Good News

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by hilzoy

Today brought some very good news for members and veterans of the armed forces. First, Stop Loss — whereby a service member's term of service can be extended whether she likes it or not — will be ended:

"The Department of Defense announced today a comprehensive plan to eliminate the current use of Stop Loss, while retaining the authority for future use under extraordinary circumstances.  This is an important step along the path in adapting the Army into an expeditionary force.

The Army Reserve and Army National Guard will mobilize units without employing  Stop Loss beginning in August and September 2009, respectively.  The Regular (active duty) Army will deploy its first unit without Stop Loss by January 2010.

For soldiers Stop Lossed during fiscal 2009, the department will provide a monthly payment of $500.   Until the department is able to eliminate Stop Loss altogether, this payment will serve as an interim measure to help mitigate its effects."

Think of what it would be like to be in Iraq or Afghanistan, on your nth tour, waiting for the day when you could just go home and take up civilian life, and suddenly learn that — oops! — it's not going to happen. We should not do this to people. And now, thank heavens, we won't.

Second, Barack Obama has definitively rejected the idea of charging veterans' private insurers for service-related injuries. As I understand it, the idea was not to charge vets themselves; just to hit up their insurers if they had other health insurance (e.g., through work.) This is done now for non-service-related injuries. But it would have impacted vets: for instance, if private insurers had to pay for service-related injuries, treating those injuries would count against annual caps on payment. More to the point, it's just wrong, and should never have been proposed. Now, thank God, it has been rejected once and for all.

Somewhere on the list of reasons I found it inexplicable that the Obama administration was entertaining this idea (well below the fact that it's boneheaded and wrong) was that it distracted attention from the rest of his VA budget. It's really good in other respects. The story on the VA budget in Stars and Stripes: is headlined: "Obama Budget Draws Cheers, Jeers From Vets". As far as I can tell, all the jeers are about the idea of billing insurers. Everything else was cheers:

"President Obama is drawing high praise from veterans’ service organizations for proposing a Department of Veterans Affairs budget that would exceed by $1.3 billion what even VSOs suggested be spent next year.

No president ever offered a VA spending plan that surpassed in size the "Independent Budget" presented to Congress by major veterans groups. Obama seeks to fulfill several high-profile promises made to veterans during his presidential campaign including a big increase in VA health care budgets. (…)

Obama’s VA budget outline, with full details promised by late April, would raise VA spending to $112.8 billion in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. That’s an increase of $15 billion, or 15 percent, over the current budget. (…)

The plan allows the VA health care system to enroll up to 550,000 new Priority Group 8 veterans by 2013. These are veterans who have no service-connected ailments and have incomes deemed adequate based on family size and geographic location. The total for new enrollees includes 266,000 Group 8 veterans already slated to enroll in VA health system starting this summer under a funding initiative Congress passed last fall.

Obama’s defense and VA budgets also call for a gradual lifting of what remains of the ban on concurrent receipt of both military retirement and VA disability compensation for disabled retirees. The next step would occur in 2010 with concurrent receipt allowed for the most seriously disabled veterans forced to retire short of 20 years. Further details must await the full budget’s release in April, Shinseki said."

The VA budget also contains more money to help homeless vets, and I gather Shinseki is also trying to eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, the backlog in processing claims. The OMB fact sheet on the VA budget is here (pdf).

That's a lot to cheer about. 

2 thoughts on “Good News”

  1. Can someone explain to me how there is such a thing as “Stop Loss”? I mean, the military is pretty much already a kind indentured servitude, but not only that, it’s also one that can be extended unilaterally by the gov’t??

  2. “I mean, the military is pretty much already a kind indentured servitude,”
    A conscript military is. A volunteer military is more like a marriage. Wait….OK, point taken.

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