Support the troops? Then pay attention all the time!

Last night I put up an old post I found on the fact the Army Medical Corps had downsized to a lower rate than they had after the Gulf war when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were creating more wounded. Medical technology had caught up enough so that even some quadruple amputees survived. But was you can see there were still problems most people didn't know about.

As more wounded soldiers return from war, critics say staff shortages and turnover have affected the quality of health care at Army posts across the nation.

Overall, the Army’s Medical Corps has downsized significantly since the Persian Gulf War in the 1990s, dropping from 5,400 to 4,300 physicians and from 4,600 to 3,400 nurses.

According to the Department of Defense, more than 29,000 service members have been wounded in action in Iraq or Afghanistan in the last six years, compared with fewer than 500 in Operation Desert Storm.

I got upset with the Daily Show's Jon Stewart because while he was rightly paying attention to what is happening to our veterans today, it had been going on for a very long time.

Apr 24, 2008 “Since 2006, the number of claims has grown 15 percent. The amount of time it takes to make decisions on disability claims is two to three year. On an average, it takes four years to get an appeals decision.”

That is the biggest problem this nation has when they keep chanting "USA Support the Troops" when they want to but when they need to, they are just too busy doing something else.

According to the American Federation of Government Employees, the VA employed 1,392 Veterans Service Representatives in June 2007 compared to 1,516 in January 2003. But what would have happened if after the troops were being sent into a second war, the VA was prepared to take care of them with their claims as well as their wounds? Would older veterans have suffered even longer than they already had? Would it have helped to know all their years of fighting to make sure PTSD was treated for all veterans was worthy of their efforts?

“U.S. soldiers serving repeated Iraq deployments are 50 percent more likely than those with one tour to suffer from acute combat stress, raising their risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the Army's first survey exploring how today's multiple war-zone rotations affect soldiers' mental health.” (Repeat Iraq Tours Raise Risk of PTSD Army Finds, Washington Post, Ann Scott Tyson, December 20, 2006)

The VA's mental-health experts started pushing for specialized PTSD programs in all medical centers in the 1980s. Top VA officials agreed "in concept" that it would be a good idea. But in 2005 and 2006, despite telling Congress that it was setting aside an additional $300 million for expanding mental-health services, such as PTSD programs, the VA didn't get around to spending $54 million of that, according to the Government Accountability Office.”
• Despite a decade-long effort to treat veterans at all VA locations, nearly 100 local VA clinics provided virtually no mental-health care in 2005.
• Mental-health care is wildly inconsistent from state to state. In some places, veterans receive individual psychotherapy sessions. In others, they meet mostly for group therapy. Some veterans are cared for by psychiatrists; others see social workers.
• The lack of adequate psychiatric care strikes hard in the western and rural states that have supplied a disproportionate share of the soldiers in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — often because of their large contingents of National Guard and Army Reserves.
Moreover, the return of so many veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan is squeezing the VA's ability to treat yesterday's soldiers from Vietnam, Korea and World War II.
"We can't do both jobs at once within current resources," a committee of VA experts wrote in a 2006 report, saying it was concerned about the absence of specialized PTSD care in many areas and the decline in the number of PTSD visits veterans receive. (McClatchy 2007)

Department of Veteran Affairs promising to beef up its mental health services in response. Veterans of previous conflicts continue to have problems as well, and the VA has estimated that a total of 5000 suicides among veterans can be expected this year.
However, CBS News has now completed a five-month study of death records for 2004-05 which shows that the actual figures are "much higher" than those reported by the VA. Across the total US veteran population of 25 million, CBS found that suicide rates were more than twice as high as for non-veterans according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide accounted for 32,439 deaths in 2004. (Stunning Veterans Suicide Rate, David Edwards, Muriel Kane, CBS, November 13, 2007)

But that same year officials in the Department of Veterans Affairs spent $2.6 billion on their credit cards as reported by the Associated Press Hope Yen. What did they spend the money on? $3.1 million purchases including casinos, high price hotels, movie tickets, and high end stores.

By 2008 another $2.7 million was handed over to a contractor to make phone calls. Yep~phone calls! 570,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were supposed to be called to find out why they hadn’t gone to the VA.

“The first calls will go to about 17,000 veterans who were sick or injured while serving in the wars. If they don’t have a care manager, the VA says they will be given one.

The next round of calls will target 555,000 veterans from the wars who have been discharged from active duty, but have not reached out to the VA for services. For five years after their discharge from the military, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have access to health care at the VA. The effort will cost about $2.7 million and will be handled by a government contractor.

The agency has faced complaints that a backlog in claims and bureaucratic hurdles have prevented some recent veterans from getting proper mental and physical care. Earlier this week, two Democratic senators accused the VA’s top mental health official of trying to cover up the number of veteran suicides and said he should resign.” (VA to call Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, Associated Press, April 24, 2008)

As for the reports on military and veterans committing suicide, hope of actually doing something eroded when the media refused to correct their published numbers. If they can't even get that right, and the public doesn't spend their time tracking news reports, nothing will change and when the next round of Congress takes their chairs, when the next Administration takes the Oval Office, the men and women risking their lives will face more and more suffering and some other TV personality will be complaining about what hasn't happened. The ugly truth is, they are paying the price for their service no matter who is in the chair.