Letting Our Veterans Down

[unhappycamper]

President Bush watches retired Army Sgt. Major Mike Welsh in a rehabilitation session at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington last month. Looking on are former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, left, and former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, co-chairs of the President’s Commission on Care for America’s Returning Wounded Warriors.


Letting Our Veterans Down
Posted on Sep 13, 2007
Aaron Glantz


The sorry state of care of American veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is not accidental. It’s on purpose. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush Administration has fought every effort to improve care for wounded and disabled veterans.

“The Department of Defense went to war in Iraq. They hired hundreds of thousands of extra soldiers from the Guard and Reserve to make the military larger so that they could do the invasion of Iraq,” noted Paul Sullivan, a veteran of the first Gulf War who was working as a high-ranking civil servant at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington when America invaded Iraq.

“However, the Department of Veterans Affairs, they didn’t hire more doctors, and they didn’t hire more bureaucrats to help them with their paperwork.

Indeed, as the country prepared for war, the Bush administration was actively involved in scaling back veterans’ benefits. In January 2003, the VA announced that, as a cost cutting-move, it would start turning away middle-income veterans who apply for medical benefits.

The administration also proposed making the VA’s prescription drug benefit less generous, increasing co-payments for many veterans from $7 to $15 and requiring a $250 annual fee as well.

President Bush even proposed eliminating disability payments for veterans who abuse drugs or alcohol, despite the fact that substance abuse has long been connected to psychological trauma caused by the horrors of combat.


Rest of article at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070913_glantz_sep_13_va_story/

[hobbit709]

1. The bastards have let everybody down

Except for their well-funded cronies. What they've done to the vets is symptomatic of what they've done to the American people in general. Once again, the ones who have given the most to their country have been screwed.

[blm]

2. I'm pissed at the cover Shalala is giving Bush on this.

.