The VA’s recent move easing the path for some Gulf War and Post-9/11 veterans battling certain types of cancers to receive service-earned health benefits continues an encouraging trend … and shows the importance of the work underway at MOAA and other advocacy groups to speed up this arduous and complicated process.

The department will assume a service connection for veterans facing leukemia, bladder cancer, and other cancers who served in Somalia or Southwest Asia during the Persian Gulf War (on or after Aug. 2, 1990), along with those who served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and seven other nations – including at Karshi-Khanabad (K2) Air Base, Uzbekistan – during that war or after Sept. 11, 2001. These veterans will not need to prove their illness was related to service to receive benefits, and they are immediately eligible for free VA health care connected to these illnesses.

[FULL DETAILS: New VA Presumptives, January 2025]

The move comes after a similar expansion of the presumptive list in June 2024 to include male breast cancer and other illnesses. It comes a little more than two years after the signing of the Sergeant First Class (SFC) Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act of 2022, a MOAA-backed law expanding VA care to millions of veterans.

Veterans suffering from these service-connected illnesses have faced decades of delays – Post-9/11 K2 veterans have waited nearly a quarter-century, for example, and Gulf War veterans have waited even longer. Unfortunately, according to research from MOAA and Disabled American Veterans (DAV), these delays are par for the course: The average time from exposure to determination of a presumptive service connection for the first veterans exposed to a toxin is more than 34 years.

This finding highlights the need for the recommendations outlined in Ending the Wait for Toxic-Exposed Veterans, a joint MOAA-DAV report which looked at more than a century of treatment for toxin-related illnesses, from World War I gas attacks to the post-World War II “atomic veterans” to Agent Orange to burn pits. While the PACT Act and recent VA presumptive declarations address some illnesses facing some veteran cohorts, there is more work to be done to improve the process not just for veterans, but for those in uniform and future servicemembers.

Among the report’s key recommendations:

• A new legal framework linking the important steps in the presumptive process: acknowledgement of a potential exposure, concession of that exposure, and the presumption of service connection to related illnesses.
  
  
• Improved research and oversight into the science behind toxic exposures, to include a permanent contract with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) and enhanced reporting requirements.
  
  
• A streamlined care system for veterans and survivors, to include better VA-DoD record-sharing and the removal of toxic-exposure costs from the congressional pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) process.
  
  
• A new model for classifying exposures and presumptives, one that would clarify the system and allow for a more focused approach to research and data-gathering.

All of the above recommendations would come with applicable deadlines for action by the VA, ensuring the process moves forward and continuing to give the benefit of the doubt to the veteran as presumptives are established. Rather than wait more than three decades while battling a range of progressive ailments, veterans should have a clear path to receiving the care they’ve earned through service and sacrifice.

[RELATED: Veterans Share Stories of Toxic Exposure]

The 119th Congress offers a new opportunity to address these recommendations. MOAA looks forward to working with lawmakers to improve this process for generations of veterans.

As we shape this important legislation, please consider registering with our Legislative Action Center: Doing so will allow you to receive the latest updates on member outreach campaigns and let you customize prewritten messages to your lawmakers on behalf of MOAA’s legislative priorities.