What Is the Take Care of America's Veterans Act?

The Take Care of America's Veterans Act is a sweeping veterans bill in Congress — H.R. 9237 in the House, with a companion, S. 4744, in the Senate — that bundles more than 60 separate veterans measures into a single package covering military retirement pay, disability compensation, survivor benefits, caregiver help, health care access and the running of the Department of Veterans Affairs. The House passed it on Veterans Day, Wednesday, November 11, by voice vote at about 2:46 p.m. Eastern, according to the official House Clerk's floor record reported by Military.com. It is not law. It still needs Senate approval before it can go to President Trump, and its passage on Wednesday changed no veteran's eligibility or payment by itself. Our report on the House vote is here: House Passes Take Care of America's Veterans Act on Veterans Day.

The plain reality is that the same package gives and takes at the same time. Most of its 60-plus provisions expand what veterans and their families receive. One provision, Section 108, pays for part of that expansion by tightening the disability ratings future claimants will get for two of the most common conditions veterans claim. That is why a bill almost everyone calls a benefits expansion has split the veterans world, and why people are asking what it actually is: it is an expansion with a cut built inside it, and both halves are real.

What its backers in Congress claim is that this is the promise finally kept. House Veterans' Affairs Chairman Mike Bost, who introduced the bill with Senate Veterans' Affairs Chairman Jerry Moran in June, called it "a historic healthcare and benefits expansion that will positively impact millions of veterans and American families," and said he is committed to getting it "over the finish line and to the president's desk before the end of the year." Speaker Mike Johnson said the act "keeps that promise by strengthening health care and mental health services, expanding education and economic opportunities, modernizing veterans' benefits, and supporting the caregivers and military families who serve alongside our veterans." More than 30 veterans organisations are listed as supporting the package, including the American Legion, the Wounded Warrior Project and the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors.

An earned benefit is not a spare account to raid when Congress wants to pay for another earned benefit.

The common-sense principle is that a benefit earned by service is owed in full to the person who earned it. It is not a spare account to raid when Congress wants to pay for another earned benefit. If the country owes combat-injured retirees their full retirement pay — and the package itself says it does — then taking that money out of the disability claims of veterans who have not filed yet does not settle the debt. It moves the debt onto the next wounded generation and calls the moving a saving.

The consequence is a fight that now moves to the Senate with the veterans community divided against itself. The Veterans of Foreign Wars and Disabled American Veterans oppose Section 108 and want it struck; the American Legion backs the bill as written; and the Senate companion has sat on the Senate Legislative Calendar since June, with an earlier attempt to pass it by unanimous consent blocked. If the Senate strips Section 108, the package loses the offset its backers say it needs to survive there. If the Senate keeps it, the expansion passes on the backs of future claimants. If the Senate does neither, a package with this much support dies with the Congress that wrote it — so will the Senate take the bill whole, take it apart, or let it die?

The details that matter are these. The package's centrepiece is the Major Richard Star Act, which would let about 54,000 combat-injured veterans who were medically retired before reaching 20 years of service receive both their full military retired pay and their full VA disability compensation, ending the dollar-for-dollar offset those retirees now live under. Around it sit provisions raising special monthly compensation for severely disabled veterans under the Sharri Briley and Eric Edmundson Act, the Love Lives On Act — which the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors says would let more than 30,000 surviving military families remarry without losing benefits — wider caregiver assistance, more community health care access, expanded mental health treatment and an improved Transition Assistance Program.

Section 108 is the part to watch, because it decides who pays. Today, recurrent tinnitus generally carries a 10 percent disability rating, and sleep apnea that requires a CPAP machine generally carries 50 percent. Section 108 would rate sleep apnea at 0 percent when it is asymptomatic, 10 percent when treatment gives incomplete relief, 50 percent only when treatment is ineffective or cannot be used and there is no end-organ damage, and 100 percent only when there is end-organ damage — and tinnitus would largely lose its standalone rating. The changes would apply only to claims filed after the act becomes law; the bill does not reduce a rating anyone already holds. But DAV, citing a VA analysis, estimates the new criteria could affect up to 1.5 million veterans filing in the future and reduce compensation payments by as much as $57 billion over ten years — which is exactly the saving critics say is being used to help fund the rest of the package. On the same Veterans Day, the House also voted 245 to 175, in a separate move, to bring the standalone Major Richard Star Act toward a floor vote without the rest of the package attached, then postponed further proceedings — a reminder that Congress has a second road to the most popular part of this bill, if it chooses to take it.

The sharpest word on the bill came from the organisation that wants the Senate to kill it in its current form. VFW National Commander-in-Chief Cory Geisler said: "It is an insult to America's veterans that Congress would advance legislation threatening their earned benefits on Veterans Day, the very day our nation is supposed to honor their service and sacrifice."