The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced Friday the creation of a new equity team tasked with investigating and combatting disparities in the denial of benefits for Black vets.
For years, Black veterans have been denied disability benefits at higher rates than their white counterparts, particularly when it comes to PTSD claims, according to newly released data from the VA. During FY23, the denial rate on PTSD claims for Black vets was 35%, compared to a 25% denial rate for white vets, according to VA data.
The disparity has improved slightly over the years, however, the gap between white and Black vets has continued.
“While that data, this latest data that we put out, raises more questions, maybe, than it answers, the idea behind the counsel is to tackle these questions and eliminate those disparities as it relates to VA care and VA benefits,” U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough said at a recent press conference. “We also recognize that it may take some time, but we feel urgency because each of these individual cases is not just a number, each of these individual cases is a veteran.”
The creation of the new equity team, which the VA said had already been in the works prior to a joint NBC News investigation into benefit denials earlier this year, aims to eliminate racial disparities that have plagued the VA’s benefit approval process for years.
There are roughly 3 million Black veterans living in the United States today, but it’s still unclear just how many of them may have been wrongfully denied VA benefits.
Earlier this year, NBC Bay Area profiled Ronnie Forbes, a Black veteran who served in Korea during the 1980s. After more than eight years of denials, the VA granted Forbes partial PTSD benefits in February in response to his latest appeal.
Barbara Ward, the former head of the VA’s Center for Minority Veterans, said she’s “cautiously optimistic” the new equity team can impact disparities, but questioned how its approach will differ from past efforts.
“What is going to be different this time?” Ward said. “There have been so many committees, there have been so many reports, there have been so many independent studies. These are not new issues. So what is going to be different?”
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