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Running in Tribune...
LOS ANGELES — Jack Behunin received welcome news last year from the Department of Veterans Affairs: Due to war-related medical conditions, he was being declared unfit to work, boosting his tax-free monthly disability compensation from $1,850 to $3,000.
Not that he had any interest in a job. A World War II veteran in Burbank, Calif., he is 90 years old.
His case is not an aberration. Senior citizens have helped make the benefit — known as individual unemployability — one of the fastest-growing expenditures in the VA disability system. The number of “unemployable” veterans has nearly tripled since 2000, to 321,451, with the majority at ages when most people have stopped working.
Government data show that 56 percent of the beneficiaries are at least 65 years old. Eleven percent are 80 and older.
Being classified as unemployable adds between roughly $1,100 to $1,900 to a veteran’s monthly disability pay, which often comes on top of Social Security.
At an annual cost of at least $4 billion, the benefit is part of an expanding disability system expected to cost $60 billion this year. Reports have singled out unemployability as an example of how a system operating under old rules has failed to keep pace with modern times.
“VA’s compensation program does not reflect the current state of science, technology, medicine and the labor market,” the Government Accountability Office concluded in a 2006 report on poor management of the benefit.
In response to the rising costs, GAO researchers are now examining the benefit to determine how many veterans classified as unemployable had left the labor force voluntarily.
Behunin farmed for nearly a decade after the war, then spent 17 years at car dealerships, one year selling more Pontiacs than any other salesman in the country. He worked for his son selling mulch into his 80s until they had a falling out. He said he made $50,000 his final year.
But his job as a gunner during the war sandwiched him between two loud machine guns in a B-24 bomber and badly damaged his hearing. He has worn hearing aids since the 1960s.
The war also gave him what he called mild post-traumatic stress disorder.
Behunin probably could have been collecting disability pay for decades, but he didn’t apply until a friend suggested it about seven years ago. He wound up with a 90 percent disability rating for hearing loss, tinnitus and PTSD. Being declared unemployable raised his pay to 100 percent.
He said it provided a much-needed supplement to the $2,900 in Social Security that he and his wife collect each month.
When the VA created the unemployability benefit in 1934, Social Security didn’t exist. Manual labor was the only option for most workers, and the Depression was in full swing.
The benefit was a safety net for vets who couldn’t work due to health issues that began in the military and whose disability ratings, based on a formula combining their conditions, fell shy of 100 percent.
In1945, as disabled World War I veterans continued to fall out of the workforce, the VA adopted a regulation ensuring eligibility to veterans of any age. That decision underlies much of the current growth.
More than half the137,343 veterans approved since 2010 were 65 or older, including 13,684 who were at least 75, according to VA statistics.
The largest share served in the Vietnam era. Many joined the disability system over the last decade as the VA expanded eligibility for PTSD and diabetes, heart disease, prostate cancer and other conditions on the presumption they were caused by exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange.
Once in the system, veterans are eligible for the unemployability benefit if their ailments are deemed too severe for them to work and their disability ratings reach a certain threshold.
William McMath, a psychologist who conducts disability examinations at the VA Medical Center in Northport, N.Y., said decisions about unemployability are often subjective.
Joe Meredith, who served in Vietnam and now works in Michigan helping veterans secure disability benefits, said many of his clients have had long careers and use the unemployability provision to supplement their retirements.
“Someone has spent 30 years working for General Motors, 30 years in the military or 30 years driving a bus,” Meredith said. “Now they are retired. And guess what? They’re a Vietnam veteran and they’re going to jump on the bandwagon.” azarembo@tribune.com
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