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Concurrent receipt — now

Five years ago, Congress finally decided to kill a century-old law that forced disabled military retirees to forfeit a dollar of retired pay for every dollar they received in disability compensation.

Unfortunately, lawmakers opted for a slow death — a gradual phase-out of the offset over 10 years, lasting through 2014.

In the five years since, they’ve been unable to resist tinkering — adjusting the rules three times and creating a second program aimed specifically at combat-disabled retirees.

Now the Obama administration is proposing to add still another group to the unwieldy mess: 103,000 people granted medical disability retirement before serving 20 years, known as “Chapter 61” retirees for the section of U.S. law that covers them.

This marks the first time that the White House, not Congress, has pushed to expand concurrent receipt. But the proposal has the same flaw that marred earlier congressional efforts: It doles out improved benefits at a snail’s pace over five years and to a select population.

Enough already.

Congress should dismantle the rickety patchwork of concurrent receipt legislation and end retirement/disability pay offsets for everyone.

The costs are not small; the Chapter 61 plan alone would cost $5.4 billion over 10 years.

But this is a matter of fairness. Retired pay is earned over the course of a career; disability pay is compensation for a loss that came as a result of that service. One should not offset the other.

If Congress acknowledges that it’s unfair to offset the retired pay of disabled retirees, then it has an obligation to pony up the money to fix the problem — for everyone.