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House OKs vets’ suicide prevention bill

The House of Representatives passed three veterans’ bills Wednesday, including a suicide prevention measure aimed at getting faster and better mental health counseling for returning combat veterans.

A second bill expands disability compensation for veterans with vision impairment in both eyes that is not entirely connected to military service. The third bill sets the stage for a cost-of-living adjustment in veterans’ disability and survivors benefits in December, although the amount of the increase will not be known until fall.

The Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act, HR 327, would require the VA to create a comprehensive mental health program that includes annual screenings of veterans who suffer from depression or alcohol abuse or have other risk factors, and also would require a suicide prevention counselor for every veterans’ medical facility.

Rep. Phil Hare, D-Ill., one of the bill’s cosponsors, said action is needed because “the mental health needs of our returning troops have been ignored for far too long.”

“Not all wounds are visible,” said Hare. “As a former Army reservist, I understand that sometimes our veterans are too proud to seek out the treatment and counseling they need.”

In addition to more screening at veterans’ hospitals, the bill would establish a 24-hour counseling hot line for veterans in rural and remote areas.

The bill is named for a 22-year-old Iraq war veteran from Grundy Center, Iowa, who died Dec. 22, 2005, slightly more than a year after he returned from an 11-month deployment with a military police unit to the war zone. Omvig was widely considered to have post-traumatic stress syndrome.

A key provision of the benefits bill, HR 797, is aimed at unusual situations in which service members are losing or have lost sight in both eyes, but the vision loss is not entirely connected to military service.

Under current law, a veteran with service-connected blindness in one eye can get additional compensation for being blind in the remaining eye even if it is not for service-connected reasons — but this only applies to blindness, not vision impairment.

Under a precedent in use for hearing loss and organ loss, the bill would allow vision impairment to be covered by disability benefits even when there is no direct relation to military service. About 13,000 veterans have service-connected disabilities for the loss of one eye, and about 5 percent have vision impairment in the remaining eye that is not service-connected, according to the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee staff.

The third bill, HR 1284, provides for a Dec. 1 increase in disability compensation and dependency and indemnity compensation that matches whatever increase is provided to Social Security recipients and military and federal civilian retirees. The amount of the increase is linked to the Consumer Price Index, which has been rising at a rate of about 2.2 percent so far this year.

However, the cost-of-living increase will not be set until October because it is based on a comparison of the cost of goods and services in the last quarter of this fiscal year, July through September, to the same period last fiscal year.