Taking Advantage Of VA Benefits For Children With Disabilities

The Veterans Administration offers several benefit programs for the families of former members of the uniformed service. These lesser known benefits could help your veterans’ children with disabilities.

As the Veterans Administration explains on its website, it offers several kinds of benefits for veterans’ children.

Dependency and indemnity compensation (DIC). This benefit provides a tax-free monthly payment to children with disabilities. It applies to children who survive a service member who died in the line of duty and children of a veteran who died from a service-related injury or illness.

• A survivor’s pension. The pension applies if the veteran died while in the service or if a retired veteran elected the Survivor Benefit Program.



• Health care cost-sharing for surviving children with disabilities. These benefits may come from several different sources.

Special Circumstances

The VA also offers a special benefit for children with spina bifida or certain other birth defects linked to a parent’s service in South Vietnam or the Republic of Korea.

Why Benefits Are Overlooked

It is believed that a few factors contribute to veterans not knowing the VA may provide special needs benefits. VA education and health care benefits for former service members receive a lot more attention in the military community.

Those benefits apply to a much wider segment of people in the service, while only a fraction of veterans have children with disabilities.

Misperceptions among some veterans also lead to wrong conclusions about eligibility for benefits for children. For instance, some who have retired from the military and gone on to lucrative new careers may assume that their income level is too high to qualify. That’s what they’ve experienced when seeking medical benefits for themselves from the VA. But income isn’t a factor in qualifying for disability benefits for children.

Another reason the VA benefits aren’t considered often enough by veterans is that rules for disability benefits and Medicaid benefits don’t line up neatly.

Plans made following only one of these sets of benefits can close off opportunities, because certain disability policies and medical policies directly contradict each other.

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