Diabetes now tops Vietnam vets' claims

It never fails to amaze me that this nation can be so good at spending money on the machinery of the Department of Defense but we never really do seem to be able to plan on taking care of the men and women we send. Congressman Filner said in Orlando on Sunday that the price of war should always take into account the wounded, but somehow the Presidents and planners of wars never seem to think of this. The survival rate is higher than ever and troops are surviving wounds that would have killed them on the spot during other wars but while they do make it back home to their families, the care of these men and women will need to be taken care of, and rightly so, for the rest of their lives. We spent as a nation a boat load of money over the years to find ways of keeping the wounded alive but that never seemed to translate into the money that would be needed to make sure they had what they needed for the rest of their lives.

All these years later the "good idea of Agent Orange" still does not have a price tag on it. How many years do you think it will take before the rest of good ideas the DOD has used surfaces in the lives of our troops from other wars?

Diabetes now tops Vietnam vets' claims
By MIKE BAKER (AP)

RALEIGH, N.C. — By his own reckoning, a Navy electrician spent just eight hours in Vietnam, during a layover on his flight back to the U.S. in 1966. He bought some cigarettes and snapped a few photos.

The jaunt didn't make for much of a war story, and there is no record it ever happened. But the man successfully argued that he may have been exposed to Agent Orange during his stopover and that it might have caused his diabetes — even though decades of research into the defoliant have failed to find more than a possibility that it causes the disease.

Because of worries about Agent Orange, about 270,000 Vietnam veterans — more than one-quarter of the 1 million receiving disability checks — are getting compensation for diabetes, according to Department of Veterans Affairs records obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act.

More Vietnam veterans are being compensated for diabetes than for any other malady, including post-traumatic stress disorder, hearing loss or general wounds.

Tens of thousands of other claims for common ailments of age — erectile dysfunction among them — are getting paid as well because of a possible link, direct or indirect, to Agent Orange.
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Diabetes now tops Vietnam vets' claims