Shameful Ignorance: the USG's Abysmal VA Record

I don't like venturing into the venues of public policy on this blog for two reasons: this is a blog intended to entertain and inform in the fictional realm and its associated experiences, and I am not any kind of policy wonk possessed of a keen understanding of issues with multifaceted causality.  Nor do I want to be.

But last week was Veterans Day and I thought it would be appropriate, given that we have had many debates among people who think they are fit to run for our land's highest office, yet not a single one of them has addressed what I think is the most pressing national question right now.

What are we going to do to take better care of our veterans needing post-service health care?

2006 Rolling Thunder Run for the Wall (US Navy photo by Journalist 1st Class Kristin Fitzsimmons) 

If this topic doesn't interest you, go back to surfing for porn or sarcastic memes; I'm sure there's a joke out there already told that you feel compelled to retell in uniquely derivative ways.  For all of us who will be eventually shamed, guilt-tripped, or civic-prided into voting next November by friends, relatives, a sense of duty, or that poorly fed voter-drive volunteer hanging around outside the Chipotle, it should be appalling that the debates, particularly on the GOP side, have been fractious with the rattling of war sabers or the toning down of said rattling -- even the Donkey Party promises to rattle them a little bit.  (You know, not too loud so it won't wake the neighbors, and only when it's absolutely necessary, like an impending GOP invasion of both chambers of Congress.  But I'm digressing).

Revenge for Benghazi, the threat of a nuclear North Korea, Vladimir Putin stealing that Super Bowl ring -- there seems to be no shortage of reasons for sending in the Sixth Fleet and delivering antiseptic (for us, anyway) killing blows via proxy warfare to enemies real and perceived in the current political circle-jerk.  However, even with the new and politically fashionable option of drone strikes, there is no ignoring the hard military tenet that a country has not been vanquished until an occupying army has marched onto its soil.  It's the social security OASI/DI pay-as-you-go system as applied to modern warfare: at some point, those payments will come due and you will need to ante up with the soldiers that you brought to your chosen theaters of war.  The drones just clear the roads and flatten the insurgent nests and the daisy-cutters cut the daisies, or so we're told.

But while we occasionally pay tribute to the service of our men and women in the military with parades, memorials and bombarding them with hordes of five-year-olds waving flags, these are drops in the bucket compared to what they really need: health care that delivers on the promises, if not expressly made, then certainly implied, that a grateful nation would take care of their wounds both physical and psychological.  The truth is, though, that our government has not kept its end of the deal.  And I honestly don't know what it's going to take to get it to even start, given that this is not the first time, or even the first decade, that we have continued dropping this ball.

The Department of Veterans Affairs -- a department whose specific mission is to take care of our veterans and which is headed by a Cabinet-level secretary -- has done an abysmally poor job of delivering badly needed health care to its patient population.  Not just now, not just in the past few years -- we have sucked at this for at least the past quarter century.  The highest-ranking VA official was elevated to Cabinet-level status in 1989 specifically so that the VA could streamline care to veterans and cut through the red tape, and pare down the backlogs for those awaiting treatment.  But we still suck at it, and suck terribly.

Remember the most recent scandal?  Anywhere from 35 to 40 veterans died while waiting for treatment from Phoenix-based VA facilities in 2014; or rather, let's clarify that -- 2014 was the year the story broke.  We can only guess how many months and years it took for that backlog to ramp up and garner scrutiny from someone (in this case, it was CNN which broke the story).

Just wrap your head around that for a moment: men and women who served in the military and survived their tours of duty came back only to perish at the hands of US government red tape, delays and other assorted evasions of responsibility because they couldn't get the treatment they were promised.  It was a bad time to be a veteran in the Phoenix area.  It's an even worse time to be an American voter who keeps electing the same gaggle of incompetents to public office.  Once our shores have been defended and the hatches have been battened down, there should be no greater national obligation than to take care of our returning wounded.

But this care has been sorely lacking.  I won't rehash the litany of failures here as they are well-cataloged and footnoted in the Wikipedia page on the VA scandal of 2014.  Suffice it to say, this is a gaping, bottomless well that the Veterans Health Administration has still not managed to fill.

This from a government whose requirements upon enlisting or being commissioned into service can result in death, impairment, long periods of hardship, protracted combat missions, long hours, low pay, frequent separation from their spouses, children and loved ones, and deployments to dangerous duty on short notice -- honestly, these men and women deserve, and have deserved, much better from us.  There is not a single person in this country who has not been touched by the experience of a returning veteran in need of care -- family members, a friend, a co-worker, a neighbor, the person who fixed your car, sold you life insurance, or rescued your cat from a tree.  Veterans are everywhere, if you look.

It makes the frequent calls for war all the more noxious, regardless of which political party blasts the trumpet.  We have no business committing another single boot to foreign dirt or another single bullet to a foreign firefight until this country's leaders ensure that the Department of Veterans Affairs finally gets its shit together.  The injuries are not always physical; having the same limbs and appendages upon returning is no guarantee that the mental wear-and-tear of what you went through won't resurface, sometimes years later.  The costs of combat are indeed high and involve much more than just a guaranteed ration of beans, bullets and band-aids.

Congressman Charlie Rangel once suggested bringing back the draft as a way of putting the brakes on what he called at the time the Republican's penchant for committing troops to the conflict du jour.  But I call bullshit on that logic; although a few members of Congress actually served with distinction in the military, others have sought to use their influence to get their kids plum assignments stateside, far away from the front lines, particularly during wartime (I'm looking at you, George W. Bush, Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen, Jr.).  Rangel's draft idea would only hurt the same people it has historically hurt; the poor, the underprivileged, the ones who can't afford college for any number of reasons.

But not a single candidate running for office in this year has even broached the issue of the VA's failures.  It's not sexy, it's not what sells, it's not what people care about in this election cycle.  And don't give me talk of reform or a pretty little gussied-up legislative bill -- we don't need to reform a system, we need someone to go into the VA's ivory towers and make the existing process work faster and better.

That may be the real tragedy in all this; not that politicians are up to the same old bag of tricks, but that nobody cares to hold them accountable for the responsibility this country has to look after those who came back wounded and just want to not die or go broke waiting for treatment.  So excuse me for not giving a shit about an email scandal or a voting record or even if some asshole's comb-over is covering up a bald spot.

Right or left, our veterans deserve much better than the current spate of pandering clowns who think they have all the answers.