NDC Leads Coalition Calling Out Washington Post Accusations Against Veterans
National Defense Committee led 28 military and veterans service organizations to demand accountability from the Washington Post today following an article that accuses veterans of mass exploitation of disability benefits.
An article published by the Post on October 6 alleges that “veterans are swamping the U.S. government with dubious disability claims… exploiting the country’s sacred commitment to compensate those harmedin the line of duty.”
The investigation draws tenuous, at best, connections between the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) disability rating and compensation system and what the Post implies is rampant fraud. It ignores, as former VA Secretary David Shulkin points out, that the “sheer complexity of the [claims] process leads to unnecessary delays and denials—not because of veterans’ shortcomings, but because of how the system is designed.” And it suggests that veterans are fraudulently claiming post-traumatic stress disorder without records of medical treatment, even though the National Institutes of Health argues this is a condition whose symptoms are delayed by months or years.
The article’s lack of context and cherry-picked statistics “generate false conclusions, even if not explicitly stated by the authors,” NDC notes in its letter.
“Advances in triage and battlefield medicine saved thousands who would not have survived in earlier wars, but survival came with new and complex injuries,” Mission Roll Call notes in a response to the article—a point the Post admits but demeans as little more than a factor that “contributed to the torrent of claims.”
The article references data that shows the number of veterans with 100-percent disability ratings doubled from 2019 and increased nearly nine-fold since 2001. However, both data sets are based on pre-9/11 numbers, ignoring the now 24 years of near continuous combat and high-intensity non-combat operations in which U.S. military personnel are involved, the letter notes.
“Would the Post prefer the wounded military personnel to have bled out on the battlefield rather than live and file a claim, or that veterans successfully kill themselves at higher rates so as not to burden the VA with their mental health claim needs?,” the coalition letter asks.
“While we certainly hope that is not the editorial position of the Washington Post, the article would appear to argue in favor of more dead military personnel and veterans and less disability claims and PTSD-related mental health care.”
“We expect more from a supposed ‘Paper of Record,’ but we note the Post ‘presented VA officials with a detailed summary of this story and a list of questions, which they declined to answer,’” the letter concludes. “We ask you to present those questions to our groups, and we will be happy to engage you in a rigorous analysis of your concerns and those questions to provide you with what we believe it the proper context for these programs.”
