Some troglodyte or other is deploring payments to war vets based upon exposure to a known carcinogen for disabilities not so well understood to result. Some say there is no direct, clinical evidence of a connection between the dousing of Agent Orange and diabetes, say.
They're right.
Epidemiology (as I read at the time in 1991 when the formula for rating disabilities was working out) is, essentially, statistics. Are Vietnam vets suffering from lung cancer at a rate higher than civilians of their same age group? Yes, slightly. So lung cancer is ascribed into the Agent Orange column, and vets collect for it, even were they lifetime smokers. There is no nexus between the ailment and the agent proven otherwise. It's all conjecture, based upon pure numbers.
Perhaps a general understanding of the era, and Agent Orange as an issue, is helpful. There were maybe three great veterans benefit firestorms in our history, and the other two (Full Funding and the Bonus March) happened before there was a Veterans Administration. In the seventies, the news business ignited the question of this chemical saturation of segments of jungle in Vietnam and its potential consequences before the VA was ready for it, and so it blew up in their faces.
There was a furor, and the VA was instructed by it, thusly: "You want us to spend more of your tax dollars quicker?" Okay, they said. So they ran with Agent Orange, and were way ahead of the curve when PTSD ballooned in the same decade.
A helpful side-effect for the VA was in the vast increase in the census for treatment at VAMCs and clients to be served through the Regional Offices, with consequent increase in personnel and budget. It was actually a windfall, as they were suffering, it was reported, loss in their largest pool of customers, WWII vets, at the rate of 1,500 per day.
The Repugnant party will push the review of such expenses, though they be trivial in contrast with other waste, because, while they are most anxious to send others into harm's way, Repugs are notorious for ducking such service when it's their own worthless keesters in question. The Chicken Hawks have no conception of what it means to be in combat. It is inexcusable for anyone who takes from public funds for preening in his patriotic plummage to claim that someone forced into the most grievous proof of true patriotism is over-compensated.