Congress sends message to PTSD veterans BOHICA

BOHICA
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
August 16, 2014

Members of Congress say they fixed problems with the VA with their latest bill worth billions.

The measure approved Thursday includes $10 billion in emergency spending to help veterans who can't get prompt appointments with VA doctors to obtain outside care; $5 billion to hire doctors, nurses and other medical staff; and about $1.5 billion to lease 27 new clinics across the country.

Sounds great unless you look back at all the other bills congress put out to fix the problems beginning with the first Congress making promises to veterans.

In 1789, with the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the first Congress assumed the burden of paying veterans benefits. The first federal pension legislation was passed in 1789. It continued the pension law passed by the Continental Congress.

To the creation of the Veterans Administration in 1929 and 1933 when President Roosevelt gained the authority to issue new veterans benefits.

First House Committee on Veterans Affairs in 1946, moving on up to when President Ronald Reagan appointed the first Secretary of Veterans Affairs in 1988.

President Reagan signed legislation in 1988 to elevate VA to Cabinet status and, on March 15, 1989, the Veterans Administration became the Department of Veterans Affairs. Edward J. Derwinski, VA administrator at the time, was appointed the first Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

When you consider how long this nation has depended on men and women risking their lives for the rest of us, it is harder to believe most of the things members of Congress say.

When some people talk, they use certain words and we think we know what they mean, but words are so tricky. Believe me, since I come from Massachusetts but live in Florida. You have no idea how much time is taken up explaining what I just said because our words are much different. (Ok so is the accent.) I use the word "wicked" when I want to exaggerate something. Some people hear the word "wicked" and think it is bad. In this case, the two meanings came crashing together.

(Don't even try to turn this into a patch. Only one company is being authorized to do it.)

BOHICA

BOHICA stands for bend over, here it comes again. It is an item of acronym slang which grew to regular use amongst the United States armed forces during the Vietnam War.

It is used colloquially to indicate that an adverse situation is about to repeat itself, and that acquiescence is the wisest course of action. It is commonly understood as a reference to being sodomized. An alternative etymology relates the expression to the days of sail and avoiding being struck by the boom, which would swing around the mast due to shifts in wind or the vessel's course.

Although it originated in the United States military forces, and is still commonly used by United States Air Force fighter crew chiefs and armament crews, its usage has spread to civilian environments, used to describe unavoidable, unpleasant situations that have inconvenienced someone before and are about to yet again.

In 2010 the VA rules changed to make it easier to have PTSD claims approved.

The VA is liberalizing the standard for veterans complaining PTSD by relaxing the evidence requirements for proving an in-service stressful event or stressor, streamlining the processing of PTSD claims which will result in veterans receiving more timely decisions.

This sounded really good but Congress didn't manage to increase mental health teams and claims processors enough to cover the flood of veterans finally trying to get the treatment and compensation they needed. The next step was changing the diagnosis so that more would not meet the criteria for PTSD. "About 1 in 3 soldiers found to have PTSD under the previous diagnostic standards were missed by the new criteria, according to today’s research in the journal the Lancet Psychiatry." Hey, it made sense to them for a reason. So bend over, here it comes again. Make it sound as if they were doing something to make it right for veterans and then take it away when they were not looking.

The latest part of the new Bill is to allow veterans to seek private healthcare if the VA is unable to deliver what they need, where they need it. Ok, and how well did it work after all these years they needed to put out another bill? It was happening in the 90's long before this latest Bill. It is called Fee Basis

The Fee Basis Unit processes payment to non-VA providers who have been issued formal authorizations by the medical center to deliver care. For example, the Washington DC VA Medical Center does not provide certain women’s health services. When such services are determined necessary, a VA provider will initiate a consult, requesting approval to send the patient to a non-VA provider. If that request for an non-VA authorization is approved, the Fee Basis office will process payment to the provider after the services are provided. By law, VA payment for services not authorized in advance is strictly limited.

This isn't the worst of it considering the VA has to treat what the military is doing to the troops before they even get to the VA. The Army started Comprehensive Soldier Fitness in 2009 designed to train soldiers to be resilient.

This is the meaning of resilient

: able to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens

: able to return to an original shape after being pulled, stretched, pressed, bent, etc.

: characterized or marked by resilience: as

a : capable of withstanding shock without permanent deformation or rupture
b : tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change

Resilient does not mean forever. Corelle has dish sets that last a long time. I have the same set I bought when I got married 30 years ago and some cups my Aunt had given me long before that. We use them everyday. These plates hold up to a lot but if you drop one on a tile floor, they shatter into millions of pieces. They are resilient but not indestructible. CSF made soldiers think they were not supposed to feel anything enough to make them change, or as General Ray Odierno put it last year when talking about military suicides going up, "Some of it is just personal make-up. Intestinal fortitude. Mental toughness that ensures that people are able to deal with stressful situations."

This was a horrifying move and clearly put soldiers at risk. Once they received the message they could train their brains to be "resilient" they assumed the worst within themselves and being mentally weak was part of it. Didn't matter what 40 years of research had discovered. Didn't matter that researchers started to look at the connection between combat and what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in WWI.

No matter how much Congress spent year after year the number of suicides went up and so did "bad paper discharges" in the thousands by every branch of the military. At least they stopped shooting soldiers for being cowards and malingering.


Courage

mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty

That is the point missed whenever you hear someone say "resilient" especially when talking about combat veterans.

Surviving youth enough to want to join the military is resilient.

Surviving basic training or boot camp is resilient.

Surviving deployment is resilient.

Doing everything you had to do while deployed into combat zones no matter how much pain you were in is beyond resilient.

That is far more valuable than being resilient. Being "resilient" won't give you what you need to take a bullet for the soldier next to you but being courageous will. This is what Congress still doesn't get. They just keep passing bills and spending on programs that have been failures on a massive scale.

What is it that veterans want in return for service? Simple. To be able to live as veterans among the civilians without having to sacrifice their futures because members of Congress have gotten away with decades of twisting words to make them sound as if they care.

Take care of their wounds and pay compensation when their service caused the loss of being able to work for paychecks but you better make damn sure caring for their wounds is actually what they need and the best there is instead of pushing what failed. Take care of the widows and orphans because while they were in fact GI. ("Government issue - supplies (as food or clothing or ammunition) issued by the government") they belonged to the rest of the family first and they were the last to say goodbye.