I got my percentage from the VA, after 3 assessments at 3 different VA hospital (my paperwork got messed up/lost the first two times). I wrongly thought that the percentage was based off of the pay grade a person had while in the military. Probably from confusing military retirement percentage with disability percentage. Don't think the Army directly pays disability. Might have been so in the past but I don't recall that ever being an option when I got out. The Army (well, doctors at an army hospital on For Hood) did my initial medical assessment when I ETS'd but that was a pre-assessment for the VA if I remember correctly. I believe they gave me some forms and told me to take it to the VA rep on base. I am certain my disability comes from the VA though. I get a letter from them every year saying I'm exempt from the non-insured Obamacare tax penalties due to my VA benefits.
Military did Medical retirement ratings when i ETS’d in the mid ninties and they generally paid 10-20% as the same rate, 30-50%, 60-80% and 90-100% as the same rate. You had to be inpatient treated at some point and put through the military medical board process that can take months and they use the inpatient stay as means to gather daily assessment of whatever condition. The big military hospitals have special housing units for medical board patients so that they don’t use up medical beds unless they really are in that bad of shape. Patients get assigned to medical board as their new company and the doctor becomes their new company commander and tells them to not play soldier, just take it easy and writes up a few weeks of convalescence leave so they don’t go stir crazy waiting on medical board to get to their file in the pile. I guess if people are ok enough to not need inpatient care at anypoint, then they are ok enough to not need disability support from the army. And generally, if you get any rating above 10% from the army, the VA is very likely to rate you closer to 100%. A 30-50% army rating is most likely going to be a 100% VA rating. Just drop the Army rating medical files off at the VA calims and wait the long months or years and it is a guaranteed VA rating because they do not deny people with prior ratings direct from the military medical board. VA takes the Army disability payments, and gives the VA rating payment. No double pay like normal military retirees are allowed.
Pretty sure that's not an option anymore. The military doesn't even offer the 20 year retirement any longer. They make you rely on the stock market for your retirement now.
I'm just curious if that $860 is non service connected disability from the VA? Its about the right amount. Catch with that is you can't leave the US without losing it and if do its considered fraud and if caught will not only lose it but forced to pay it back and if lied in a form saying you still were in the US potentially prosecuted. Service connected you own and earned... non service connected is treated differently. Just asking because unwise to move here on that.
It's not a pension, it is a disability check. It is supposed to supplement your income. (Note: Same with the US SS pension checks. It was never meant to be enough to live on. It is only supposed to supplement savings that a person has built up throughout their life.)
Exactly that. Its supposed to suppliment your income and not meant to be permanent even and thus not a pension. You could receive it and other forms of welfare as well. But then we go back to where we were decades ago. SS wasn't supposed to be a pension or retirement plan and welfare wasn't supposed to pay the bills. They were both meant to suppliment what someone had. SS was meant to suppliment someone's retirement plan or pension. Welfare was supposed to assist someone when they are down and out temporarily to survive better while get back on their feet.
SS in the U.S.A., according to President Roosevelt's statement to Congress, was intended to provide a safeguard "against the hazards and vicissitudes of life." He made no reference to supplementing other retirement income. At most that was implicit.
""We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age."-- President Roosevelt upon signing Social Security Act There's the full quote. The history behind SS program(s) was much longer than I thought. Social Security History The SSA calls that a "Brief History". I'm skimming through it looking for something to confirm my bias. lol Edit: "The significance of the new social insurance program was that it sought to address the long-range problem of economic security for the aged through a contributory system in which the workers themselves contributed to their own future retirement benefit by making regular payments into a joint fund. It was thus distinct from the welfare benefits provided under Title I of the Act and from the various state "old-age pensions." As President Roosevelt conceived of the Act, Title I was to be a temporary "relief" program that would eventually disappear as more people were able to obtain retirement income through the contributory system. The new social insurance system was also a very moderate alternative to the radical calls to action that were so common in the America of the 1930s." "Long before the economic blight of the depression descended on the Nation, millions of our people were living in wastelands of want and fear. Men and women too old and infirm to work either depended on those who had but little to share, or spent their remaining years within the walls of a poorhouse . . .The Social Security Act offers to all our citizens a workable and working method of meeting urgent present needs and of forestalling future need . . . One word of warning, however. In our efforts to provide security for all of the American people, let us not allow ourselves to be misled by those who advocate short cuts to Utopia or fantastic financial schemes. We have come a long way. But we still have a long way to go. There is still today a frontier that remains unconquered--an America unclaimed. This is the great, the nationwide frontier of insecurity, of human want and fear. This is the frontier--the America--we have set ourselves to reclaim." -- President Franklin Roosevelt August 14, 1938, Radio address on the third anniversary of the Social Security Act "It is impossible under any social insurance system to provide ideal security for every individual. The practical objective is to pay benefits that provide a minimum degree of social security—as a basis upon which the worker, through his own efforts, will have a better chance to provide adequately for his individual security." -- From the Report of the Social Security Board recommending the changes which were embodied in the 1939 Amendments. My interpretation of these quotes: SS isn't meant to live on. You aren't getting a free lunch and you need to take responsibility for you own future. Successful confirmation of biases.
The above comments also confirm my bias that SS is NOT an entitlement program any more than private annuity investments could be considered as such. Yet, we often hear that SS, that we pay Uber bucks into over the course of our working lives, referred to as an entitlement program. Entitlement programs are welfare that OTHERS pay into where you are entitled to money by law for being poor. But SS is paid in to. The media tend to make the “entitlement” reference probably because it reinforces their socialist narrative that the government is benignly watching over us. BS. The government may have messed up royally in managing the SS investment trust fund that we paid in to but it is no different than any other private retirement fund other than the criminal way in which politicians plunder the money for their own political purposes. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
