Why Are Veterans Paying For Their Own Benefits?
The full ledger of what the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act takes, and who is expected to hand it over
THE GIST: H.R. 9237 is being sold as the most comprehensive veterans package in years, and parts of it deserve that. But the same bill pays for a chunk of its own generosity by cutting future disability ratings for sleep apnea and tinnitus, tripling a VA home loan fee, and charging newly eligible Guard and Reserve borrowers extra just to use a benefit other veterans get for less. None of that money came from the general fund. It came out of other veterans’ pockets. Every veteran should see the whole ledger before their VSO tells them how to feel about it.
What’s Actually In This Bill
The headline provisions are real. The Major Richard Star Act ends the “wounded warrior tax,” letting roughly 54,000 combat-disabled retirees keep both military retirement pay and VA disability compensation instead of one offsetting the other. The Love Lives On Act lets surviving spouses remarry without losing Dependency and Indemnity Compensation, and there’s caregiver support, suicide prevention funding, and claims processing reform tucked into the same 62-bill package. Veterans service organizations have wanted most of this for years, which is exactly why the funding mechanism stings so much when you actually read it.
Nobody’s press release gets around to explaining how it’s paid for. So here’s the part they left out.
Follow the Money
Sleep apnea currently rates 50 percent automatically for anyone using a CPAP machine. Section 108 changes that math entirely, tying the rating to how well treatment works, which can drop a veteran to 0 or 10 percent even while they’re still using the machine every night. Tinnitus loses its standalone 10 percent rating too, only compensable going forward if it’s riding along with something else, like hearing loss. VA’s own estimate puts the damage at $57 billion less in compensation over 10 years, touching as many as 1.5 million future claimants who haven’t filed yet.
Then there’s a fee increase almost nobody outside a handful of mortgage trade outlets has bothered to connect to this fight. Section 104(b) takes the fee on an Interest Rate Reduction Refinance Loan from 0.50 percent to 1.42 percent, which on a $300,000 loan turns a $1,500 charge into $4,260, an extra $2,760 out of pocket before you even count what happens if it gets financed into the loan itself. The fee for assuming someone else’s VA-backed loan doubles too, and the bill removes the 10-year sunset that would have let these increases expire on their own eventually. The Mortgage Bankers Association told the House this “would create even greater challenges for veteran homeowners.” To be fair, veterans who already carry a service-connected disability rating are generally exempt from these fees no matter what this bill does. But that leaves a large group of veterans without a rating, plus other non-exempt borrowers, footing this particular bill.
The one that got under my skin the most while I was writing this is Section 104(c). It genuinely expands VA home loan eligibility to Guard and Reserve members with as little as 14 days of qualifying training service, going all the way back to September 11, 2001, which is a real fix for people who should have had this access twenty years ago. Then it charges those same newly eligible borrowers an extra percentage point above the standard funding fee, roughly $3,000 more on that same $300,000 loan than an already-eligible veteran pays for the identical product.
Concurrent receipt, the actual centerpiece of this whole bill, only applies to retirees whose disability is officially combat-related, straight from Congress’s own summary of the text. A veteran medically retired with an equally severe disability that just doesn’t happen to be combat-related, and there are plenty of those veterans, doesn’t get a dime from this provision even though their situation looks identical on paper to the one Congress just fixed.
Surviving spouses get something too, a temporary DIC bump equal to Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment plus one extra percentage point, running for three increases before it stops. It’s a real improvement, just not the parity survivor advocates have spent years pushing for under the Caring for Survivors Act. Pass this smaller version now and Congress may never feel pressure to pass the bigger one later.
Somebody Chose This
Look at where all five of those dollars come from. Not one of them traces back to the general Treasury. Every bit of it comes out of the veteran and military community itself, future disability claimants, veterans refinancing their homes, newly eligible Guard and Reserve members, and disabled retirees stuck on the wrong side of a combat-related line that VA and DoD will now spend years arguing over case by case.
Congress had an entire federal budget available to work with, and this is what they picked anyway.
A mortgage broker who works with VA loans, Carlos Scarpero of Edge Home Finance, described it to a trade publication more bluntly than any advocacy group has managed:
“basically using the funds from one side to pay for the other side.”
Scarpero has no stake in veterans’ politics one way or the other. He just processes these loans for a living, and even from where he sits, the shape of it is obvious.
Nobody made Congress structure it this way. The Major Richard Star Act could have gone through the ordinary budget process like everything else Congress funds, competing for its share the same way any federal priority does. Instead, someone decided to make it revenue-neutral inside the veteran community, which tells you something about how certain lawmakers actually think about earned benefits, less like an obligation the nation owes and more like a line item they can move money around inside of, so long as a press release is ready to explain who came out ahead.
None of This Is New
Somebody fought for every benefit a younger veteran takes for granted today. The GI Bill did not write itself into law out of gratitude. Agent Orange presumptive conditions showed up decades after Vietnam veterans came home, only after years of veterans organizing, testifying, and refusing to let VA pretend the exposure never happened in the first place. Burn pit presumptive conditions under the PACT Act needed a hunger strike on the Capitol steps and a Senate vote that failed once before it finally passed the second time. Veterans did that work, mostly on behalf of other veterans who hadn’t even filed a claim yet.
Whether the sleep apnea and tinnitus changes are medically defensible is a real debate, and reasonable people land on different sides of it. But that’s a separate question from the one underneath this whole fight, which is whether this generation of veterans is going to let Congress treat “fund new benefits by cutting other veterans’ benefits” as an ordinary, repeatable move. Once that precedent gets set, it doesn’t go away when this particular bill is finished. It just becomes the template for whatever comes next.
Every decade of veterans before us protected what the next decade would eventually need, and that habit is the actual reason any of us have what we have right now, not sentiment about it. Somebody has to keep doing that. It falls to whoever is paying attention after this news cycle ends, and that’s usually us, the people who already know what a rating number means to somebody actually living inside the condition it describes.
The Question Nobody Has Answered
One thing is settled. Section 108(c)(2) says the revised rating criteria “may not serve as the basis for reducing, discontinuing, or otherwise adversely affecting compensation that was in effect” before enactment, so existing ratings really are protected, straight from the statute itself.
Here’s what’s genuinely unclear. A veteran already rated for sleep apnea or tinnitus files a claim to increase that rating after this law takes effect. Which schedule applies? An increase claim is its own claim type under normal VA practice, adjudicated under whatever criteria is current at the time it’s decided, which puts this squarely in a gap the statute never addresses. One reading treats the existing rating as a floor you can’t be dropped below, though you’d still have to clear the new, tighter criteria to climb any higher. A different reading keeps the whole disability under the old schedule for any future action that touches it. I have not found anyone, in Congress, at VA, or across any VSO, who has worked through this in public. If this applies to you, ask your VSO directly whether they have an answer before you file anything. If they don’t, take the question to your representative.
Worth knowing too: as of July 15, 2026, the White House’s own policy statement on this bill confirmed there’s still no final Congressional Budget Office score attached to any of this. The $57 billion and 1.5 million figures everyone keeps citing come from a VA analysis, not CBO, which doesn’t make them wrong, VFW and DAV reached the same number independently, but it does mean the figure hasn’t gone through the government’s own scorekeeper yet.
Related reporting: The White House Didn’t Fight for Sleep Apnea Ratings. Here’s What It Fought For Instead., on what the Administration’s policy statement actually objects to in this bill, and it isn’t Section 108.
Related reporting: Dan Crenshaw Has a Staff. He Should Use Them., a fact-check of Rep. Crenshaw’s claims about this same bill.
Sources for verification:
H.R. 9237, Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, full bill and official summary: congress.gov
VFW statement on Section 108 offsets: issuevoter.org
VA home loan funding fee increase, Section 104(b): Mortgage Professional America
Mortgage Bankers Association objection letter: HousingWire
NAMB statement on fee increase: National Mortgage News
Section-by-section analysis, Title I: free-range-advocate.com
I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.
Last verified: July 23, 2026
For press and advocates: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com
Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).
Shit I’m laying out $400 a month for my own therapy after my VA therapist left the VA when I used to have it for free four times per month now I can only afford two. 2️⃣