If you have served in the military,
either on active duty or in the reserves or National Guard that were
called into active duty, you should check with your Veterans Affairs
office to determine if you are eligible for medical benefits. You do
have to be honorably discharged and there are some active duty
lengths of service to be met.
One of our group, Allen worked with me
in pulling information together for this blog. We were able to find
the websites for every state, but a couple was difficult to find.
Most of the time by typing in the state followed by "department
of veterans affairs" in a search engine, we were successful –
example: iowa department of veterans affairs. For a couple of
states we needed to use this site, which does list every state and
territory. Find your state and by clicking on your state, or
territory, it will take you to the website.
Each state seems to handle their
website differently and to find a local Veterans Affairs office
requires some work. We feel fortunate that our state – Iowa –
makes it fairly easy to find the office of the county in which you
reside. The county map can be found here.
The remainder of this blog is for
veterans living in Iowa. There is not enough space in a blog to do
all states or the interest for two Iowa natives. We have learned
about the Veterans Affairs offices in Iowa and are comfortable with
locating information for each of the 99 counties. The information
for each county is different as you click on different counties and
there is no consistency from one county to the next. Some also
maintain county Facebook pages with minimal information on the county
site. While checking out each of the 99 counties, we came across
several county sites that were down.
We were able to contact one of the
counties, they will be up by the middle of the month, and another
county site was down for the holidays. One county even had
information on their site that they were down until a new Veterans
Affairs officer was hired and then the site would be back with the
new information in place. This has to be expected with retirements
and others being replaced when the local VA commissioners are not
satisfied with the performance of a current VA officer.
If you are a reader of this blog and a
former United States military veteran, Allen and I strongly urge you
to become familiar with the county website where you reside. You
should take time to become familiar with where the office is located
in your county. Then take the time to stop by the office and check
out what benefits you are eligible for and when.
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