Congress
recently voted to send $87 billion to Iraq, money that will be used
to build everything from roads to power plants to hospitals. Yet
while Congress appears ready to rubber-stamp unlimited monies for
nation building in Iraq, thousands of our own soldiers at home are
languishing with substandard medical care.
You may have
read about conditions at Fort Stewart, Georgia, where hundreds of
injured reserve and National Guard soldiers are housed in deplorable
conditions and forced to wait months just to see a doctor. These
soldiers made huge sacrifices, leaving their families and jobs to
fight in Iraq. Now they find themselves living in hot, crowded,
unsanitary barracks and waiting far too long to see overworked
doctors. This is hardly the heroes� welcome they might have
expected. Only an expos� in a major newspaper brought attention to
their plight, prompting an embarrassed Defense department to rush
additional doctors to the base.
Many of these
men and women expressed shock at their treatment. They assumed
wounded soldiers returning from Iraq would receive priority
treatment, given the �support the troops� rhetoric coming from
Washington. Their complaints went ignored, however, until the media
became involved.
Similar
mistreatment of soldiers has been evident throughout our occupation
of Iraq. Some wounded soldiers convalescing at Walter Reed hospital
in Washington were forced to pay for hospital meals from their own
pockets! Other soldiers returning stateside for a two-week liberty
had to buy their own airfare home from the east coast. Still others
have paid for desert boots, night vision goggles, and other military
necessities with personal funds. It�s shocking that our troops are
forced to pay for basic items that should be supplied to them or
paid from the defense budget.
Perhaps the
most shameful mistreatment of our veterans is in the area of
concurrent receipt benefits. Existing federal rules force disabled
veterans to give up their military retirement pay in order to
receive VA disability benefits. This means every VA disability
dollar paid to a veteran is deducted from his retirement pay,
effectively creating a �disabled veterans tax.� No other group of
federal employees is subject to this unfair standard; in every other
case disability pay is viewed as distinct from standard retirement
pay.
For years
veterans have fought for concurrent receipt benefits to no avail.
Last week Congress finally passed a very limited concurrent receipt
law, but the change is unlikely to satisfy those disabled veterans
who need benefits the most. Under the new partial concurrent receipt
bill, only those veterans in essence deemed �disabled enough� will
qualify; this means roughly two-thirds of disabled veterans will not
receive concurrent receipt benefits at all. Even severely disabled
veterans who do qualify may never enjoy their long-sought relief,
because the bill passed by Congress takes ten years to phase in. How
sad that some disabled soldiers will die in the next decade without
seeing a penny of their concurrent receipt benefits.
Members of our armed forces deserve more than
platitudes when they return from foreign wars with illnesses or
disabilities. Unfortunately, the trust our soldiers place in the
federal government to provide for their health care has been
breached time and time again. Last week�s partial grant of
concurrent receipt benefits will prove woefully inadequate for most
of our disabled veterans, veterans who could be well-served with
just a fraction of the billions Congress gave away in
Iraq.
