Filner: Congress not Done With GI Bill

Improvements to the Post-9/11 GI Bill; an end -- at long last -- to the "disabled veterans' tax" known as concurrent receipt; and expanded services to rural, homeless and other vets.

These are things veterans can expect to see -- some in just months, others over the next year or two -- as Congress moves to improve programs and services to the nation's vets, Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, told Military.com recently in an exclusive interview.

A top priority will be fixes to the ambitious new GI Bill, widely hailed as the most generous education program for veterans since the end of World War II. Veterans quickly found that pegging the amount of tuition coverage to that of each state's public university system left those wanting to go to a private college digging deep into their own pockets.

"California, where I am from … prides itself on its low tuition," Filner said. "Well, that makes it difficult for veterans from California to go to a private college, because tuition is pegged to a public institution. Why discriminate against a person who wants to go to Stanford just because they're in California?"

The solution, he says, is to raise the stipends for veterans attending school in "low-tuition" states. Filner believes the same case can be made for veterans who are pursuing a degree program online, meaning their stipend does not include an amount for housing.

"They still have to live somewhere," he said. Filner believes these fixes could be in place within months, in time for the fall semester.

Filner is also intent on finally ending a decade-old law that permitted the government to deduct from a veteran's retirement check an amount equal to what he is getting for a service-connected disability.

Congress took its first crack at concurrent receipt five years ago, passing legislation repealing it for retired vets with a disability rating of at least 50 percent. The repeal was phased in over five years, Filner said, and is only now fully repealed for those vets.

The plan now is to repeal it for retired veterans with disability ratings below 50 percent.

He expects less opposition this time, especially if it is based only on the costs.

"We're talking a few billion. A few billion used to sound like a lot of money; now, it's almost nothing compared to the hundreds of billions we're giving out [to banks] and the trillions we're in debt," he said. "It seems to me we shouldn't balance the budget on the backs of veterans."

Filner said Congress is also eyeing "groups of veterans who do not have the kind of access to care they should. I'm talking about those who live in rural areas. I'm talking about homeless veterans. I'm talking about women veterans."

With women emerging as a higher percentage of the military, and many serving in the combat theater, they are also in greater need of veterans' health and medical care, he said. What Filner calls a "Bill of Rights for Women Veterans" may soon be passed in the House and it would, among other things, mandate that VA hospitals and clinics ensure women vets' needs are met, that they have adequate privacy and that there is child care available for those who must come to the facility with a child.

Ensuring that vets who live in rural areas, far from a VA facility, are able to get basic medical care is also a priority. You can't put a VA hospital in every town, Filner concedes, but you can make it so a vet who needs a blood test or some other basic service can have it done locally without having to pick up the tab.

"I'll give you the extreme example," he said. "If you live in Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic is, you cannot go to the Mayo Clinic for a blood test. They have to go up to Minneapolis [to a VA hospital]. Now that's pretty ridiculous. I mean, I trust the Mayo Clinic. It's something they can do. They can do a blood test.

"But that's for X-rays, and blood work, all kinds of things that could be done locally … some of these veterans are older, they don't have cars. The DAV -- Disabled American Veterans -- does an excellent job with its volunteer van program. But you can't solve everything with volunteers. We've got to allow the local communities to do more."

Eliminating homelessness among veterans -- which Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki has vowed to do -- "will take some effort, but we hope to do that," he said.

Filner is backing Shinseki's vow to end homelessness among veterans within five years.

"In the last 3 years, we raised [the VA's] budget over $20 billion -- 60 percent. It's the second biggest bureaucracy in the government. They have the resources."

At times, the VA just doesn't use its resources to the best advantage, he said, citing the agency's chronic problems with information technology. The VA had planned to contract out the programming for the GI bill … but somehow they couldn't even do that.

"They haven't even put some of the information into digital form. ... They're not even in the 21st century yet, which is unfortunate. We're trying to move there as fast as we can."