Physician Payment

VA Is Splitting One Reimbursement Form Into Two for Veterans’ Drug, Medical, and Transportation Claims

The Department of Veterans Affairs plans to retire a single catch-all reimbursement form and replace it with two forms—one for prescription drugs and…

Matt Reid

— 2 min read
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The Department of Veterans Affairs plans to retire a single catch-all reimbursement form and replace it with two forms—one for prescription drugs and another for certain medical and transportation costs. The change is modest by Washington standards, but it directly affects roughly 30,000 annual claim submissions for eligible expenses veterans have already covered out of pocket.

What It Is

In a notice scheduled for Federal Register publication on September 23, the Veterans Health Administration is seeking comment under the Paperwork Reduction Act on a revision to OMB Control No. 2900-0940. The current VA Form 10-320 is used by veterans requesting reimbursement for eligible costs tied to non-VA care, including claims arising under the Veterans Community Care Program, emergency-care authorities, the COMPACT Act, and recent veterans’ health legislation.

This is an information-collection revision, not a rule changing who qualifies for reimbursement or guaranteeing that a particular claim will be paid. Comments will be due 60 days after publication.

What’s Changing

VA would discontinue Form 10-320 and replace it with Form 10-485 for prescription-drug reimbursement and Form 10-487 for certain emergency medical or transportation costs. The agency says separating the claim types will make filing simpler than using one universal form for several categories of expense.

VA estimates 29,000 annual responses for the prescription-drug form and 1,000 for the medical-and-transportation form. At an estimated 10 minutes per response, the combined annual burden would be 5,000 hours. Those estimates describe form-completion time; the notice does not claim that the change will shorten adjudication or payment timelines.

Why It Matters

For veterans who have already paid for prescriptions, emergency care, or transportation, paperwork is not an abstract compliance exercise. A clearer, purpose-built form could reduce confusion about what documentation belongs with which claim and help VA route submissions correctly. Splitting one form into two, however, also creates a new wrong-door risk when an episode involves more than one kind of expense.

The comment request invites scrutiny of whether the collection is necessary, whether VA’s burden estimate is accurate, and how the agency could improve clarity or use automation to reduce effort. The practical questions are straightforward: Will the instructions make the dividing line between the forms obvious? Will veterans with mixed expenses know whether they must file twice? And will the submission process make supporting receipts and records easy to attach and track? The notice itself does not answer those questions.

This is paperwork policy in its natural habitat: unglamorous, consequential, and paid for in minutes by people waiting to be reimbursed. The success of the redesign will depend less on the elegance of two new form numbers than on whether veterans can choose the right one the first time.

Read the VA notice on Federal Register public inspection (https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2026-19410/agency-information-collection-activities-proposals-submissions-and-approvals-reimbursement-claim)

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