{"id":75238,"date":"2026-06-16T08:05:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T08:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/75238\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T08:05:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T08:05:12","slug":"the-va-and-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/75238\/","title":{"rendered":"The VA and Artificial Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"


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President Lincoln\u2019s promise\u2014\u201cto care for him who shall have borne the battle\u201d\u2014is the foundational ethos of the Department of Veterans Affairs. It is a promise that frontline, ground-level staff try their hardest to keep every single day. However, as policies move up the chain of command, the bureaucratic drive for administrative efficiency can sometimes overshadow the human element of veteran care.<\/p>\n

I say that with standing. I served in the Marine Corps after September 11. After the military, I spent seventeen years as a Supplemental Security Income (SSI) claims representative for the Social Security Administration. I dealt daily with our nation\u2019s disabled, measuring brokenness and navigating federal bureaucracy for a living. I know exactly how complex the government claims process can be.<\/p>\n

This complexity was recently shown when the VA proposed an amendment<\/a> to 38 CFR 4.10, which would have required examiners to rate the semi-corrective effects of medication\u2014in effect, rating the band-aid rather than the disease. It took over 20,000<\/a> public comments to highlight how this would hurt veterans. To the VA\u2019s credit, they listened to the backlash and rescinded the rule on February 27. But this situation highlights a recurring issue: The push to streamline the system often leads to policies that miss the reality of a veteran\u2019s lived experience.<\/p>\n

Now, we are seeing this play out again\u2014this time, with Artificial Intelligence.<\/p>\n

The VA is currently deploying AI to screen Disability Benefits Questionnaires (DBQs)<\/a> and flag veteran claims. The stated goal is to target predatory claims sharks and prevent fraud, which is an objective we all share. But in their rush to modernize, the VA is deploying a tool that inadvertently treats veterans with the suspicion of criminal behavior.<\/p>\n

As a third-year student currently studying AI and computer programming, I see the glaring limitations of these systems daily. Without constant, rigorous human monitoring, these technologies are highly prone to \u201challucinations<\/a>,\u201d data bias, and pattern-matching errors that produce confidently wrong results. These models do not see a veteran who bled for this country; they see a dataset. They scan for the bureaucratic signals they were programmed to recognize, and when they don\u2019t find them, they flag the claim. The veteran pays the price for an algorithm\u2019s mistake.<\/p>\n

Consider just one of the tool\u2019s own design criteria: It will flag any DBQ where the examining doctor\u2019s address is more than 100 miles from the veteran\u2019s home. Yet, veterans in rural areas routinely travel far beyond that for specialized care. I know veterans whom the VA itself has sent from an urban area to a rural clinic in an adjoining state just to get an exam. Under this algorithm, doing the right thing and finding a qualified provider becomes an automated red flag.<\/p>\n

The VA\u2019s concern regarding predatory representatives is valid. But these \u201cDBQ mills<\/a>\u201d only thrive because the VA bureaucracy remains a labyrinth designed to exhaust the applicant. Veterans wouldn\u2019t feel forced to turn to paid services if the system actually worked for them. Deploying AI to police the symptom while leaving the root disease\u2014the complexity of the claims process\u2014untreated is not a solution. It simply puts a black-box barrier between veterans and their care.<\/p>\n

This is why legislation like the\u00a0FRAUD in VA Disability Exams Act\u00a0<\/a>is so critical. It ensures that a veteran\u2019s benefits cannot be reduced on fraud grounds without an actual criminal conviction. While VA officials have argued<\/a> that waiting for a conviction takes too long, we cannot sacrifice a veteran\u2019s due process for the sake of administrative speed. An algorithm\u2019s flag should never be enough to pull a benefit.<\/p>\n

AI cannot be the end-all, be-all for veteran care. If the VA truly wants to protect veterans from bad actors, the solution is to simplify the agonizingly complex rating process\u2014not rely on technology that lacks human nuance.<\/p>\n

If an automated system flags an anomaly, human eyes and medical expertise must verify it before any claim is affected. Congress must mandate transparency, independent auditing, and clear appeals pathways for these AI tools. Lincoln\u2019s promise was to the veteran, not the dataset. We must ensure human verification remains at the heart of every claim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Lincoln\u2019s promise\u2014\u201cto care for him who shall have borne the battle\u201d\u2014is the foundational ethos of the Department…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75239,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,111,41359,33657,41360,21567,274],"class_list":["post-75238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-department-of-veterans-affairsva","tag-medical-care","tag-veteran-resources","tag-veterans","tag-veterans-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}