All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
This is Veterans Radio.
Welcome to Veterans Radio.
I am Jim Fausone.
I'm the officer of the deck today.
We've got some great programs for you.
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you didn't know before by going to VeteransRadio.org.
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Legal Help for Veterans fights for veterans disability rights all across the nation.
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We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today Yolana Darte.
She is a law professor.
Don't let that scare you now.
We're going to talk about veteran issues.
She's an assistant professor of law and director of the Veterans Legal Clinic at the University
of Illinois in Chicago.
Yolana, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Hi, Jim.
Thanks so much for having me today.
Well, professor, you wrote an opinion piece that caught my attention.
It was published in The Hill.
It's titled Veteran Basic Income Could Be the Solution the VA has been searching for.
And any of us in the veteran space know VA continues to search for solutions.
But before we get there, tell us a little bit about your educational background and
how you got yourself focused on veteran issues.
Yeah, so coming into law school, I had the opportunity to work in a Veterans Legal Clinic.
And one of the things that I want to mention is that I was a student in this clinic.
I was really interested in helping veterans because my dad was a Vietnam veteran, was
drafted in 1970.
And seeing what veterans go through day to day, I was interested in helping and seeing
what I could do.
And that inspired me to continue on this path to helping veterans.
I saw the roadblocks that VA puts in front of them.
All of the hoops that the federal government requires of veterans.
And I kept down this path.
I became an attorney helping veterans do this work.
And then I had the opportunity to start the Veterans Legal Clinic at Syracuse University
in 2015.
And so I was there for a few years working with veterans, starting that clinic.
I did some VA benefits work and discharge upgrades with veterans and teaching law students
how to do this work.
And then I came back to Chicago.
Marshall turned into University of Illinois, Chicago.
And we are continuing to do this work, helping veterans and thinking about the bigger issues,
the policy issues behind it as well.
Well that's very interesting.
There's always a story like why somebody started down this path.
And it's obviously dad here.
So that's good to know from our end of it.
And your time at Syracuse University, which has a great reputation in the veteran space,
was about four and a half years, 2015 to 2019.
And every law school legal clinic's a little bit different.
So tell us what the focus is for the University of Illinois at Chicago's School of Law Legal
Clinic.
Yeah, it's changed over the years.
But at present, we are looking to help veterans get access to VA healthcare.
Many of our clients have lower than honorable discharges.
Some of that stems from mental health diagnoses that they didn't have at the time.
And they ended up committing some misconduct.
Sometimes it's marijuana use.
Sometimes they went AWOL after a really traumatic event.
And helping them upgrade that discharge, try to get them access to VA healthcare, and potentially
VA benefits.
So that's been our main focus.
But really we take it, we look at who comes in our doors, see what veterans need, and
see if we can assist them.
We are looking to see what our community needs.
And we don't really try to dictate where we end up.
We try to see what our clients are asking for and how we might be able to use our lawyer
skills and teaching law students how to be lawyers.
Well the Discharge Upgrade 1 in particular, there are very few places that help out on
that.
And it is sort of a specialized niche.
So I'm glad to hear you do that.
Talk to us about who can walk in the door and seek assistance at the University of Illinois
in Chicago.
So geographically we are limited to the state of Illinois.
So we have clients from all around the state, from Chicago all the way downstate close to
St. Louis.
We will work with anyone in the state.
We don't have any income thresholds.
And so one of the benefits is those veterans who kind of fall in between legal aid and
being able to afford an attorney, we can help that population who needs the assistance.
And like you said, Discharge Upgrade, it's really hard to find an attorney to do that
work because there is no availability for a fee.
So the attorney will only get paid if the veteran can afford it.
Yes, it's really a tough road to go to get that change on the upgrade.
And without that you lack opportunity for a lot of other benefits.
You've been doing this for over a dozen years now working in the veteran space and it's
given you an opportunity to see a lot of different issues.
Your opinion piece in the Hill begins talking about, hey, VA was supposed to solve all of
its problems through the Appeals Modernization Act, sometimes referred to AMA and the trade,
but maybe it didn't work out.
So what frustrations did you see that said, I got to think about a policy approach that's
different?
The wait times.
And I think we hear about this all the time, how long veterans are waiting just for a decision.
Many times our clients come to us hoping to have this resolved quickly, hoping that the
VA will finally recognize a disability, recognize that it's related to service.
And the kind of crushing feeling that you have to tell a client, this might take five
years, this might take even longer based on what we have.
That's really been probably the hardest conversation and I've had it so many times, it's still
a hard conversation to have with a client to say, this is the next step and this is
the timeframe that we're looking at.
That really pushed me to write this piece with these timelines are a bit unforgivable.
The federal government's here to serve our veteran population and they're not doing it.
You point out that if your appeal is going up to the Board of Veterans Appeals, it's
41 months right there.
And that's not the longest piece of this whole process, it's just a definable piece.
The whole process is, as you say, kind of not too surprising, the hard ones take five
years or so.
That's absolutely frustrating.
But you also mentioned, and I think this is important, it's the setup for why maybe veterans'
basic income is appropriate.
The, I'll call it a disconnect between medical science and what veterans really experience
and this need for a medical nexus that seems to take on a life of its own.
So explain that a little bit.
Yeah, so part of the process, as probably many of your listeners know about, are the
compensation and pension exams or we call them C&P examinations.
Those examinations may take 15 minutes, may take a couple hours, depending on how thorough
the examination is.
And sometimes the examiner just does not understand what's in the record, you know, what happened
in the service, they don't think about the relationship between what happened in the
service and the current disability.
And they get caught up in the cycle of incomplete and adequate examinations coming from VA,
and then the VA adjudicators were lying so heavily on these medical opinions because
they were coming from a medical professional.
And it's really hard to get out of this cycle of reliance on the examination until you
have somebody who's really trained to identify that these are not done well.
So one of the issues is the issues of the actual exam itself.
But the other one is these studies, like the toxic exposure studies, take a really long
time to define that relationship between an exposure to some toxin, for example, camp
lejeune, and disabilities that arise, typically cancers and how likely they are to relate.
Cancers don't show up right away, it might take a few decades for the VA to recognize
this as a cause of the cancer.
But by that point, many, many veterans have had this cancer already who don't have the
benefit of that, we call presumption, that there's a legal relationship between that
exposure and the diagnosis.
Yeah, and it's interesting, you referenced this a little bit and I want to highlight
it, which is on those long studies that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention,
CDC has to do to sort of make this leap, is there really a medical connection, maybe even
a presumption for things like Agent Orange or burn pits.
Some of these studies are not really focused on subgroup of veterans, and by that I mean
women, veterans of color.
So you're kind of, science and reality are just a little out of phase in some of this
work, isn't it?
Absolutely, I think that's a big concern when they're lumping everyone into a general
population view, rather than like you said, a subcategory to see, do our women veterans
who were exposed to this have higher levels of certain cancers compared to the civilian
counterparts?
And all of this kind of mixed in to make the whole thing take longer and make people frustrated.
And that led you to think about whether veteran basic income would be a solution to this.
Tell us what basic income is about and how you thought, well, this is a policy to consider.
Yeah, so, you know, for many years, folks have been talking about a basic income in
a general sense, should we give our citizens, our people in this country, a basic income,
a monthly income that would have no strings attached to it.
And I started thinking about in the veteran space, should we start thinking about a basic
income, something where it would be similar to compensation, a monthly check to every
veteran who gets out of the service.
So we don't have to keep dealing with this bureaucratic system.
I think many of us will tell you, especially lawyers in this space and veteran service
organizations, that the system is broken.
It works for many, but there are many who are left out of this system.
And requiring veterans to have to prove that they're cancers related to toxins that they
were exposed to in the military, to prove that they had a traumatic event that they
had to live through, and now have to tell that story.
Lots of my clients will stop pursuing a case because they don't want to have to tell their
story again and again.
And feel like, to be honest, the government just doesn't believe them.
And I think it's on us to start thinking about how do we stop this harm of the VA benefits
process and think about healing veterans, making sure they have the treatment that really
we promise when they enter and they sign that contract.
And some people might reflect back that this whole discussion of what was being called
universal basic income was part of the presidential campaign.
Andrew Yang was the advocate of that.
But it's used in different countries for a lot of different reasons.
And it's nothing.
And I think there are some cities in the United States who've played with this concept, haven't
they?
Yeah.
The University of Chicago had a pilot program where they gave folks, I think it was $500
a month in basic income to see, did that change the trajectory of their life, having housing,
having steady income coming in?
Does that make a difference in outcomes?
Thinking about health outcomes, thinking about the holistic person outcomes.
That's really in early stages I know here in Chicago and in other cities and states.
We're still in those early stages to see what those outcomes will look like.
So I think those data points are still out.
Yeah.
It may not be firmed up yet, but I think as you suggest in your article, it probably will
reduce homelessness.
It probably has a positive impact on mental health.
It probably reduces suicide rates.
You can see the connection between some basic income for veterans and some of these other
problems, can't you?
I can.
And I think lots of our clients would benefit from having this like, there's a term for
this like safety net is what I was looking for.
A safety net for veterans where when they come out of service, they are able to move
on to the next thing.
If that's work, if that is schooling, to have something there to catch them for a bit,
to make sure that they move forward and then continuing on.
I think homelessness is the biggest concern that we have, especially in a lot of our client
population, making sure that they have secure housing.
Well we're talking to Professor Yelana Dorte from the University of Illinois and Chicago
School of Law who wrote an op-ed piece and talked about veterans basic income.
And it made me think of things like you just mentioned transitions.
We've been talking to veterans for so long.
I hear so much from them about how the first anywhere certainly from one or two to up to
six years of transition out of the military is really tough in part because they don't
have the structure in part because they don't have the network in part because they don't
have that constant income they were so used to.
I mean there are a lot of ways to think about basic income might be helpful in that transition
period.
And certainly for those you mentioned low income.
For those veterans who are low income who need to avoid things like homelessness because
you're not going to get a job if you don't have an address.
There's a lot of ways to think about this.
What kind of response have you gotten from folks as you've put this idea out and is anybody
developing it further?
Yeah I've had lots of different responses.
I've had responses where some veterans have reached out thanking me for putting this out
there.
You know that this has been a really hard struggle for them to get VA benefits and they
felt like they were seen and heard through this piece.
And so those meant a lot to me is to think veterans really have a positive response to
it.
I've had others who were very dismissive who think you know this may never happen.
I think with Congress the way it is with our population I don't know how far this will
go.
There may be some perspective in that way.
I think that's a very valid response on practicality.
Well yeah but if you think every issue is not going anywhere there's no sense putting
any forward and part of putting something forward is it does highlight the underlying
problem and looks for solution.
There might be a different solution but this might be one for some group of veterans as
well and it may not solve it for everybody right?
Absolutely.
Yeah and I think we can think about this as a big idea right but we can think about this
as a smaller piece to this.
Just the transition time.
Could there be a basic income for a period of time when someone gets out right to have
a softer landing.
And so thinking about this as not like just one big idea but maybe smaller pieces can
start the conversation for Congress members who are thinking about what can we do so veterans
have an easier transition.
And you also promoted this and this is interesting because you tied it to a current problem.
How does this impact recruiting?
Absolutely.
I think recruiting right now is at its all time low or pretty close to an all time low.
The Navy has reduced its standards recently no longer requiring a high school diploma
which has been a requirement for some time now.
So we're seeing that the military is responding to these changes right and folks wanting to
enlist.
If veterans knew or I guess there would be civilians at that point knew that there could
be a basic income the GI bill this may allow more people to want to serve our country.
And I think it's really important for us to think about this as we're going through a
really scary time right now politically internationally.
Oh yeah national security.
Heck yes.
Yeah I think we need to think about how do we incentivize this more for folks to want
to enlist who want to serve our country.
Yeah I think you're right if you think about it in terms of a recruiting benefit just as
the GI bill is not every kid's going to say well I'm going to go to college when I get
done here but every kid would know hey I'm going to get X when I come out as well for
this period of time and let me transition back.
Interesting ideas from a recruiting standpoint.
So one of the things I did when I was doing a little research to talk to you professor
was you know get on the search engine and look this issue up and it was interesting
I found a Reddit thread from about a year ago where they posed this question and they
used a thousand dollars a month as the hey should we have a veterans basic income of
a thousand dollars a month and it's a small sample size but 59% of the people said yes
it's only 272 people who responded to the thread but it was interesting that there was
a very positive reaction you can't get 60% of any group in America agree on anything
I don't think maybe this has got more legs to it than you might think.
Yeah it's always surprising to see the positive response to it because I really did think
this is going to have a more negative response you know people talk about it like a handout
but I also think we need to shift the framing of it as a compensation for their service.
Well it's a benefit and just like folks may say the disability benefit or the healthcare
benefit is a handout it's something you earned and you know there's a lot of ways you could
think about this that the amount of your basic income or the length of time you get the basic
income is somehow related to how long you serve right if it's only two years it's this
much but if it's four years it's this much it just there's a lot of ways to think about
it if there's discussion on the larger policy issue.
Absolutely and I think that's the great thing about an OPAD is this idea pushed forward
and then we can reimagine it in different ways.
Well let's come back to the issue of the law clinic at University of Illinois Chicago.
Tell us a little bit more about the number of folks you have in the Veterans Legal Clinic
and the number of clients that you're able to serve.
Yeah so there are two attorneys myself and another attorney in our office.
We usually have somewhere between 12 and 16 law students who are working for us each semester
so each semester is about 13 weeks and they work on three or four cases each working individually
with the clients trying to help them tell their stories.
In the clinic right now we have about 300 veterans we're working with.
Some of those veterans we have submitted briefs and now we're just waiting for the very long
board wait and some of them we are waiting on for records and so there's a lot of wait
times as many of the folks probably listening know about the wait times in VA but also even
just to get records can be some wait times and so in the clinic the veterans we work
with have the opportunity to work individually with law students who are learning how to
interview clients, counsel clients but they work so closely with the veterans they get
probably the best legal service that anyone can provide because they have so much time
with each individual veteran.
Oh absolutely and it's important and satisfying work important as your dad knows and satisfying
as you know from doing it for over a dozen years.
We want to- Absolutely it's probably the best work I've ever done.
We're really appreciative of the time that you've spent with us Professor Yolanda Darte
from the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law from its veterans legal clinic to talk
about your iPad and the whole concept of veteran basic income just maybe solve some of the
VA problems that veterans face.
It is a big idea and worth pushing forward and having discussions on and we're glad that
you did it.
Thanks so much for your time I really appreciate the invite.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today I am Jim Fawson.
It's been a pleasure to be your host I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help
for Veterans and you can reach us at 800-6934800 or legalhelpforveterans.com on the web.
You can follow Veterans Radio on Facebook and listen to its podcasts and internet radio
shows by visiting us at veteransradio.org that's veteransradio.org.
And until next time you are dismissed.
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And until next time you are dismissed.