Former members of the military are being refused benefits by the Department of Veterans Affairs at the highest rate since the department's creation at the end of World War II, according to a recent report from three veterans' groups: Swords to Plowshares, the National Veterans Legal Services Program and the Veterans Legal Clinic at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School.
More than 125,000 veteran marines from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are precluded from receiving healthcare and job training benefits promised by the VA as a result of less-than-general discharges, also called "bad paper" discharges.
The report, which compared 70 years of data from the Departments of Defense and the VA, found veterans who served after 2001 were almost two times as likely as those who served during Vietnam to be excluded from benefits, and nearly four times as likely as the troops in World War II.
Approximately 6.5 percent of all Iraq and Afghanistan troops have "bad paper" discharges, according to the report, with the highest rates — 10 percent — found among Marines.
"It has gotten worse with every generation, and it appears to hit the veterans Congress intended to protect," Bradford Adams, a lawyer and an author of the report, told The New York Times. "They knew these folks had been through combat, and wanted to make sure they had help. The VA doesn't seem to be doing that."
About three quarters of veterans with "bad paper" discharges who served in combat have post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the report.
"We separate people for misconduct that is actually a symptom of the very reason they need healthcare," said Coco Culhane, a lawyer who works with veterans at the UrbanJusticeCenter in New York, according to The New York Times.
The GI Bill requires the VA to care for veterans if their service was "other than dishonorable." According to The New York Times, the agency has interpreted this to exclude "other than honorable" discharges.
The growing population of ineligible veterans is likely due to the military's increasing reliance on other-than-honorable discharges to enable them to refuse treatment to men and women who might otherwise qualify for expensive and time-consuming medical treatment, according to the report.