The Blue Button Test
"Pull your Blue Button. Whose birthday is on it?"
Blue Button is the VA’s own health-records download — the report VA.gov generates about a veteran, from the veteran’s own account. On August 14, 2026, the report pulled from Thomas Bowman, Sr.’s account described the wrong man. It takes about five minutes to check yours. Here is how, what a correct report looks like, and the five red flags his carried.
Step by step
- Sign in to VA.gov with the veteran’s own account (ID.me, Login.gov, or My HealtheVet sign-in). If you are a caregiver, do this with the veteran or as their authorized representative — it has to be the veteran’s account, because that is the record being tested.
- Go to My HealtheVet → Health records, and choose “Download your VA health records (Blue Button®)”.
- Select all available dates and all record types, then generate and download the report (PDF or text file).
- Open the report and check the five things below — name, date of birth, email, service-connected percentage, and military service history.
- Save the file with the date you pulled it. A dated copy is evidence; a memory of what the screen said is not.
What a correct report shows
- The veteran’s own name and own date of birth.
- The veteran’s own contact information.
- The veteran’s actual service-connected disability percentage.
- A military service history that exists — branch, service period, service data present.
- Caregiver and contact information that names living, actual caregivers.
The five red flags — from a 100% veteran’s own report
The Blue Button report pulled August 14, 2026, from the account of Thomas Alan Bowman, Sr. — U.S. Navy 1964–1970, rated 100% service-connected — contained all five:
- Someone else’s date of birth. The report carried his son’s birthday, not his.
- Someone else’s email address. His son’s email, not his.
- “Service connected percentage: 0.” For a veteran rated 100%, drawing Special Monthly Compensation since 2022.
- “Military Service: No data was found.” Six years of Navy service, invisible to the VA’s own system. VA.gov separately told him it had no combined disability rating on file for him.
- A dead caretaker of record. The VA still listed his wife — deceased since August 27, 2019 — as his caretaker of record (confirmed by the VA on July 29, 2026), while his registered caregiver son was routed nothing.
One wrong field is a typo. All five is a record conflated with another person’s — and every authorization, consult, and contact built on that record inherits the error.
If yours is wrong too
- Save the report with the pull date, exactly as downloaded.
- Tell the VA, in writing — your VA facility’s patient advocate and AskVA — and keep the confirmation numbers. (The Bowman family did all of this. The record above shows what came back.)
- Put it on this record. A single family’s wrong report is an anecdote the VA can file away. A registry of them is a pattern it has to answer. Tell your story → — the intake asks for your Blue Button result directly, and you choose how your story is handled: your name, anonymous, or record-only.
Blue Button® is a registered trademark of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This page is an independent family's guide to checking a VA record; it is not a VA publication.