Final Report for the Veterans’ Disability Benefits Commission: Compensation, Survey Results, and Selected Topics

The Veterans’ Disability Benefits Commission (the Commission) asked The CNA Corporation (CNAC) to help assess the appropriateness of the benefits that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) provides to veterans and their survivors for disabilities and deaths attributable to military service.1 Specifically, the Commission is examining the standards for determining whether a disability or death of a veteran should be compensated and the appropriateness of benefit levels. The overall focus of this project is to provide analyses to the Commission regarding the appropriateness of the current benefits program for compensating for loss of average earnings and degradation of quality of life resulting from service-connected disabilities for veterans. We also evaluated the impact of VA compensation for the economic well-being of survivors and assessed the quality of life of both service-disabled veterans and survivors.