If you do 20 years and retire, either normally or for medical reasons, you are eligible for either Combat Related Special Compensation (CRSC), or Concurrent Receipt of Disability Pay (CRDP), once you receive VA disability compensation. Usually, unless all of the disabilities are combat-related, retirees take CRDP. If you get CRSC, you get two checks from the Defense Finance and Accounting Service: one is the CRSC amount, which is tax exempt, and rest is the difference in the CRSC and your total retirement check, which is taxed. If you are better off with CRDP (because you only have a limited amount of CRSC benefit) then you only get one check and it is taxed. In either case, if you did 20 or more years, you get all of your retirement and all of your VA benefit. If you are medically retired with less than 20 years, you get screwed.

Here’s why: Beginning in 2005, the military phased in a new system where those with 20 or more would start having less of their retirement subtracted due to the receipt of VA disability compensation. It used to be that if you got VA compensation, they took a dollar from your military retirement for every dollar from the VA. By 2014, those with 20 or more began to receive 100% of their VA pay and 100% of their retirement pay. This is not the case for those medically retired with less than 20 years. Once they receive VA benefits, they are still losing a portion of their retirement pay, and the formula they use to figure out what to take is ridiculously complicated. I am a pretty smart guy and I cannot friggin’ understand the formula. In any event, Congress needs to fix this so that those soldiers who are medically retired with less than 20 years get all of both benefits, particularly since the vast majority of these men and women are being retired due to combat injuries.

As far as I am concerned, the government these people served isy stealing money they deserve for putting their lives on the the line. This was actually supposed to have been fixed in the 2009 NDAA and, instead, they enacted this bullshit, complicated process that still took money from deserving soldiers.

This will take an act of Congress. We need to find allies in the House and Senate who will be favorable to this, and we would probably have our best luck by bringing this to former soldiers now serving in Congress. I would hope that John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and the rest of the veterans in the House and Senate would get behind this.