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  1. Roughly half of all post-9-11 U.S. veterans peruse disability claims through the Veteran’s Health Administration (VA), a highly technical and bureaucratic process through which veterans are often guided by certified counselors. The benefits to which they may become entitled are politically and culturally sacrosanct. This was not always the case, but now, as the VA finds itself engulfed in scandal after scandal, and the federal government swings from budget crisis to budget crisis, veterans’ disabilities, especially those acquired during the exceptional work of war, seem increasingly economized and increasingly valuable. Seemingly a world away, Americans’ with disabilities comprise more than half of the nation’s Medicaid expenditures, expenditures that have been among the lowest hanging of sacrificial political fruit (vis Medicaid block granting and work requirements). The economization of these “unexceptional” disabilities increasingly insinuates they are worthless, hence the need to insist that “disabled lives matter.” Deploying “worthiness” as an analytic that combines the spheres of value and virtue that liberal reckonings attempt to keep distinct, this paper works through ethnography and economization as well as recent work on the worth of disability to muddle the distinction between the exceptional worth of injured soldiers and the unexceptional worthlessness attached to other disabled people, moving between biopolitics and biolegitimacy, and working away from a distinction between populations and toward figures and moments of resemblance. 
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