Benefits To Veterans And Their Families Continue
Long After Conflicts Are Over.
AP News:
"If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and
their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.
An
Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the
government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War
veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.
At the 10-year
anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, more than $40 billion a
year is going to compensate veterans and survivors from the
Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the
Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And
those costs are rising rapidly.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said such expenses should remind the nation about war's long-lasting financial toll.
"When
we decide to go to war, we have to consciously be also thinking about
the cost," said Murray, D-Wash., adding that her WWII veteran father's
disability benefits helped feed their family.
Alan Simpson, a
former Republican senator and veteran who co-chaired President Barack
Obama's deficit committee in 2010, said government leaders working to
limit the national debt should make sure that survivors of veterans need
the money they are receiving.
"Without question, I would affluence-test all of those people," Simpson said.
With greater numbers of troops surviving combat injuries because of
improvements in battlefield medicine and technology, the costs of
disability payments are set to rise much higher.
The AP identified
the disability and survivor benefits during an analysis of millions of
federal payment records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
To
gauge the postwar costs of each conflict, the AP looked at four
compensation programs that identify recipients by war: disabled
veterans; survivors of those who died on active duty or from a
service-related disability; low-income wartime vets over age 65 or
disabled; and low-income survivors of wartime veterans or their disabled
children.
THE IRAQ WARS AND AFGHANISTAN
So
far, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the first Persian Gulf conflict
in the early 1990s are costing about $12 billion a year to compensate
those who have left military service or family members of those who have
died.
Those post-service compensation costs have totaled more
than $50 billion since 2003, not including expenses of medical care and
other benefits provided to veterans, and are poised to grow for many
years to come.
The new veterans are filing for disabilities at
historic rates, with about 45 percent of those from Iraq and Afghanistan
seeking compensation for injuries. Many are seeking compensation for a
variety of ailments at once.
Experts see a variety of factors
driving that surge, including a bad economy that's led more jobless
veterans to seek the financial benefits they've earned, troops who
survive wounds of war, and more awareness about head trauma and mental
health.
VIETNAM WAR
It's been 40 years since the U.S. ended its involvement in the Vietnam War, and yet payments for the conflict are still rising.
Now
above $22 billion annually, Vietnam compensation costs are roughly
twice the size of the FBI's annual budget. And while many disabled
Vietnam vets have been compensated for post-traumatic stress disorder,
hearing loss or general wounds, other ailments are positioning the war
to have large costs even after veterans die.
Based on an uncertain
link to the defoliant Agent Orange that was used in Vietnam, federal
officials approved diabetes a decade ago as an ailment that qualifies
for cash compensation — and it is now the most compensated ailment for
Vietnam vets.
The VA also recently included heart disease among
the Vietnam medical problems that qualify, and the agency is seeing
thousands of new claims for that condition. Simpson said he has a lot of
concerns about the government agreeing to automatically compensate for
those diseases."
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