It's a shorter time period. Well, macular degeneration, as you know, is a deteriorating eye condition. So what happens is that the person may see us initially with some mild vision loss—maybe mild from our point of view, but not from theirs—and then, a couple of years later, there may have been quite a bit of deterioration, to the point where they're perhaps not seeing much at all.
It's that failure, sometimes, of the benefit grid to acknowledge that the same person at one point might have this and at the next point might have something different. So we'll get questions like, why do they need this now when they just got such and such?
Again, these are innocent...not innocent; they're not deliberately disrespectful questions, but they're auditing-type questions. Why does this person now need this? They just had such and such two years ago. Well, because it's different now. Again, that's where the case management system would fit in.
But in reply to your original question—and again, we don't have time to wax philosophical here—the issue that veterans themselves are struggling with, and the military struggles with, is that you have two separate ethos going on at the same time. As a military person, you're expected to be strong and tough and suck it up and get out there and do the job. Do it as part of a team, etc. It's very counterintuitive for someone to require assistance.
So to overcome that—and the dilemma is very clear in the issues of post-traumatic stress, but it falls into blindness also—is to remove the stigma of needing help. That's the communications approach that needs to be, I think, engineered. Veterans Affairs perhaps would be able, through its communications department, to deliver that kind of message: it's all right to need help. It doesn't make you less tough, strong, etc.; it simply makes you strong enough to admit you can't do it all by yourself.