022 and you're so far up shit creek in a job you can't quit...