Surviving Spouse Corner
By Pat Green
It’s still summer! Hope you are having a great one with a vacation, time spent rebuilding your garden after our freezing winter, or extra time with kids, grandkids, and family.
MOAA uses the summer for a follow-up Legislative push.
If you haven’t ever gone to the MOAA Legislative Center, let me guide you:
- Go to https://www.moaa.org Under the MOAA logo,
- Click on Advocacy, then click on Legislative Action Center.
- Start scrolling to the box labeled Families and Survivors, then click. You will find this explanation.
There are a number of issues there. A MOAA Legislative advocate told me that they need support on the 2nd issue, Parity for Surviving Spouses: Increase DIC to match other federal survivor benefits.
Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC)—a benefit for survivors of those who die in service or from service-connected conditions—lags behind other federal survivor benefits. DIC provides only 43% of what a 100% service-disabled veteran receives. Civilian federal survivor programs provide up to 55% of the employee’s calculated retirement pay.
This inequity leaves military survivors with less support than their civilian counterparts, despite the sacrifices their loved ones made in service to our country.
The bill also cuts in half, from 10 years to five, the amount of time a veteran must be rated 100% disabled before passing away from a non-service connected condition in order for the surviving spouse to collect DIC.
Contact your lawmaker today and ask them to champion this bill and push for its passage. Or, you can use the module that MOAA provides. When you press write, you will be asked to fill in some information so that MOAA can write and address a letter to your reps, expressing your support for that bill. Submit your information and then press write. An email will be sent to your representatives supporting this bill.
There are other bills in the Families and Survivors section. Please look through those. There may be others that you would like to support. Do your part and ask your Representatives to support your choices.
