The VA sucks. Wanted help with a lift for Tom and groceries since we have 10 steps to get into the house and after 18 years here, his degenerative disc disease has, well, degenerated. Oh, but if you try to get crumbs from the VA, they threaten to take away the crumbs they already give you. In other words, they want him to be re-evaluated AGAIN to see if they can lower his disability rating so they can deny the request and take what they give him. What do they give him? ZIPPO!
He literally gets not one thin dime for his 40% rating. They take about $660 from his pension and hand it back to him from the VA as non-taxable. That's it. No extra money, nothing. He pays for his own VA money. Know why they stopped his rating at 40%? Because if it was 50%, he would have to get actual money above and beyond his pension, not taken out of it. That is how you treat someone who spent 20 years in the Air Force and 5 years in the GA Nat'l Guard before that and was hurt loading bombs during Desert Storm. He's done everything they asked of him, including weeks of physical therapy that was not going to work because it manipulates muscles, does not affect discs that are missing entirely. He's jumped through hoop after hoop, from the time he got a 20% rating many years ago, then they arbitrarily lowered it to 10% because he walked into a doctor's office on his own two feet. Then, he had to fight to get it raised when his back got much worse and got a 40%, not the 50% he wanted. It's not worth the insane trouble to jump through hoops all over again. We will have our own lift built and they can suck eggs! Enough of this crap.