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. It is, partly. It also 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 to use a benefit other veterans get for less. Congress did not reach into the general fund to protect combat-injured retirees. It reached into the pockets of other veterans. Every veteran should see the whole ledger before their VSO tells them how to feel about it.
The Part Everyone’s Talking About
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. Caregiver support, suicide prevention funding, claims processing reform, all in the same bill. Veterans service organizations aren’t wrong to want these things. Most of them have wanted these things for years.
Nobody’s press release mentions how it’s paid for.
Follow the Money
Start with the big one. Sleep apnea rated 50 percent automatically for anyone on a CPAP right now. Under Section 108, that number drops to 0 or 10 percent if treatment is working, and tinnitus loses its standalone 10 percent rating entirely, compensable only when it rides along with something else, like hearing loss. VA’s own estimate: $57 billion less in compensation over 10 years, touching up to 1.5 million future claimants. Existing ratings stay put. New claims don’t.
Then there’s the home loan fee nobody’s covering outside a handful of mortgage trade outlets. Section 104(b) takes the fee on an Interest Rate Reduction Refinance Loan from 0.50 percent to 1.42 percent. On a $300,000 loan that’s $1,500 jumping to $4,260, an extra $2,760 out of pocket, more if it gets financed into the loan itself. The fee for assuming someone else’s VA-backed loan doubles too, half a percent to a full percent. And the bill kills the 10-year sunset that would have let these increases expire on their own. The Mortgage Bankers Association told the House this “would create even greater challenges for veteran homeowners.” Veterans who already carry a service-connected disability rating are generally exempt from these fees regardless of what this bill does. The ones who pay this increase are veterans without a rating and other non-exempt borrowers using these specific loan products. That’s not a small group.
Here’s the one that actually made me angry writing it. The bill genuinely expands VA home loan eligibility to Guard and Reserve members with as little as 14 days of qualifying training service, dating back to September 11, 2001. Real fix, real gap closed. Then it turns around and charges those 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. Congress opened a door that should’ve been open for twenty years and billed the people walking through it more than everyone already inside.
Concurrent receipt, the actual centerpiece of this whole bill, only covers retirees whose disability is officially combat-related. Congress’s own summary says so in plain language. A veteran medically retired with an equally severe disability that isn’t combat-related, and there are plenty of them, gets nothing from this provision. One group’s offset gets fixed. The other group stays exactly where it started.
And the survivor benefit everyone’s celebrating? Surviving spouses get a temporary bump to Dependency and Indemnity Compensation, Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment plus one extra point, for three increases, then it stops. That’s a real improvement. It is not the parity survivor advocates have spent years asking for under the Caring for Survivors Act, and passing this smaller version now risks taking the pressure off Congress to ever pass the bigger one.
Notice Where All This Money Comes From
None of it comes from the general Treasury. Every dollar funding this bill’s generosity comes from inside the veteran and military community itself: future disability claimants, veterans refinancing their homes, newly eligible Guard and Reserve members, disabled retirees who land on the wrong side of a combat-related line that VA and DoD will now spend years litigating case by case.
Congress had an entire federal budget to work with. It chose this instead.
A mortgage broker who works with VA loans, Carlos Scarpero of Edge Home Finance, said it plainer than any advocacy group has. Asked about the fee increase, he told a trade publication the bill is
“basically using the funds from one side to pay for the other side.”
He’s not a veterans advocate. He processes these loans for a living, and even he can see it.
Nobody forced this structure on anyone. Congress could have funded the Major Richard Star Act through the ordinary budget process, the same way every other federal priority competes for money, and let it stand or fall on its own merits against everything else Congress spends on. Instead they made it revenue-neutral inside the veteran community. That choice tells you exactly what some lawmakers think veterans’ benefits actually are: not an earned obligation of the nation, but a budget line they can shuffle money around inside of, as long as there’s a press release ready about who came out ahead.
This Isn’t the First Time, and That’s Exactly the Point
Every benefit a younger veteran takes for granted today, somebody fought for it first. The GI Bill didn’t write itself into law out of national gratitude. Agent Orange presumptive conditions weren’t granted the year Vietnam veterans came home, they came after decades of veterans organizing, testifying, and refusing to let VA pretend the exposure never happened. Burn pit presumptive conditions under the PACT Act took a hunger strike on the Capitol steps and a Senate vote that failed once before it finally passed. None of it was handed down. Veterans fought for it, on behalf of veterans who hadn’t even filed a claim yet.
That’s the obligation sitting underneath this fight, and it has nothing to do with whether the sleep apnea and tinnitus rating changes are medically defensible. Reasonable people can argue that piece either way. The real question is whether this generation of veterans lets Congress establish, as normal practice, that new veterans benefits get funded by cutting other veterans benefits. Set that precedent once and it doesn’t disappear when this bill is done. It becomes the template for the next one. And the one after that.
Every decade of veterans before us protected what the next decade would need. That’s not sentiment, it’s the entire reason any of us have what we have right now. Continuing that doesn’t fall to Congress by default. It falls to us. We’re the ones who know what these ratings mean to someone actually living with the condition, and we’re the only ones who’ll still be paying attention once this news cycle moves on to something else.
What Nobody Has Answered Yet
The statute is clear on one point. 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. Existing ratings are protected. That much is settled law, straight from the bill text.
Here’s what isn’t settled. What happens to a veteran already rated for sleep apnea or tinnitus who files a claim to increase that rating after this law takes effect? An increase claim is its own claim type under normal VA practice, adjudicated under whatever criteria applies at the time it’s decided. Read the statute one way, the existing rating is a floor nobody can drop you below, but you’d have to clear the new, tighter criteria to climb any higher than that. Read it another way, the whole disability stays under the old schedule for any future action touching it, period. The bill doesn’t say which reading wins. I haven’t found a single person, in Congress, at VA, or at any of the VSOs, who has publicly worked through this scenario. If you’re rated for either condition and thinking about filing to increase it, ask your VSO directly whether they have an answer. If they don’t, take that gap straight to your representative before this bill moves any further.
One more thing worth knowing. 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. The $57 billion and 1.5 million figures driving this entire fight come from a VA analysis, not CBO. That doesn’t make the numbers wrong, VFW and DAV cite the same VA analysis independently of each other, but it’s worth knowing the number hasn’t gone through the government’s own independent 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).