The Observer, March 9, 2007
Volume XXXIX, Issue 20
Decent medical care for veterans needed
Amid the embarrassing revelations this week of the poor condition of both the facilities and treatment at the Walter Reed Medical Center, which is currently treating returning Iraq War veterans, both Congress and the Bush Administration have scrambled their respective public relations machines to make up for their negligence.
Now that this issue is under investigation, it appears that the military's outpatient care is completely broken. Unfortunately, outpatient care is indicative of much more extensive problems of corruption, deceit, and inefficiency in the United States military. But while the average citizen cannot and probably does not want to know what the military does with its time and money; the matter of veterans' affairs is both perennially relevant and visible.
Unfortunately for our veterans, the only response to the public's realization of their insufficient health care is the politically predictable one. Just as with the Iraq Study Group and the 9/11 Commission, the administration is hoping to deter incoming criticism by setting up a powerless and purely symbolic commission with some high profile members (Bob Dole and Donna Shalala in this case) to spend a couple months crafting a report which will have marginal, if any, effect on actual policy. In the meantime, people will have lost interest and the media will have moved on to the next mindless sensation story of the moment.
On Tuesday, President Bush had the nerve to give a speech at the American Legion calling for greater medical care for Iraq War veterans – as if he actually cares. You think most of the people in the administration, Congress, or the Pentagon care about veterans? Think again. They didn't pay much attention to poverty or global warming until Hurricane Katrina hit, and they weren't interested much in helping veterans until the media finally ran some stories about the miserable economic and psychological conditions of Iraq War vets.
According to government sources, last month when Bush proposed his FY 2008 budget, he asked for $481.4 billion for the Dept. of Defense, plus $141.7 billion for the war on terror, plus a "request for $93.4 billion in emergency supplemental funding" for a grand total of $716.5 billion – an 11.3 percent increase on military spending from the FY 2007 budget. The estimated spending of the entire Department of Veterans' Affairs for FY 2008 was only about $29 billion. Of course, that number is sure to increase in light of the true state of veterans' care.
The most offsetting aspect of the government's carelessness is that all of this sounds eerily familiar; didn't Vietnam Veterans get screwed over when they got home too? The same holds true for Gulf War veterans and the Gulf War syndrome. The government's remedy for these physically and psychologically maimed individuals, many of who are homeless, is to attach the euphemistic diagnosis Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), offer some half-hearted therapy, and feed them antidepressants.
This is an endemic and recurring problem because nobody in power cares about veterans – it's that simple. The military brass could care less about the common G.I. and see them as nothing more than numbers. The politicians are too busy meeting with lobbyists from Northrop Grumman and Lockheed-Martin to care, selling away what decency and justice is left in this country.
If we are going to send hundreds of thousands of our citizens to fight, bleed, and die in a completely senseless and ill-motivated war, we ought to at least give them decent medical care when they return. When the United States is spending way over a billion dollars a day on the production and execution of military power, the least our representatives can do is to offer sufficient medical and psychological care to the people they send to be killed. For more information, go to http://www.dod.mil/comptroller/defbudget/fy2008/ and http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy08/browse.html.
Pieragastini is a senior History and International Studies major involved with Catalyst: Students for Social Justice, Case-ACLU, and the Philosophy Society.
