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SOME VETERANS GETTING VA DISABILITY FOR VENEREAL

DISEASE -- There likely have been thousands of vets since 1972

who have drawn millions of dollars in payments for conditions

they readily acknowledge came from illicit sexual activity.

 

 

Reporter Lisa Hoffman has been busy digging up more dirt on the VA benefits system.

Here is a link back to some of her previous work...
http://www.vawatchdog.org/07/nf07/nfMAR07/nf033007-1.htm

Story here... http://www.knoxnews.com/
kns/national/article/0,1406
,KNS_350_5514750,00.html

Story below:

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Some vets get disability checks for venereal diseases

By LISA HOFFMAN

Scores of veterans across the country are getting lifetime checks from the government for gonorrhea, genital herpes and other venereal diseases they caught while in the ranks.

The disability payments are made under a little-known provision from three decades ago that entitles vets to monthly benefits for sexually transmitted diseases they contracted, or simply aggravated, while in the service - even if they became infected on their own time years ago.

Under the rule Congress created at the end of the Vietnam War, even genital warts are considered a "service-connected" condition entitling a vet to the same $100 or more a month for the rest of his or her life that those who suffer wounds or battle injuries can receive.

This enrages some veterans of combat in Iraq, particularly those who have had to battle the backlogged Department of Veterans' Affairs bureaucracy to be deemed worthy of benefits for clearly war-related disabilities. For them, the fact that the VA's resources and taxpayers' wallets are being tapped for such claims is hard to stomach.

"It's a crock," said Jerry Yarbrough, a former volunteer fire fighter in Gibson County, Tenn., who suffered major systemic damage from heatstroke as an Army fueling specialist in the early days of the Iraq invasion and continues to fight for full benefits now that he's "a virtual prisoner in my own home."

The number of veterans getting benefits for sexually transmitted diseases is unclear. Repeated requests to the Department of Veterans Affairs for that information went unanswered.

But a review by Scripps Howard News Service of more than 60,000 cases under the purview of the VA's Veterans Benefits Administration reveals that there likely have been thousands of vets since 1972 who, collectively, have drawn millions of dollars in payments for conditions they readily acknowledge came from illicit sexual activity.

Among those receiving VD disability payments is a Texas veteran of a four-year hitch in the mid-1980s, who convinced the Board of Veterans' Appeals that he deserved to be considered 30 percent disabled - worth $350 a month now - because his genital warts left him seriously depressed.

Another veteran, this one from Wisconsin, waited 30 years before applying for benefits for the residual effects of gonorrhea he acknowledged he contracted from a prostitute during his basic training at Fort Polk, La., in 1972.

This former soldier, who spent a decade in prison after mustering out of the Army in 1975, said he continued to suffer from recurring gonorrhea-related urethritis when he sought benefits in 1996. Eventually, the appeals board deemed him 10 percent disabled, and thus eligible for a monthly check of about $100 for the rest of his life.

The question of compensating veterans for sexually transmitted diseases is one that apparently has not arisen in Washington since 1972, when Congress changed old rules that had categorized the contracting of such diseases to be an act of "willful misconduct."

Part of the reason lawmakers gave then for eliminating the pejorative classification was that doing so would encourage Vietnam vets returning home with VD to get treatment, rather than stay in the shadows and spread the diseases.

From then on, veterans have been eligible for benefits for an array of venereal diseases which were caught while in, or aggravated by, their military service.

In all, close to 20 sexually transmitted or related conditions can be found on the list of diagnoses covered by VA benefits. According to a VA archive of claim appeals, one of the most common is gonorrhea-connected urethritis, an inflammation of the male urethra. Gonorrheal and syphilitic arthritis, and syphilitic heart disease and dementia are also on the list.

That taxpayers are subsidizing vets with those diseases does not sit well with Sen. Larry Craig, the top GOP member of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee.

"We need to rethink whether taxpayers should support cash compensation payments for disabilities that are, without doubt, the result of one's own personal, voluntary behavior. Sexually transmitted diseases fall into that category in my mind," said Craig, an Idaho Republican.

Several veterans' service organizations, which are normally quick to fight off attacks on current benefits, offered a comparatively mild defense of VD benefits.

Saying he was unfamiliar with the reasoning behind the policy, Veterans for America official Steve Robinson suggested some of the beneficiaries could be victims of rape, former prisoners of war or others who contracted the illnesses during the call of duty.

He also decried those who focus on this sort of issue - which involves a comparatively small number of the 2.6 million vets getting benefits and a tiny portion of the $26 billion benefits budget - instead of on the trouble vets are having in getting VA help clearly due to them.

Veterans of Foreign Wars spokesman Joe Davis called the subject a difficult one, and cautioned that some who innocently contracted venereal diseases would suffer if they were denied benefits.

"Some of the maladies ... can be contracted through non-sexual means, or through normal human relations," said Davis, whose organization has represented veterans with venereal diseases in their appeals to the VA for more benefits.

That gonorrhea and genital warts can entitle a vet to monthly checks came as a surprise recently to experts in veterans' issues in Congress and the Government Accountability Office, which has long been a critic of including such maladies as hemorrhoids under the disability umbrella.

"This is something that needs to be looked at," said GAO official Dan Bertoni, upon learning of the VD benefits.

But the issue is not on the current agenda of a blue-ribbon commission charged by Congress with finding fixes for the overburdened, inefficient and sometimes arbitrary system for compensating veterans for illnesses and injuries.

While the VA's benefits system originally was intended to compensate former troops for the economic sacrifices they suffered because of service to their country, it has evolved into a more generous one that does not require vets with VD or any other medical condition to demonstrate how their ailment has hurt their earning power in order to receive monthly checks.

Veterans do have to show their condition either began while they were in uniform or was aggravated by their military service, and the amount of their checks is determined by how disabled they are, ranging from 10 percent to 100 percent.

The Veterans Disability Benefits Commission is mulling criticism from the accountability office and others that economic and medical changes since the end of World War II - when the current system was cobbled together - have left the disability system an outmoded relic that pays veterans for ailments that don't hurt their ability to work, or are treatable, carry only a tangential connection to military service, and are the result of the normal aging process.

For instance, an earlier Scripps review of thousands of records found more than 120,000 veterans are collecting benefits for hemorrhoids - making that painful affliction the 11th most common disability for which U.S. vets are compensated. Thousands more are receiving checks for bumps on their faces from shaving or for scars so small they are hard to see. The cost of hemorrhoids benefits alone could be $14 million a year or more.

At the commission's behest, the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine is reviewing about 20 conditions, including hemorrhoids, osteoarthritis, arteriosclerotic heart disease, ulcers and scars. No venereal diseases are on the list, although analysts are examining HIV-related illness, which can be transmitted sexually but also by other means.

Commission executive director Ray Wilburn said it would be impossible to scrutinize the hundreds of illnesses and injuries a soldier can suffer, and those selected for study include some of the more common ailments for which claims are made.

The commission's findings, slated for release in September, will form a centerpiece of congressional efforts to fix the benefits system, which is already seeing an influx of what could be 700,000 U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars applying for help.

And Congress is where concerns about sexually transmitted disease benefits should be addressed, said the VFW's Davis.

"If people don't like the law, they should urge their elected officials to change the law. But the conundrum for lawmakers is how to differentiate while still being fair to the service member" who got VD innocently, Davis said.

Until then, Veterans for America's Robinson said, vets should continue to file claims for sexually transmitted diseases.

"If the government allows someone to make a claim, I have no beef with it," he said.

Contact Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl@shns.com

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Larry Scott  --