Which states allocate the highest percentage of their veteran budget to medical care and who is utilizing care provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs?
A recently released study by disability attorneys Hill & Ponton sought to find answers to those questions by looking at the VA’s Summery of Expenditures for 2019.
The study found that 48% of all VA spending last year was allocated to compensation and pension while 38% went to medical care.
Data was also broken down by state and then by county to see which states have the majority of their budgets allocated to veterans’ medical benefits and which states focus their spending elsewhere.
VA programs spent around $202 billion on the 19.1 million veterans in the United States last year, the study found.
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“At almost half of all VA spending, veteran compensation and pension spending was the biggest expenditure in 2019,” the study reads. This includes dependency and indemnity compensation (DIC) for service-related deaths, pensions for nonservice-related disabilities, burials, and other benefits to veterans and their survivors.”
The second-largest portion of VA program spending went to medical care, at just over 38% of all VA spending in 2019.
The state with the biggest percentage of its total veteran budget going to medical care was South Dakota at 54%. Wyoming, Connecticut, and Illinois also allocated over half of their VA budgets to medical care
Virginia allocated the smallest portion of its VA budget to medical care at 29%. However, Virginia was the state with the second-largest budget allocation to education and vocational rehabilitation at 12.6%.
Georgia, Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio, Texas, and South Carolina also allocated less than one-third of their veterans’ benefits budgets to health care, the study found.
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The study also broke VA medical care usage down by examining counties across the country with a veteran population of at least 10,000. The county with the highest percentage of veterans seeking medical care at a VA facility in 2019 was Douglas, Oregon.
“Douglas has around 12,473 veterans out of a population of almost 111,000, or about 11% of the population,” the study reads.
In Arlington, Virginia, veterans account for only 5% of the overall population, and only 11.6% of them sought medical care at a VA facility in 2019. The state also had 6 of the 10 lowest-utilization counties across the country in 2020.
The remaining lowest utilization counties are all in Maryland, which also had the lowest statewide percentage of vets who received care at a VA facility. Howard County, Maryland, with a population that is about 5% veteran had only about 14% of its vets receiving care in a VA facility.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.
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