This often-overlooked VA pension can add meaningfully toward senior care costs. Here's how Chicago-area veterans and surviving spouses served by Jesse Brown VA and Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital qualify — and where to get free help.
By James Whitfield, LCSW · March 12, 2026
Aid & Attendance (A&A) is an enhanced VA pension for wartime veterans and surviving spouses who need help with daily activities such as bathing, dressing, or medication management. It can add substantially each month toward assisted living, memory care, in-home care, or nursing care costs — making it one of the largest sources of private-pay assistance available to Chicago's large veteran population. Veterans do not need to be enrolled in VA health care to apply for Aid & Attendance.
Chicago-area veterans are served by several VA facilities: Jesse Brown VA Medical Center on the Near West Side, Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital in Hines (near Maywood) west of the city, and the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, which serves veterans in the northern suburbs and Lake County. Because A&A eligibility follows the veteran rather than the facility, a veteran can use the benefit toward care at any qualifying assisted living, memory care, or in-home provider across Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, Will, or McHenry counties.
Eligibility generally requires wartime military service (a qualifying period such as WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or the Gulf War era), an honorable or general discharge, a medical need for daily assistance, and income and net worth within VA limits. Asset-transfer rules include a 36-month look-back, so getting the application right the first time matters. Surviving spouses of eligible wartime veterans may also qualify, typically at a lower benefit rate than the veteran rate.
As a clinical social worker who has spent years on hospital discharge floors across Chicago, I've watched families miss this benefit simply because no one told them it existed. If your veteran parent is paying privately for assisted living or memory care anywhere in Chicagoland, Aid & Attendance is worth investigating even if you think the assets are too high — the net-worth rules have exclusions many families don't expect, and the value of a primary residence is generally handled differently than families assume.
Start with an accredited Veterans Service Officer. The Illinois Department of Veterans' Affairs and county veterans assistance commissions across Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, Will, and McHenry counties provide free A&A claims assistance, as do accredited service organizations. The social work service at Jesse Brown VA Medical Center, Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital, or the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center can also point families toward accredited help. Avoid paying anyone a fee to file an A&A claim; accredited assistance is free.
The VA Caregiver Support Line at 1-855-260-3274 is another free resource for families juggling a care search and a benefits application at the same time. A free senior advisor who knows which Chicago-area communities readily accept and coordinate with Aid & Attendance paperwork can help time the benefit alongside a placement, so families aren't managing a VA claim and a care search under pressure simultaneously. Because A&A can take months to be approved and is often paid retroactively to the application date, applying early — even before a move — is almost always the right call.
Free, no-pressure call. We work for families, not facilities.