Caring for Vets on the Cheap

[Guest guest]

SharinSharAlike

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:37:04 EDT

Caring for Vets on the Cheap

 

Know anyone who is still a bushie after all this, who insist THEY are

the ones supporting the troops, who seem not to have a clue ...who do

we fight? The neocons trying to take away their benefits.

 

Lying to them is bad enough, but when they return home and need

medical help and have to beg or live like animals with no toilets,

etc...they are stripped of every shred of dignity.

 

Sheer audacity is these very repukes have those support troops signs

on their cars -- who still support republicans who are trying to get

away with treating our troops like dogs. Yes...LIKE DOGS...READ BELOW.

If you have kept up, you will know that we have even put them in

storage containers for holding them till doctors could see them. Some

have waited so long, they had to have bones rebroken in order to be set.

 

Supporting a war of choice, gone to in knowing lies is not supporting

the troops. That is supporting an illegal and immoral war - has

nothing to do with the troops.

 

KNOW A REPUBLICAN -- PASS THIS ON...

 

****

 

 

 

Tomgram: Judith Coburn, Caring for Veterans on the Cheap

 

Can anyone be surprised any longer when FEMA reneges on its promise of

a year's free housing to Hurricane Katrina evacuees? Or that, in once

can-do America, the devastated southeastern coast from which those

residents fled in such confusion remains almost singularly

unreconstructed as the next hurricane season approaches? Or that the

only ones likely to receive relief at the gas pump this summer are the

oil companies? Or that the Bush administration is incapable of running

a new Medicare drug program as anything other than an experience in

chaos? Or that so many functions that once made civil government seem

in any way civil are simply disappearing and others are being rebuilt

on a military model? Typically, a Senate report on dismantling FEMA

suggests replacing it with

 

" a new National Preparedness and Response Authority whose head

would... serve as the president's top adviser for national emergency

management, akin to the military role served by the chairman of the

Joint Chiefs of Staff. It would reunify disaster preparedness and

response activities that [Department of Homeland Security head

Michael] Chertoff decoupled, and restore grant-making authority taken

away by Congress in redefining a stronger national preparedness system

with regional coordinators, a larger role for the National Guard and

the Defense Department and more money for training, planning and

exercises. "

 

None of this should surprise anyone all these years into the Bush

presidency. But if you really want a benchmark of where we're heading,

consider the Veterans Administration as the gasping canary in the

American mineshaft of civility. And think of the matter this way:

While President Dwight Eisenhower warned of a " military-industrial

complex " in his 1961 farewell address to the American people ( " In the

councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of

unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the

military-industrial complex... " ), we have never had a president who

was so determined to turn more of what once passed for civil

government over to the Pentagon, an organization seemingly intent on

proving in Iraq and elsewhere that reconstruction and civil governance

are nowhere in its bag of tricks. Yet from avian-flu defense to

catastrophe relief, from civil reconstruction to global diplomacy and

domestic intelligence-gathering, the Pentagon, whose budget dwarfs all

else, is the preeminent institution in this country today, shouldering

ever more of the burden ever more poorly.

 

So when what is most " civil " in the military starts to falter as well,

all of us should take note. In this case, as Judith Coburn reports

below, the health-care and disability system for American veterans --

the very men and women this administration so cavalierly sent off to

its war of choice in Iraq -- is in a state of increasing disarray and

faces a wounded administration that secretly likes to think of the

medical care of veterans as another form of welfare to be slashed. Tom

 

 

 

 

 

Coming Home from War on the Cheap

Shortchanging the Wounded

By Judith Coburn

 

On the eve of his Marine unit's assault on Falluja in November,

2004, Blake Miller read to his men from the Bible (John 14:2-3): " In

my father's house, there are many mansions: if it were not so, I would

have told you. I leave this place and go there to prepare a place for

you, so that where I may be, you may be also. "

 

A photograph of Miller's blood-smeared, filthy face, so

reminiscent of David Douglas Duncan's photos of war-weary Marines in

Vietnam, is one of the Iraq War's iconic images. Over a hundred

newspapers ran it. But as the San Francisco Chronicle reported

recently, Miller, a decorated war hero, has been shattered

psychologically by Iraq. Disabled by flashbacks and nightmares, he

continues to pay daily and dearly for his service there.

 

His eloquent commitment to his fellow Marines is the highest value

in military life. But the Bush administration, which sent Blake

Miller, his fellow Marines, and 1.3 million other Americans (so far)

to war in Iraq and Afghanistan apparently does not share this commitment.

 

Much has been written about how President Bush and Secretary of

Defense Donald Rumsfeld waged war on the cheap, sending too few

ill-equipped young soldiers -- 30% of them ill-trained Reservists and

National Guardsmen -- into battle. But little has been reported about

how shockingly on-the-cheap the homecomings of these soldiers have

proved to be. The Bush administration awarded Blake Miller a medal,

but it has fought for three long years to deny soldiers like him the

care they need. While Miller and his men were being thrown into the

fire in Falluja, the White House was proposing to cut the combat pay

of soldiers like them. (Only an outburst of outrage across the

political spectrum caused the administration to back off from that

suggestion.)

 

The Veterans Administration, now run by a former Republican

National Committeeman, has been subjected to the same radical

hatcheting that the White House has tried to wield against the rest of

America's safety net. Cutbacks, cooking the books, privatization

schemes, even a proposal to close down the VA's operations have all

been in evidence. The administration's inside-the-beltway supporters

like the Heritage Foundation and famed anti-tax radical Grover

Norquist like to equate VA care with welfare. Traditionally, however,

most Americans have held that the VA's medical care and disability

compensation was earned by those who served their country.

 

Unfortunately, in our draft-free country, the fight to protect the

Veteran's Administration and to fully fund it has gone on largely out

of public sight. Other than the Washington Post and the Associated

Press, relatively few journalistic organizations have bothered to

regularly cover the VA. The fight over it that White House hatchetmen,

VA political appointees, and their allies in Congress have had with

Congressional critics (Democratic and Republican) along with veterans'

organizations has been monitored closely only by veterans' websites

like Larry Scott's VAWatchdog.org, veteransforcommonsense.org and

military.com.

 

" Enron-styled Accounting "

 

While national deficits soar, thanks in part to skyrocketing war

costs, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are flooding into the

increasingly underfunded VA system. The Pentagon says that 2,389

Americans have died and 17,648 have been wounded in combat in Iraq

(and another 285 have died in Afghanistan). But these casualty figures

seem to be significant undercounts. After all, 144,424 American

veterans have sought treatment from the VA system since returning from

those wars, not including soldiers actually hospitalized in military

hospitals.

 

These figures were wrested only recently from the Veteran's

Administration after years of fruitless demands from Democrats on the

House Veterans' Affairs Committee. The 144,424 figure includes not

only many of those 17,648 reported wounded in combat by the Pentagon

-- if that figure is, in fact, accurate -- but those wounded

psychologically, those injured in accidents, and those whose ailments

were caused or exacerbated by service in the war. (Think of war, in

this sense, as an extreme sport in its toll on the body.) Of course,

neither Pentagon, nor VA figures for the wounded include estimates of

those soldiers or veterans who don't show up at a Department of

Defense (DoD) or VA facility. Among these casualties are

post-combat-tour suicides (who obviously can't show up) and the

victims of diseases like leishmaniasis, caused by the ubiquitous sand

flies in Iraq, who often suffer on their own.

 

Nonetheless, the VA has admitted -- and it's been confirmed by an

Army study -- that a staggering 35% of veterans who served in Iraq

have already sought treatment in the VA system for emotional problems

from the war. Add this to the older veterans, especially from the

Vietnam era, pouring into the VA system as their war wounds, both

physical and emotional, deepen with age or as, on retirement, they

find they can no longer afford private health insurance and realize

that VA health care is -- or, at least in the past, was -- more

generous than Medicare.

 

Just as the Pentagon failed, after its March 2003 invasion of

Iraq, to plan for keeping the peace, guarding against looting,

fighting a resilient insurgency, or handling a civil war, so has the

Veterans Administration failed to plan for caring for casualties of

the war. The VA admitted recently that 33,858 more vets showed up for

treatment in just the first quarter of FY2006 than were expected for

the entire year. Do the math yourself. Multiply times 4, assuming that

the war goes on injuring Americans at current levels, and you get a

possible underestimate of 135,000 casualties for the year.

 

Even more distressing, the San Diego Union recently reported that

mentally ill soldiers are being sent back to war armed only with

antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. The Union quotes Sydney Hickey

of the National Military Family Association as saying that " more than

200,000 prescriptions for the most common antidepressants were written

in the last 14 months for service members and their families. "

According to the Union, an Army study also found that 17% of

combat-seasoned infantrymen suffer from major depression, anxiety, or

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after a single tour in Iraq.

California Sen. Barbara Boxer has called for an investigation.

 

Are such chronic underestimates merely the result of incompetence?

Not according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO),

Congress's investigative arm. In a series of reports on the Veterans

Administration over the last three years, the GAO found that the VA's

top officials submitted budget requests based on cost limits demanded

by the White House, not on realistic expectations of how many veterans

would actually need medical care or disability support.

 

In repeated testimony before Congress, top VA political appointees

have opposed demands by veterans' groups like the American Legion and

the Disabled Veterans of America to increase significantly funds for

medical care and disability payments for the new patients now flooding

the system. Top VA officials assured Congress that more money wasn't

needed because the agency had stepped up " management efficiencies. "

But the GAO found that, from 2003-2006, there were no obvious

management efficiencies whatsoever to offset the increased treatment

costs from the Iraq War, nor did the VA even have a methodology for

reporting on such alleged efficiencies.

 

While the GAO's findings, when describing the VA's budget

manipulations, were couched in such relatively polite bureaucratic

euphemisms as " misleading, " " lacked a methodology, " and " does not have

a reliable basis, " the conclusions nonetheless were striking. " The GAO

report confirms what everyone has known all along, " American Legion

National Commander Thomas L. Bock commented. " The VA's health-care

budget has been built on false claims of 'efficiency' savings, false

actuarial assumptions and an inability to collect third-party

reimbursements -- money owed them. This budget model has turned our

veterans into beggars, forced to beg for the medical care they earned

and, by law, deserve. These deceptions are especially unconscionable

when American men and women are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. "

 

Some veterans are calling it fraud. Rep. Lane Evans (Dem.-Ill.) of

the House Veterans' Affairs Committee calls it " Enron-styled accounting. "

 

Budget Busting

 

The economic realities of the wars the Bush administration has

taken us into are, in truth, budget busting. A recent study by Nobel

prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard management expert

Linda Biones -- that actually factored the costs of " coming home " into

war expenditures -- sets the total cost of the Iraq War between $1 and

2 trillion, including $122 billion in disability payments and $92

billion in health care for veterans.

 

Pentagon health-care costs for soldiers still in the military have

doubled in the last five years and are projected to total $64 billion

or 12% of the official Pentagon budget by 2015, according to William

Winkenwerder, Jr., Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs.

Soaring American medical costs are only partly to blame. Advances in

combat medical care have also meant that far more wounded soldiers are

being kept alive than in earlier wars, many of them with serious brain

injuries and/or multiple amputations. Taking care of these tragically

maimed soldiers for life will be extraordinarily costly, both in terms

of medical care and their 100% disability payments. (The VA rates

disability on a scale of 0 to 100%, which then determines the size of

the monthly disability payment due a veteran.)

 

Even before recent veterans began flooding the system, the VA was

already underfunded and being criticized for poor services. Then,

three years ago, Rep. Evans and Rep. Chris H. Smith, (Rep.-NJ),

Chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, raised the alarm

that the VA, already short of funds, would face a catastrophe as the

troops began returning from Iraq.

 

Smith was rewarded for his efforts to sound the alarm by being

removed not just from his chairmanship, but from the committee

altogether, by the House Republican leadership. Similarly, in November

2004, VA head Anthony Principi was forced out by the White House

because of his opposition to the VA being shortchanged in the budget

the White House demanded -- so lobbyists for veterans believe. But

Principi seems not to have suffered from his VA experience. The Los

Angeles Times reported recently that a medical services company

Principi headed, and returned to after running the VA, earned over a

billion dollars in fees, much of it from contracts approved while

Principi was VA chief.

 

The VA admits its disability system was overburdened even before

the administration invaded Iraq; and, by 2004, it had a backlog of

300,000 disability claims. Now, the VA reports that the backlog has

reached 540,122. By April 2006, 25% of rating claims took six months

to process -- no small thing for a veteran wounded badly enough to be

unable to work. An appeal of a rejected claim frequently takes years

to settle. One hundred twenty-three thousand disability claims have

been filed already by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, in its

budget requests, the administration has constantly resisted

congressional demands to increase the number of VA staffers processing

such claims.

 

The True Cost of Coming Home

 

Congress has fought the White House over its low VA budgets for

several years. In the FY 2006 budget, all Congress could finally grant

the VA was $990 million above the agency's already meager request --

an increase of just 3.6% over the previous year despite the rise in

casualties to be treated. In fact, top VA officials now admit it would

take a 14% increase in the present budget simply to keep up with the

inflation in medical costs.

 

Rep. Evans estimates that there has been a $4 billion shortfall in

VA funding in the years 2003-06. In 2005, the White House admitted

that, for medical services alone, the VA was short $1 billion for the

year -- and another estimated $2.6 billion in 2006.

 

What may ultimately swamp the Veterans Administration's ability to

cope is the emotional toll of combat -- unless it jettisons thousands

of returning soldiers. Nearly one in three veterans has been

hospitalized at the VA, or visited a VA outpatient clinic, due to an

initial diagnosis of a mental-health disorder, according to the VA

itself. Its numbers are consistent with a recent Army study on

soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such a rate might add up

over time (depending on how long these wars last) to almost half a

million veterans in need of treatment -- or more. A 2004 study of

several Army and Marine units returning from Iraq and Afghanistan that

appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine found only 23-40% of

those with PTSD had sought treatment. And post-traumatic stress is

called " post " for a reason -- its most serious symptoms usually emerge

long after the trauma is over.

 

Listen to the VA's own national advisory board on PTSD in a report

released in February, 2006:

 

" [The] VA cannot meet the ongoing needs of veterans of past

deployments while also reaching out to new combat veterans of [iraq

and Afghanistan] and their families within current resources and

current models of treatment. "

 

The VA is now paying out $4.3 billion a year for PTSD disability

to 215,871 veterans. The report also found that a returning war

veteran suffering from emotional illness now has to wait an average of

60 days before he or she can even be evaluated for diagnosis, let

alone treated. Forty-two percent of VA primary care clinics had no

mental-health staff members and 53% of those that did had only one.

Eighty-two percent of new patients needed to be in the most intensive

PTSD treatment programs, the VA report found, but 40% of those

programs were already so full that they could only take a few more

patients; 20% said they were too full to take any at all.

 

" VA's data show a 30% increase in the number of [iraq and Afghan

War] veterans who have an initial diagnosis of post-traumatic stress

disorder from the end of FY 2005, " says Rep. Michael Michaud

(Dem.-Me). " I applaud the courage of these veterans who have sought

help, but the administration refuses to acknowledge fully the demand

and need for mental health services. "

 

Further down the line: How many Iraqi veterans will eventually

join the ranks of the 400,000 homeless vets on the streets of American

cities? (Right now the VA takes care of only 100,000 such vets,

according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.)

 

This dire situation has only encouraged the budget cutters and

anti-government radicals like Norquist, who once joked that he hoped

to shrink the government enough so that he could drown it in a

bathtub. With PTSD rates soaring among vets, the hatchets have been

out not just when it comes to treating them, but even when it comes to

the diagnosis of PTSD itself. In 2005, the VA, under White House

pressure, announced that it was reopening 72,000 long-approved PTSD

disability claims for review, many of them for Vietnam veterans.

Right-wing columnists quickly swung into action with op-ed pieces

insisting that many PTSD claims were fraudulent. The VA backed off --

but only after a New Mexico newspaper reported that a troubled Vietnam

veteran with a 100% PTSD disability killed himself upon fearing that

the VA might review his case and a firestorm of criticism from

Congress and veterans' organizations followed.

 

Other White House ideas for cutting back the VA, including making

vets pay insurance premiums, higher co-pays and doubling Vets' costs

for prescription drugs, have also been beaten back by Congress. One VA

response to its huge backlog of claims has been to limit enrollment

for its services. In January 2003, the White House ordered the VA to

create a new temporary cost-cutting category of " affluent " vets who

would not be eligible to use the VA. But the new category seems headed

for permanency. And it sets the cut-off level for eligibility for VA

care so low -- around $30,000 for a so-called " affluent " family of

four -- that many vets who have been cut off can't possibly afford

health insurance and medical care on the private market.

 

In World War II, 12 million Americans fought on behalf of a nation

of 130 million. Twenty-five percent of American men served in that

war. They came back heroes to a country more than willing to give them

the latest medical care, compensate them for their wounds, send them

to college, and help them buy homes.

 

Fifty years later in Iraq -- an unpopular war -- only 1.3 million

are fighting for a nation of 300 million. " Never have so few

sacrificed so much for so many, " one Desert Storm veteran said

recently. Iraq may be the wrong cause for sacrifice. But Vietnam

veterans taught us that once war starts we must be willing to take

care of everyone who gets hurt in it.

 

Judith Coburn has covered war and its aftermath in Indochina,

Central America, and the Middle East for the Village Voice, Mother

Jones, the Los Angeles Times, and Tomdispatch, among other media outlets.

 

Copyright 2006 Judith Coburn

 

TomDispatch - Tomgram: Judith Coburn, Caring for Veterans on the Cheap