With respect to the lump-sum payment, the only reason I bring this up is that I hear people from time to time sort of saying, “Well, in the old days we used to have a pension and now we get a certain amount of money and we're supposed to live off of that”. It's given once at the beginning, and some people abuse the fact that they have that money and they may gamble it away or do silly things with it, that sort of thing.
I only mention that because everybody assumes this is the pension plan, but it is not the pension plan. This is just for pain and suffering, and not everybody gets the $265,000 or whatever it is. If it's a small item, they get a lot less money, and if it's major, they get more and more, and I believe if you die then your estate would get the $260,000, that sort of thing. I only mention that because this whole program has a number of ways of providing money to people who have to leave the service because of injury and that sort of thing.
And the other point that was mentioned just before is getting people back to work as soon as possible so that hopefully taxpayers' money won't be spent and the people who are back at work feel good about themselves and become fully functioning members of society again, as much as possible. But that wasn't the aspect I was mentioning.
What I'm really trying to say in this paper here is that it's not just that gap. The major gap, as I see it, is really how I put it: we have to treat those people as if they continued in their military career. What I mean there is that if you do go, you get pay raises and incentives as you go along, and at a certain point in time, of course, you can retire. Most people put in 35 years and the pension is a 70% average of the best seven years. But as well you have money coming in afterwards, a pension. Right now when the people get out they don't have a pension; so yes, they might get 75% of the salary when they get out, but that pension only goes for a certain length of time. At age 65, I believe, it stops, and people say, “Well, you should have put money into a pension plan”. The military pension plan, for those who stayed in it, has contributions from the government, so you go a lot further on a military pension plan than you would after you get out.
All I'm saying, and what my briefing is based on, is that we should be treating these people—these people should not be paying for this war themselves—as if they remained in the military and giving them what you would get, not be limited by things like SISIP, for example, and the way we approach these people.