Sometimes during the normal progression of your life, your service connected disability may get worse. If that happens you may find that your level of benefits is not sufficient. A VA rating increase is for someone who already has a service connected disability and finds himself/herself in this situation. At that time, if it does happen, you want to go ahead and file a claim with the VA as soon as possible. For instance, diabetes is a condition that sometimes gets worse. If you are awarded benefits for diabetes, usually the VA will start with 10% or 20%.   However, if you become insulin dependent in diabetes, which a lot of diabetics do, then you want to go ahead and file a new claim for an increase beyond that. There are lots of other issues such as PTSD that also are conditions that may get a little worse over time. You want to file a claim for that. So, what you want to do is, as soon as you think your condition is worse, file a new claim.