by hilzoy
Until now, there have been three things that this administration has done that have reduced me to a tiny molten ball of fury: shredding the Constitution, invading Iraq, and leaving people to die after Katrina. Somehow, all the rest — even really important things, like the deficit, the astonishing failures in nuclear nonproliferation and securing loose nukes, our virtual lack of an energy policy, and all the rest — don’t make me truly livid in quite the way that these three do. Now we can add a fourth: veterans’ health care. I suppose that in the grand scheme of things, it probably matters less than failing to take any action at all on global warming, but it just encapsulates everything that drives me crazy about this administration: the heartlessness, the abject failure even to try to do right by people who manifestly deserve it at the very time when the administration’s own policies were putting their lives in danger, the complete lack of any concern for the very people who were willing to risk everything for us, and who (in general) stood by the administration even when it was utterly failing to stand by them.
Read it and weep:
“Sandy Karen was horrified when her 21-year-old son was discharged from the Naval Medical Center in San Diego a few months ago and told to report to the outpatient barracks, only to find the room swarming with fruit flies, trash overflowing and a syringe on the table. “The staff sergeant says, ‘Here are your linens’ to my son, who can’t even stand up,” said Karen, of Brookeville, Md. “This kid has an open wound, and I’m going to put him in a room with fruit flies?” She took her son to a hotel instead.
“My concern is for the others, who don’t have a parent or someone to fight for them,” Karen said. “These are just kids. Who would have ever looked in on my son?”
Capt. Leslie Haines was sent to Fort Knox in Kentucky for treatment in 2004 after being flown out of Iraq. “The living conditions were the worst I’d ever seen for soldiers,” he said. “Paint peeling, mold, windows that didn’t work. I went to the hospital chaplain to get them to issue blankets and linens. There were no nurses. You had wounded and injured leading the troops.” (…)
Hundreds of soldiers contacted The Washington Post through telephone calls and e-mails, many of them describing their bleak existence in Medhold.
From Fort Campbell in Kentucky: “There were yellow signs on the door stating our barracks had asbestos.”
From Fort Bragg in North Carolina: “They are on my [expletive] like a diaper. . . . there are people getting chewed up everyday.”
From Fort Dix in New Jersey: “Scare tactics are used against soldiers who will write sworn statement to assist fellow soldiers for their medical needs.”
From Fort Irwin in California: “Most of us have had to sign waivers where we understand that the housing we were in failed to meet minimal government standards.” (…)
VA hospitals are also receiving a surge of new patients after more than five years of combat. At the sprawling James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y., Spec. Roberto Reyes Jr. lies nearly immobile and unable to talk. Once a strapping member of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, Reyes got too close to an improvised explosive device in Iraq and was sent to Walter Reed, where doctors did all they could before shipping him to the VA for the remainder of his life. A cloudy bag of urine hangs from his wheelchair. His mother and his aunt are constant bedside companions; Reyes, 25, likes for them to get two inches from his face, so he can pull on their noses with the few fingers he can still control.
Maria Mendez, his aunt, complained about the hospital staff. “They fight over who’s going to have to give him a bath — in front of him!” she said. Reyes suffered third-degree burns on his leg when a nurse left him in a shower unattended. He was unable to move himself away from the scalding water. His aunt found out only later, when she saw the burns.”
Paul Krugman provides context:
“For all its cries of “support the troops,” the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can.
What makes this a particular shame is that in the Clinton years, veterans’ health care — like the Federal Emergency Management Agency — became a shining example of how good leadership can revitalize a troubled government program. By the early years of this decade the Veterans Health Administration was, by many measures, providing the highest-quality health care in America. (It probably still is: Walter Reed is a military facility, not run by the V.H.A.)
But as with FEMA, the Bush administration has done all it can to undermine that achievement. And the Walter Reed scandal is another Hurricane Katrina: the moment when the administration’s misgovernment became obvious to everyone.
The problem starts with money. The administration uses carefully cooked numbers to pretend that it has been generous to veterans, but the historical data contained in its own budget for fiscal 2008 tell the true story. The quagmire in Iraq has vastly increased the demands on the Veterans Administration, yet since 2001 federal outlays for veterans’ medical care have actually lagged behind overall national health spending.
To save money, the administration has been charging veterans for many formerly free services. For example, in 2005 Salon reported that some Walter Reed patients were forced to pay hundreds of dollars each month for their meals.
More important, the administration has broken longstanding promises of lifetime health care to those who defend our nation. Two months before the invasion of Iraq the V.H.A., which previously offered care to all veterans, introduced severe new restrictions on who is entitled to enroll in its health care system. As the agency’s Web site helpfully explains, veterans whose income exceeds as little as $27,790 a year, and who lack “special eligibilities such as a compensable service connected condition or recent combat service,” will be turned away.
So when you hear stories of veterans who spend months or years fighting to get the care they deserve, trying to prove that their injuries are service-related, remember this: all this red tape was created not by the inherent inefficiency of government bureaucracy, but by the Bush administration’s penny-pinching.
But money is only part of the problem.
We know from Hurricane Katrina postmortems that one of the factors degrading FEMA’s effectiveness was the Bush administration’s relentless push to outsource and privatize disaster management, which demoralized government employees and drove away many of the agency’s most experienced professionals. It appears that the same thing has been happening to veterans’ care.
The redoubtable Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, points out that IAP Worldwide Services, a company run by two former Halliburton executives, received a large contract to run Walter Reed under suspicious circumstances: the Army reversed the results of an audit concluding that government employees could do the job more cheaply.
And Mr. Waxman, who will be holding a hearing on the issue today, appears to have solid evidence, including an internal Walter Reed memo from last year, that the prospect of privatization led to a FEMA-type exodus of skilled personnel.”
Remember: this is not about money. At the very same time that the Bush administration was sending troops off to fight two wars and underfunding the VA, at the very same time that it was charging wounded veterans for their meals, this administration somehow found a way to cut taxes for the wealthiest among us. It’s too much, apparently, to ask the likes of Paris Hilton to pay taxes on any money they inherit, after the first few tax-free millions. But it’s not too much to ask people who have given their health or their limbs or their minds fighting George W. Bush’s misconceived war to pay for their meals, or to live in rooms with asbestos and mold and rodents and stray syringes lying about.
This is not about money. It’s about a complete lack of decency and honor and fairness; and about the absence of even the most minimal sense of shame.
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