Helping vets get their well-earned benefits.(health care)

Washington state's main social and health service agency is moving on two fronts to help veterans get the benefits they are due for their military service.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

* Over the past 6 years, a Department of Social and Health Services program aimed at connecting the state's veterans with federal benefits has become a model for other states in helping veterans obtain the benefits.

* Meanwhile, a 1-year-old DSHS program is helping train mental health workers, police, drug treatment counselors, tribal representatives and other community service personnel to better serve the new returning veterans after service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Both projects are partnered with other government agencies and community groups, including the state's Department of Veterans Affairs.

David Reed, mental health administrator in the Health and Recovery Services Administration wing of DSHS, says the more recent effort is called "the Veteran's Collaboration Group." It was developed in response to the challenges local communities face as soldiers dealing with war trauma return from the battlefield after prolonged and repeated deployments.

The Collaboration Group is sponsoring a series of trainings this summer in the state with the help of its partner agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the DSHS division that coordinates substance abuse treatment, the Washington Association of Designated Mental Health Professionals and the federal Veterans Administration.

The workshop focuses on the basics--what works and what doesn't--and instructors encourage participants to look ahead at the kind of crisis situations in which they may face a returning solider losing control or posing a threat.

The curriculum includes veteran and military cultures, war trauma, traumatic brain injury, war-related post traumatic stress disorder and combat-related mental illness and stigma.

The six-year-old veterans project at DSHS was created after Bill Allman., a Vietnam veteran himself, realized that a significant number of Washington state veterans were being absorbed by the Medicaid program for health and long-term care even though richer federal benefits were often available to those families.

Allman established a partnership with the Washington State Department of Veteran Affairs and put together a pilot program in Clark County, home to the city of Vancouver, and showed that about 42 percent of vets enrolled in Medicaid over the age of 50 were potentially eligible for the federal benefits. Up to 27 percent--a little more than half--actually were able to qualify for the switch.

Now statewide, the project operates inside DSHS' nationally recognized Payment Review Program, which is also part of the Health and Recovery Services Administration.

In addition, a significant advantage to the federal benefits is that Medicaid is obligated under law to seek reimbursement for the state after a client's death, and the state claims its repayment by attaching liens to property or other assets in order to defray the cost of care.

But unlike Medicaid, the federal veteran programs are a benefit the veteran has already earned by his military service. Thus, the assets and property remain with the family.

The project has caught the attention of a number of other states, in part because the primary tool used to ferret out the veterans on Medicaid rolls is a state-federal databank called the Public Assistance Reporting Information System or PARIS.

Operated by the Administration for Children and Families, within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, PARIS was intended as a tool to improve program integrity in the administration of public and medical assistance programs. In fact, Washington state also uses PARIS to match up clients who may be double-enrolled in different states as well as tracking down veterans by running the DOD data against state military related third-party health care enrollments.

PARIS includes data from the Veterans Administration, the Department of Defense and participating states--although a new federal mandate will bring all states into the effort by the end of the year.

The new interest in PARIS as well as publicity about the program has meant extra work for Allman, who said he has been contacted this year by more than a dozen other states asking about the project and how Washington state put it together.

DSHS and the state Department of Veterans Affairs were also among nine states represented in a "Veterans Policy Academy" that started last year. The group was selected by the federal government last summer to help study how assistance programs could respond more quickly and effectively to some of the drug and trauma problems that young veterans often face when they come back from the combat zone.

"With today's veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, we will need programs that will help keep these veterans in better touch with the health care they deserve," Allman said. "Veterans Day is only one day of the year, but this program operates year-round."

Jim Stevenson is communications director for the Health and Recovery Services Administration in the Washington Department of Social and Health Services.

Print Get the Mag Weekly Updates