Tom Reed, Director Widener University School of Law Veterans Law Clinic, has a law review article detailing what veterans and advocates know well. “Parallel Lines Never Meet: Why the Military Disability Retirement and Veterans Affairs Department Claim Adjudication Systems are a Failure.” Reed is sending copies of the article to the House & Senate Armed Services & Veterans Affairs Committees. See the full text (download if you want) at Reed’s Parallel Lines Never Meet.
Writes Reed:
When a service member is disabled by disease or injury, the service member falls into the clutches of the military disability retirement system, which uses one set of criteria to evaluate the service member’s disability for purposes of compensation.3 After discharge, the service member has the option to apply to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for compensation benefits for the same injury or disease.4 Since neither system treats as conclusive an administrative determination by the other system on the issues of relation to service and degree of impairment, it is highly likely that a service member will be found ineligible for compensation by one system and eligible for compensation by theother.5 The VA compensation system and the military disability retirement system are also encumbered with decades of administrative debris that precludes rapid adjudication of service members’ disability claims under either system.6 Both systems are full of landmines and traps for the unwary that are generated by judicial decisions construing the organic laws of each system in an inconsistent and whimsical manner.7 These judicial decisions are contingent on a reviewing court’s deference to the expertise of the administrative decision makers who make the initial mistakes.8
This mess ought to be fixed. There is no excuse for the two systems to go on side by side, fumbling with the claims of sick and wounded veterans and dependents.
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