Two Washington State projects are helping make sure that U.S. veterans get the benefits they earned on the battlefield

Helping vets

By JIM STEVENSON
Communications Director, Health and Recovery Services Administration, DSHS

Washington State’s main social and health service agency is moving on two fronts to help veterans get the benefits they are due for their military service.

• Over the past six years, a Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) program aimed at connecting the state’s veterans with federal benefits has become a model for other states interested in helping veterans obtain the benefits they have earned with military service.

• Meanwhile, a one-year-old DSHS program is helping train mental health workers, police, drug treatment counselors, tribal representatives and other community service personnel in how they can better serve the new veterans returning to the U.S. after service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Both of the projects are well partnered with other government agencies and community groups, including the state’s Department of Veterans Affairs.

David L. Reed, a mental health worker in the Health and Recovery Services Administration wing of DSHS, says the more recent effort is formally called “the Veteran’s Collaboration Group.” It was developed in response to the serious challenges that face local communities as soldiers still dealing with war trauma return from the battlefield after prolonged and repeated deployments.

The Collaboration Group is sponsoring a series of trainings this summer in the state with the help of its partner agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the DSHS division that coordinates substance abuse treatment, Washington Association of Designated Mental Health Professionals and the federal Veterans Administration.

One of the workshops was held in early June, with two others planned later — July 9 in Tacoma and July 30 in Yakima.

“These events are funded through a federal block grant,” Reed said. “The training content will be geared to initial field-based contacts, with the focus on returning soldiers and their interface with crisis first-responders.”

The workshop doesn’t pull any punches. It focuses on the basics – what works and what doesn’t – and instructors encourage participants to look ahead at the kind of crisis situations in which they may face a returning solider losing control or posing a threat.

The workshops provide information about the soldiers’ needs,” Reed said, “and they are upfront about the challenges these veterans may be dealing with at that point. We teach specific skills that you need to de-escalate this kind of crisis.”

The curriculum includes veteran and military cultures, war trauma, traumatic brain injury, war-related post traumatic stress disorder and combat-related mental illness and stigma.

Reed said the workshops also involve local experts on a panel representing clinicians, veterans, benefit specialists, local support services, chemical dependency and tribes.

“These crises and the interventions that are needed are essentially local events, and a strong background in community interests, culture and resources is vital in helping first responders deal effectively with the incidents,” Reed said.

The six-year-old veterans project at DSHS was created after Bill Allman, a Vietnam veteran himself, realized that significant Washington State veterans were being absorbed by the Medicaid program for health and long-term care even though richer federal benefits were often available to those families.

Allman established a partnership with the Washington State Department of Veteran Affairs and put together a pilot program in Clark County, home to the city of Vancouver, and showed that about 42 percent of vets enrolled in Medicaid over the age of 50 were potentially eligible for the federal benefits.  Up to 27 percent – a little more than half – actually were able to qualify for the switch.

Now statewide, the project operates inside DSHS’ nationally recognized Payment Review Program, which is also part of the Health and Recovery Services Administration.

“Our project tries to locate veterans and their families in Washington State who may be eligible for additional federal benefits based on their military service,” PRP Office Chief Paige Wall said. “We can be especially helpful for veterans struggling with the costs of long-term care. In some cases, this may also save the state money – but the best part is that it can beef up the benefits available to the vet.”

In addition, a significant advantage to the federal benefits is that Medicaid is obligated under law to seek reimbursement for the state after a client’s death, and the state claims its repayment by attaching liens to property or other assets in order to defray the cost of care.

But unlike Medicaid, the federal veteran programs are a benefit the veteran has already earned by his military service. Thus, the assets and property remain with the family.

The project has caught the attention of a number of other states, in part because the primary tool used to ferret out the veterans on Medicaid rolls is a state-federal databank called the Public Assistance Reporting Information System or PARIS.

Operated by the Administration of Children and Families (ACF), within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, PARIS originally was intended as a tool to improve program integrity in the administration of public and medical assistance programs. In fact, Washington State also uses PARIS to match up clients who may be double-enrolled in different states as well as tracking down veterans by running the DOD data against state military related third party health care enrollments. 

PARIS includes data from the Veterans Administration, the Department of Defense and participating states – although a new federal mandate will bring all states into the effort by the end of the year.

The new interest in PARIS as well as publicity about the program has meant extra work for Allman, who said he has been contacted this year by more than a dozen other states asking about the project and how Washington State put it together.

DSHS and the state Department of Veterans Affairs were also among nine states represented in a “Veterans Policy Academy” that started last year. The group was selected by the federal government last summer to help study how assistance programs could respond more quickly and effectively to some of the drug and trauma problems that young veterans often face when they come back from the combat zone.

“With today’s veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, we will need programs that will help keep these veterans in better touch with the health care they deserve,” Allman said. “Veterans Day is only one day of the year, but this program operates year-round.”