Proposed $3.4B plan would expand caregivers’ benefits
For 20 years, Yvonne Riley has cared for her husband, Dave, a medically retired Coast Guard rescue swimmer who became a quadruple amputee after a bacterial infection turned into sepsis two decades ago.
With three young children at home, Yvonne quit a good job to bathe him, get him in and out of his wheelchair, feed him, help him when he fell out of bed and eventually help him put on and remove his prosthetic limbs.
“To this day, she puts me together in the morning. She takes me apart at night,” Riley said from their family home in Semmes, Alabama. “It’s a fulltime job. But she’s never gotten paid or training.”
That’s because the Department of Veterans Affairs offers only stipends, training, paid breaks and other benefits to the caregivers of post-9/11 veterans through a program passed in 2010. But the Riley family and thousands of others say they are hopeful that soon will change.
A proposed $3.4 billion in federal funding over the next five years would extend caregivers’ benefits to family and friends performing full-time care for veterans of all eras.
This past Wednesday, the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee approved the expansion of the post-9/11 caregiver program as part of a new plan to revamp the VA’s health-care system, which also is pushing for better access for veterans who want to see doctors in the private sector.
If approved by the full Senate and signed into law by President Donald Trump, the new benefits would first provide help to caregivers of veterans injured before May 1975 and then expand to include those such as Riley who were affected from May 1975 to September 2001.
That means Riley’s wife would get updated training on how to help her husband, paid time off, and a stipend to make up for all of her years of lost income.
“We just bumbled through this whole thing, and having that knowledge base of all the caregivers out there would be great. And giving her time to take a real break away,” Dave Riley said, pausing.
His wife interjected: “Would be wonderful,” Yvonne Riley said. “I would go away for a few days. Spend some time visiting our adult kids or just regain energy with some girlfriends.”
Garry Augustine, executive director of the Disabled American Veterans headquarters in Washington, D.C., called expanding the benefits, “the right thing to do,” adding, “you can’t have certain benefits for some veterans and none for others.”
Joyce Wessel Raezer, executive director of the National Military Family Association, said that in the long run, this might be less expensive than paying for long-term nursing care.
But implementing it correctly in the already overwhelmed VA system would be complicated. It would mean hiring hundreds of people to review requests for benefits, and involve a massive undertaking to create a network of nurses and social workers who could offer breaks for caregivers.
But Riley, who formerly served as an elected national commander of the Disabled American Veterans, estimates that if he had to go into assisted care it might end up costing the government even more.
“We are gonna have a steady drumbeat for this,” said Riley, who will go with his wife to Washington this week to support the issue. “And I’m hopeful. We realize it’s a lot of money. But it’s also going to help a lot of veteran families.”