Researchers examine increasing veterans’ disability compensation

The dramatic increase in the number of Vietnam War veterans receiving veterans’ disability compensation since the 1990s has been fueled more by growing incentives for lower-skill whites than by an actual increase in veteran disabilities, social science researchers said.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ph.D. candidate Brigham Frandsen, one of the authors of “The Complicated Effects of Military Service on Self-Reported Health,” spoke to about 20 students, professors and veterans at MIT Monday on his findings.

“The main point is to show the long term effect of serving in the military on disability rates,” Frandsen said. “This research speaks to an important component of the legacy cost of war, or at least of the Vietnam conflict and by extension to current wars.”

Frandsen said he found through his research that from 1999 to 2005, the number of veterans receiving compensation for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder doubled, rising from over 90,000 to about 180,000. PTSD was found to be the leading claim for compensation, with diabetes following close behind.

After the Agent Orange decision of 2003 where diabetes was determined to be service-related, he said, the number of veterans claiming compensation for diabetes increased by almost one third in just two years, rising from roughly 140,000 to 180,000.

Dennis Kenney, a veteran who fought in Germany, said he attended the lecture because he is interested in Frandsen’s research. He said he and his fellow veterans were told they could go home once relieved of their duties if they didn’t think they had any service-related disabilities.

“I think there were about eight out of 800 of us who left, myself included,” he said. “I wanted to go home.”

He said he and his peers were advised by older veterans to be picky about their disabilities and try to get as much as they could for compensation, that they should “keep their options open insurance-wise.”

Frandsen said eight million veterans receive compensation from VDC, one-third of whom are Vietnam veterans. Many of these claims are being awarded “individually unemployed” status, which automatically qualifies a veteran for the maximum payment of $2,300 tax-free per month for as long as they live, he said.

Increasing incentives and institutional changes in the late 1990’s may be the cause for the rise in veteran compensation, he said, specifically Vietnam-era veteran compensation.

“The overall effect of serving in the military for these veterans was small,” Frandsen said.

But he said he found a large effect specifically on low-skill white men.

“If you were a low-educated man, getting disability compensation though the program looks like a great deal,” he said. “One way to get compensation is to show PTSD or any other service-incurred disability, and the compensation is fairly generous.”

In the late 1990s, the individually unemployed status began to be granted more freely; extensive paperwork was no longer required, Frandsen said. The VDC also began to presume eligibility instead of requiring that veterans have to file for it, he said, and attitude changes could be another cause for the compensation increase.

Frandsen and his colleagues said they are not suggesting that veterans are committing fraud, but that they are responding to incentives. But the increasing compensation to Vietnam in the present day could mean less compensation for future veterans, such as those of the current war in Iraq, he said.

He said his overall conclusion is the legacy cost of war seems to be more political and incentive-driven than health-related, something more than an inevitable cost of war.

“We’re not suggesting anything,” Joshua Angrist, one of Frandsen’s co-authors, said. “We’re not into call to action, just pointing things out.”