I know the title above sounds like doom and gloom but I’m going to take you on a journey to the inevitable future-both of VA’s proposed Compensation haircuts as well as America’s too. Much of what I’m going to say here is going to elicit anger and a feeling I do not share the angst of my fellow Veterans in their battle for benefits. Remember, I’m not speaking my mind about how I feel but what I suspect- and have already been witness to- over the last 37 years of playing VA poker.  It’s as inevitable as the the sun coming up tomorrow. Veterans have a better chance of inventing a DeLorean with a 1 gigwatt flux capacitor and a nuclear “kicker” to get it started as they do attempting to alter or stave off the future erosion of Veterans Compensation benefits.

Before I go Back to the Future, I want to illustrate what the past looked like- the past I remember. In 1970, you could smoke yourself into a rip snorting case of lung cancer and it would be service connected. All them Marb Reds, Kools and Winstons were 13¢ a pack at the BX when I got to Udorn in May 1970. They went up to 15¢ a pack just before I went TDY to the country that rhymed with Mouse. All them 15 year old Chesterfield Kings and Lucky Strikes in c rations were free but they didn’t have filters.

Likewise, in 1970, you could hit the Class VI store and load up on booze each month if you were over 21. If you had a Mormon Buddy who didn’t smoke or drink, you could hornswoggle him out of his ration card and double that. I was only 19 when I arrived but no one ever bothered to X out our liquor ration cards. Johnnie Walker Red was $9 a fifth. Johnnie Black was $12. You could take them off base and sell them for $35 and $50 respectively. The only problem was you were stuck with Thai Baht- not greenbacks. But that’s another story involving the Swiss Embassy in Bangkok..

Moving into 1990, VA decided to pull the plug on compensation for alcoholism and drug abuse. See 38 CFR 3.301. VA does, however, have a sense of humor. They outlawed it on Halloween Morning in 1990. Gives trick or treat a whole new meaning.

In keeping with that sentiment, in 1998 VA decided if you had a five-pack a day habit and you came down with a rip snorting good case of lung cancer, it was no longer service connected. Mind you, the Class VI store and BX/PX didn’t quit selling cheap booze and smokes. They didn’t. They just said if you came down with cancer or cirrhosis, it was on your dime.

I could go on and on citing other benefits haircuts over the years too numerous to mention. The fact is, VA’s compensation history is replete with gradual shrinkage-both percentage wise as well as what is, and what isn’t service connected. As an example. I attach here the 1969 Part IV (4) VA Schedule of Rating Disabilities (VASRD) that was in effect when I held up my right hand.

1969 VASRD

When doing VA claims for §3.156(c) claims, it’s imperative you (VA representatives) seek the right VASRD to cite to when they promulgate your RD (rating decision) using 2026 criteria. A 30% rating back to 1972 is all fine and dandy but if you use the 1969 schedule, that could very well be 50%. When they add up the intervening retro to the 2024 §3.156(c) win, that could mean tens of thousands more just waiting to be granted. Don’t leave anything on the table.

I’ve discussed above what used to be then and what it is now as my introduction to the what if? But I’m going to add in a new wrinkle. Back in 1970, you could be a cannon cocker at Fire Base Betty or a Pig Packer in a LRRP outfit up in the Central Highlands in I Corps and sticking used Marb filters in your ears for “hearing protection”. Of course, you could have just been using your index fingers if you didn’t smoke. The Pig haulers lost out. You can’t load and feed a 60 and plug up your ears at the same time with your fingers. When you got out, you filed for hearing loss. Nobody doing the c&p hearing tests bothered to ask you if you had that weird bodacious ring that made it difficult to hear the TV.  Funny thing is VA knew all about Tinnitus and had a Diagnostic Code for it (6260) but plumb forgot to even tell Vets about it.

Gradually, since Vietnam, service members’ experiences have changed. A big one was a group of men (and women) would join and go through Basic, AIT and deploy as a cohesive unit. No more Repo Depots like Bien Hoa in the 60s-70s. Ground pounders, Squids, Crayon Eaters and Air Force Personnel tend to talk in their spare time- especially if they’ve known each other and bunked together for a few years. They trade addresses and now cell phone numbers and stay in touch. Most of the guys I flew with had high value whole life insurance policies for good reason. In the almost three months I lasted up there, we had an average of a 40% casualty rate.

Which leads me to… A lot of my Vets I’ve represented have Buddy letters from their fellow servicemen that attest to long hours being awake leading to insomnia, extensive acoustical trauma due to gunfire and explosions causing hearing issues and (wait for it) snoring which provoked OSA. Virtually all of these folks were service connected for hearing loss at 0%, Tinnitus at 10%, OSA at 50% with use of a CPAP and maybe 30-50% for PTSD. And virtually all of these folks got these rating not with a doctor’s diagnosis but via the Buddy letters and their STRs.

Granted, VA can’t find their ass with a Methane Detector on any given day but they don’t have to now. They have Artificial Intelligence (AI) detectors. They can run the claims history of all of us and come to the conclusion that about 98% of us are getting 10% for ear ringitis. They know a lot of the Iraqistan Vets are getting 50% for their CPAP use. Think back. Remember when the VA put that gizmo on your CPAP that you had to plug in with a USB cable to download to your computer that let them know how much you were using the mask? Ronnie Reagan called that “Trust. But Verify.” They popped a bunch of Vets and dragged them in for a new c&p exam to explain why they had insomnia and 50% but no longer needed the CPAP. Lots of Vets dropped from 50 to 10% over that one alone.

About 6 or 7 years ago, VA began grumbling about the huge amounts of Compensation they were handing out and began to discuss yet another new haircut to benefits. Eliminating TDIU was also discussed but the Big Six (DAV/VFW/AmVets/ WWP/VVA/AmLeg) put the kibosh on that in a hurry. Getting rid of, or reducing, benefits for ear ring or OSA was part of that discussion but it fell by the wayside. Newsflash. It’s back and on page 63 of the Richard Starr Act.

Congress has a new technique- one I tend to agree with Considering the National Debt is approaching $40 Trillion, we have a pay/go system in place. If you want to increase VA benefits for one disability, you have to get out the garden shears and trim another area to pay for it. This is why they’ve 86’d all the trans folks. Face it. Gender Dysphoria is a psychiatric disability. Read your DSM 5. You can’t enlist if you have a known psychiatric condition anymore than you could enlist if you were blind or deaf. I sure don’t have any gripe with trans folks but I can sure see why that will never fly.

As for the pay/go dilemma, an example is Congress’ decision to increase SMC benefits for the higher levels of SMC  R1 and R2/T. They threw in a DIC increase as well. Who got the haircut to pay for all this? Why, you guys who take out VA Mortgage loans is who. This brings to mind George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Some pigs are more equal than other pigs. I guess we didn’t have TBI back in the ‘Nam. They called it Organic Brain Syndrome. They tried to tell us that the two were different until 2015- then caved in and gave it to the WW II/Korea and V Vets. That’s bullshit in my book.

We saw this phenomenon back in 2010 when the WWP jammed SMC T up Congress’ butt strictly for Vets who had served after 9/11/2001. Fortunately, that happened before pay/go or another cohort of Vets would have discovered they were paying for it. But pay/go is now the law of the land. Outside of COLA increase every January nowadays, I doubt we are going to see much more in the way of Congressional largesse.

But let’s get back to AI. I reckon a lot of you have heard of hare-brained schemes to create a $500-$750 per-month check for folks who are unemployed or “paycheck-challenged”. The qualifier is poverty. You could be blowing your welfare checks on cool tattoos and Micky D’s meals but now there’s a movement to just give away free money with no strings attached. What the hey?  You can go out and blow it on Coke if you want. Without sounding racist, a few African American Californians are now proposing a $5 million reparations check for their ancestors being slaves. I hear stock in Ancestry.com is going to go through the roof if it passes. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kiwi™ begins selling shit tons of brown shoe polish, too.

I won’t go into my feelings on it but there has been much talk about how AI is going to make everyone unemployed in 30 years. What then? How do you receive your daily bread if you don’t have any income? What are we going to do with all that spare time if we don’t go to work? Take up Macramé? The Ukraine Army just deployed robots with Ma Deuce .50 cals attached onto the battlefield. What purpose is a war if you don’t decimate the enemy and force them to surrender? Each side could just manufacture and deploy more robots but never achieve a decisive military victory.

I’m not going to say I have the answer to any of the questions I’ve raised. I’m just pointing out why you (Veterans) are beginning to notice VA changes that are going to eventually affect you both financially as well as inevitably impacting your health. In about 1998 when the military did away with jetguns due to the hepatitis C (HCV) epidemic, VA began surreptitiously testing Veterans in their system for the disease. If you came down with it, you died. But VA didn’t bother to volunteer the fact that you had it. Most of us found out by getting a copy of our VA medical records.

Granted, there wasn’t a true cure for it. Interferon cured about 37% even though they claimed a 85% cure rate. That figures. According to them, if you believe it, the accuracy rate on VA claims is 98%, too. Be that as it may, nowadays, with AI, they can run through your records and spot precursors for Agent Orange presumptives, burn pit diseases etc. But again, will they tell you or pretend ignorance and keep mum as they did with the HCV test info?

I suspect AI is going to be both a curse and a blessing. As for Veterans, I suspect the former. AI will be able to diagnose a disease or condition far more accurately than any doctor from a laundry list of possibilities. In the civilian arena, you’d expect your treating physician to recommend a test or two to rule out a possible cancer or disease. Will that be true in the VHA? I fear it will not. I worry that the hierarchy will enact directives that prevent a VA physician from acting on his or her hunches. With AI now at their fingertips, A VA treating physician may take it upon himself to order life-impacting tests and simply be overruled.

It doesn’t require an historian to remind us that one day in 2010, VA Secretary Shinseki- a fellow Veteran like you and me- forbid VA doctors from writing nexus letters for Veterans to help them get service connected for their illnesses. So much for a Veteran friendly process. The Hippocratic Oath  is explicit in my mind- First, do no harm. Does enforced silence with the full knowledge gleaned from AI that a disease is terminal if left untreated fall into the category of harm? I submit it does.

I know it’s a week early but Happy Nongestational Parents Day to all of you XY folks in New York. I reckon the term will be embraced in Illinois and California soon as well.