They Named the Bill After a Dead Veteran and Still Won't Pass It

Richard Star was a combat engineer. He deployed to Desert Storm, then to Afghanistan with the 391st Engineer Battalion clearing roads and disarming IEDs, then to Iraq with the 841st doing the same work. In 2018, not long after returning from a deployment to Kuwait, he and his wife Tonya learned he had stage 4 lung cancer, caused by the burn pits he had spent years standing near (MOAA).

Then he found out he could not collect both his military retirement pay and his VA disability compensation at the same time. Because he had been medically retired rather than serving a full 20 years, the law classified him as a "Chapter 61 retiree," and he had to choose (MOAA).

Tonya left her job to become his full-time caregiver. The household ran on Rich's pay and whatever benefits the government decided he was allowed to keep, and the two of them carried roughly $50,000 in debt through his chemotherapy. Still, in the months he had left, Star met with lawmakers and pushed Congress to fix the offset, not just for himself but for the roughly 50,000 other veterans in the same position (MOAA). He died on February 13, 2021.

The Major Richard Star Act was named for him. It still has not passed. Five years later, it is once again attached to a much bigger bill, and once again, it is not moving.

The veteran the bill is supposed to help is against it

Jason Church lost both legs to an IED in Afghanistan. He is one of the roughly 54,000 combat-injured veterans the Star Act fix is designed to help, and by any straightforward reading, he should want this bill passed as fast as possible (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

He opposes it anyway. Not because of what it does for him, but because of how it pays for it. "The individuals who evacuated me from that battlefield returned with the same injuries that this legislation aims to cut," Church has said (Jason Church, LinkedIn). The medics who carried him off that field came home with tinnitus and sleep apnea of their own. The bill would fund his benefit by cutting theirs. As Church put it, "You don't support one veteran by undermining another" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

What the bill actually does

The legislation in question, the Take Care of America's Veterans Act, bundles more than 60 bipartisan veterans bills into one package, including the Star Act fix, survivor benefit increases, and support for family caregivers. Nobody disputes that most of it is overdue and good (Stars and Stripes).

The dispute is over how it is paid for. Under the House and Senate's own budget rules, new benefits have to be offset, so the bill largely funds itself by cutting future disability compensation for tinnitus and sleep apnea, according to a VA analysis, by as much as $57 billion over ten years for an estimated 1.5 million veterans (DAV). The new benefits, including the Star Act fix, are projected to cost about $21 billion. That leaves roughly $36 billion in cuts with no clear destination beyond the Treasury (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

DAV has called the funding mechanism a "poison pill" buried in an otherwise supportable package (DAV). Craig Romanovich of the Union Veterans Council put it more bluntly: a grateful nation pays its debts, it does not send veterans the invoice (Stars and Stripes).

Tinnitus and sleep apnea are not paperwork problems

It is easy to hear "tinnitus" and "sleep apnea" and file them under minor. Romanovich lives with tinnitus from his time in the Army, and he describes it in terms that are hard to dismiss: "There is a constant ringing in my ears, it's ringing right now. It deprives me of my sleep, it causes anxiety and depression, and it causes issues in my family" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

Constant noise that never turns off. Sleep that never fully comes. Those are not side effects at the edge of a person's health, they are gateways to depression and isolation. Reducing compensation for them does not make the underlying condition go away. It just removes the government's acknowledgment that the injury is real.

This is happening while the VA itself is losing people

The backdrop makes the funding fight worse. The VA lost more than 40,000 employees in fiscal year 2025, its first annual net staff loss in the department's history, and 88 percent of those who left were healthcare staff, according to a report from Senator Richard Blumenthal's office (Blumenthal VA staffing report). The loss of physicians alone means an estimated 1.2 million veterans have lost their VA provider. The national average wait time for a new mental health appointment now exceeds 35 days, well past the 20-day threshold that is supposed to make veterans eligible for care outside the VA. One outpatient clinic in California, after seven of its twelve mental health providers left, is currently quoting new patients a 134-day wait (Blumenthal VA staffing report).

To be fair, the package includes real mental health provisions: the HOPE for the Brave Act would make suicide prevention grants permanent, plus a $20 million annual mental health pilot program and free naloxone at VA pharmacies. But critics note the same bill strips collective bargaining rights from roughly 5,000 VA psychologists and leans further into privatized care, changes that could deepen the staffing crisis rather than fix it (Government Executive).

It didn't even fail on the merits

Here is the part that is hard to explain to anyone outside Washington. The bill did not stall because lawmakers debated the funding mechanism and voted it down. On June 30, 14 House Republicans, in a fight over an unrelated voter ID bill called the SAVE America Act, joined Democrats to sink the procedural rule needed to bring the veterans package to the floor. The vote failed 224 to 198, and the House was sent home early. The Star Act, the caregiver support, the survivor benefits, all of it became collateral damage in a dispute that had nothing to do with veterans (Government Executive).

As of this week, there are roughly 23 legislative days left in the session for lawmakers to bring it back up. A bill that bears a dead veteran's name, built around a promise he spent his final months trying to secure, is waiting on a fight about voter registration.

Most of this fight happens where most veterans aren't

Here is the number that puts all of it in perspective. Sixty-one percent of veterans who died by suicide in 2023 were not receiving VA care in their final year of life (VA National Veteran Suicide Prevention Report).

The fight over funding mechanisms, staffing, wait times, and privatization inside the VA is real and it matters. But most veterans who die by suicide are not inside that system when it happens. They are outside VA's reach entirely, which means even if every provision in this bill passed tomorrow exactly as written, it would not reach most of the people it is meant to protect.

That gap is not a legislative problem. It shows up in the days when nobody is checking in, when the next appointment is 35 or 134 days away, when a person is managing something real and doing it mostly alone.

Where Lumafy fits into this

We did not build Lumafy AI to replace VA care, and it is not a crisis line. It is a daily check-in for the space between appointments and crises, for the person waiting 35 days, or 134, who still needs something today.

Recovery Mode and Hero Mode are free for every user, always. Free, because the people who need consistent daily support are often the same people who cannot count on a system currently losing staff faster than it can hire.

Richard Star spent his last months fighting for people he would never meet. Five years on, Congress still has not finished what he started. While that fight continues, the people it is meant to help still need somewhere to show up every day. That is what we built.