Comments on Military Vet Bill
Introduction
The doctors group began its involvement with Military Pensions in the early
months of 2010. Our main intention then was to have the Colonel buy-in in the
establishment of multi-purpose centre to cater for military veterans. The purpose
of the centre included amongst others, to serve as a debriefing facility for nonstatutory forces, to serve as a skill development centre as well as to rehabilitate
those cadres that have unfortunately fallen victim of alcohol and drug abuse.
Since then we took greater interest as Medical Practitioners in assisting these
cadres to access pension funds from GEPF. To date we have assisted more than
2000 ex-combatants. We further had great influence in further streamlining the
application process to make it a bit user-friendly to cadres.
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It is out of this experience that we are here today to give our perspective on the
draft Military Veterans bill from Medical and Socio-economic aspect.
The Experience
It has not been a smooth sailing journey for us, and there were a number of
challenges and frustrations that we as doctors have and are experiencing:
1. The application process itself is complicated and lengthy
2. The form is very user-unfriendly, long, has language difficulty as many of
the cadres are illiterate, and is often ambiguous.
3. The process is simply un-affordable, as medical and transport costs are a
hindrance to the majority of unemployed veterans.
4. There are very few doctors trained to evaluate and interact with military
veterans
5. Most of the ex-combatants are illiterate
6. Turn-around time is phenomenally long
The Draft Bill
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Overall the bill is well written and covers almost all areas envisaged by the
Memorandum at the end of the bill
We appreciate that the Bill changes the criterion for military pension from a mere
physical disability to include other psycho-social elements. For this reason we
would like the Bill to clarify the status of those cadres who have already been
assessed by the GEPF and turned down, or scaled down to partial
compensation.
Therefore, we would like the Bill to call for re-assessment of all the previous
applications. Perhaps the first job of the Appeals Board must be to re-assess all
the applications processed thus far and moderate on the outcomes thereof.
The crux of the whole Bill revolves around the formation of the Advisory Board.
This is a new body altogether and has sweeping powers. We therefore have to
examine this body very closely:
1. Point 11 (1) states that the Advisory Board reports directly to the Minister.
We have a problem in the sense that there is no clear demarcation of
duties between this body and the DG. We foresee a lot of duplication at
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the least or even a lot of tension between this body and the DG. More
thoughts need to be applied to this potential source of conflict. Moreover, if
the board is composed exclusively of “military personnel/veterans” as
envisaged by the Bill, foreseeable conflicts can be worse than imagined
and could be difficult to manage.
2. The second comment on the Advisory Board relates to composition of the
board. We think it is unacceptable that the board members could only be
military veterans. This is tantamount to saying that one can only be
minister of health only if he/she has a medical background. The corollary
of that argument is that Minister of Finance aught to be an
accountant/economist. Furthermore, looking at the scope of duty of the
envisaged board, more than ninety percent of expertise has to come from
people with Medical and Social background. We need to guard against a
board that will make emotional rather than pragmatic and rational
decisions.
This board is a very powerful and highly influential body, writing reports
that are to be presented to parliament. It therefore has to have solid
administrative and accounting capacity, be able to research and analyze
complicated and sophisticated data pertaining to all spheres of life,
particularly demographics and the like. It has to recommend to the
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minister a fair and well researched “means test”, assess and interpret a
person’s disability and recommend the most appropriate intervention
measure. Furthermore, considering the fact that most ex-combatants are
unemployed and some even resort to drugs and alcohol abuse, the board
must have competency to recommend the most suitable and sustainable
measures to remedy the situation. It is for these reasons and many others
that we strongly recommend that the board has to be multidisciplinary in
the sense of composing of other prospective individuals who would be
competent even if they are not military veterans
3. Our next point is on the Appeal Board. Again this body has very sweeping
powers and its constitution is very crucial. While we endorse the formation
of such body, we suggest that there should be a parallel Medical Appeal
Board solely dealing with medical related issues. This is because most of
military veteran’s matters are of medical, rather than legal nature. We
suggest that such body should at least be constituted by competent
medical practitioners, a psychiatrist and a physiotherapist. In its operations
the Medical Appeal Board will interact with specific specialists (as expert
authorities) to resolve pertinent disputes as they emerge from time to time.
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The other point that we needed the Bill to cover is to promulgate on the
competencies of medical personnel involved in doing medical and
psychological assessment of the cadres when they first apply , i.e. the very
first point of entry of the military pension applicant. Perhaps the Advisory
Council will make recommendation here and also on providing accessibility of
cadres to these points of entry.
Duties of Medical Appeal Board
1. Section 5 1 (a) and (b)
2. Section 5 1 (i)
3. Draw up criterion for medical qualification for military grant
4. Work in collaboration with relevant stakeholders to design, implement
and roll out standardized program for evaluation of military veterans
5. Safeguard and ensure collation of a comprehensive database
pertaining to medical records of military veterans
6. Examine and reevaluation of all issues/problems relating to medical
complains and appeals thereof
7. Attend to all issues pertaining to all socio-economic issues in relations
to widows/widowers, spouses, children and all dependents of military
veteran
Terminology
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Flipping out a page from our experience with GEPF so far, we wish to state
that some of the applicants were unfortunately turned down solely based on
the interpretation of a mental problem. We therefore suggest that the phrases
physical and mental disability be changed to physical and psychiatric
impairment. Reference to any psychiatric disease or illness should rather be
psychiatric impairment. This is because war veterans suffer mostly from
psychiatric impairment requiring intervention. The approach for disability is
pension.
Adjudication of Impairment as partial
We argue that the percentage of disablement and specific injury or
disability/impairment should only be veteran specific. We further suggest that
substance abuse and psychiatric impairment should be added in this process.
Management of Military Veterans
We strongly argue that GEPF lacks both capacity and the competence to
manage military pensions. We therefore suggest that military pensions be
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completely removed from the jurisdiction of GEPF and be place under
management of a newly constituted body formed by the Advisory Board . We
advise that this move will help modernize and the whole system and help to
significantly reduce the turn-around time.
Salutation
In conclusion, we wish to reiterate that the Bill must recognize that military
veterans are not disabled, and therefore are not looking for handouts from the
State or the Community. They dedicated their lives to the struggle for the
better life of all South Africans. The state must respect, protect, promote and
fulfill their rights as enshrined in bill of rights of the constitution of the country.
Their dignity has to be respected, and they too have aright to healthcare,
food, water and social security as enshrined in bill of rights of the constitution.
They have aright to access to adequate housing.
We need to find a way that enables military veterans to continue to contribute
in a positive and sustainable way to the development of South Africa.
Thank you
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Dr Alicia K Khwitshana
Dr Angelique Coetzee
Dr Thabo Rangaka
Dr David Phofa
Dr Herman Rossouw
Dr Thabo Makgabo
Dr Marmol Stoltz
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