Stars and Stripes – Earlier this year the Department of Veterans Affairs executed a clever rewrite of a regulation to avoid reimbursing hundreds of thousands of veterans for non-VA emergency health care costs that their own insurance plans failed to pay in full. By inserting two words — “deductibles, coinsurance” — into the revised rule, VA successfully neutralized the impact of the 2016 Staab decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims to save the department billions of dollars.
