- I am traveling on business and limited
on the time I have to receive or send emails.
-
- The following is a recent article about
how the VA is short-changing our veterans. It does not matter if
they are having DU symptoms, problems induced by the crappy vaccines given
to the soldiers or PTSD, our veterans are ignored to the greatest extent
possible.
-
-
-
- Caring For Our Veterans On
The Cheap
- How the Veterans' Administration
has been
shortchanging soldiers who come back wounded.
-
- Judith Coburn
- April 28 , 2006
-
- On the eve of his Marine unit's assault
on Fallujah 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 Fallujah, 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
hatchet men, 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 leischmaniasis, 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
-
- This piece first appeared, with an introduction
by Tom Engelhardt, on TomDispatch.
-
-
- The federal government mistreatment of
the veterans is systematic and a continuous series of acts. It has
the appearance of being willful and when you weigh that promises were made
to get the soldier to sign the enlistment document it appears to be fraudulent
inducement on the part of our government.
-
-
- Best regards,
-
- Karl
|
