A whistleblower said the Department of Veterans Affairs has known of and tracked racial disparities in benefits decisions for years. Here's an update an ongoing discrimination lawsuit against the VA.
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Internal documents from the Department of Veterans Affairs show that Black veterans are much less likely to get approved for benefits for conditions like PTSD. This information comes from a lawsuit brought by a Black Vietnam veteran and a Yale law clinic. As NPR's Quil Lawrence reports, there's evidence the VA has been aware of this racial disparity for years.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Richard Brookshire is with the Black Veterans Project. He was a combat medic in Afghanistan. In recent years, a whistleblower contacted him and confirmed what he'd been hearing, and there were documents.
RICHARD BROOKSHIRE: An internal report that was drawn up in 2017 so that the VA began to look into racial disparities - that it looked at PTSD explicitly and found really stark racial disparities in PTSD denial rates faced by Black vets.
LAWRENCE: This is a huge part of what VA does - decides if a veteran has PTSD or other injuries related to military service and then pays them disability. The document showed that non-Hispanic Blacks who filed a claim for PTSD got rejected more than average by a solid 12 percentage points. In a recording shared with NPR, the whistleblower describes how this internal report was produced for senior VA officials in 2017. Then, Brookshire says, it...
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