If you are eligible for Veteran's benefits

President Obama's health care will NOT take it away:

Matt Flavin, Director of Veterans and Wounded Warrior Policy, explains that nothing in health insurance reform will affect veterans' access to the care they get now. To the contrary, the President's budget greatly expands coverage for veterans who have been denied access in the past.

Listen to the intelligent answers the Obama administration has prepared to respond to the idiotic lies saturating the media and deliberately confusing the public.

The best worsts of the week

Of these ten.

Look at number six and guess who it is:

- Voted AGAINST an amendment providing $20 billion to the VA's medical facilities. (5/4/06)

- Voted AGAINST providing $430 million to the VA for outpatient care "and treatment for veterans," one of only 13 senators to do so. (4/26/06)

- Voted AGAINST increasing VA funding by $1.5 billion by closing corporate loopholes. (3/14/06)

- Voted AGAINST increasing VA funding by $1.8 billion by ending "abusive tax loopholes." (3/10/04)

- Voted AGAINST a $650 million increase in veterans' medical care funding. (8/1/01)

Which politician is so against supporting our troops that (s)he would vote like this?? Obviously some dirty rotten liberal Demo..... uh..... Republican?

How could this be?



crossposted at American Street

I hope the Veteran's administration is ready for this

Because this will go on for years. We are poisoning our own soldiers along with everyone else in Iraq:

Governments deny it, but many people have long suspected that depleted uranium weapons may cause cancer. It looks as if the suspicions were right.
Depleted uranium (DU) is a dense, weakly radioactive metal used in armour-piercing shells. Hundreds of tonnes of them were fired by US and UK forces in Iraq in 2003. Previous research at the US government's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico found that people exposed to DU dust were at little extra risk of developing cancers.
Now the first study of DU's effects on human lung cells suggests otherwise. Toxicologist John Wise and colleagues at the University of Southern Maine in Portland exposed cultures of human bronchial fibroblasts to particles of uranium oxide typically found in DU dust. Chromosomes in the cells mutated and the cells died, genotoxic effects that increased with the particle concentration. This may increase a person's risk of lung cancer, the team conclude.

Update 5/15: Didn't we force our troops to get these shots as well?

Some Israeli soldiers have reportedly developed tumours and suffered infections after being used in tests by the Israeli military to develop an anthrax vaccine.

The report televised on Israel's Channel 2 on Monday said that several of the 700 soldiers who volunteered to test the vaccine have since suffered medical problems.

Giora Martinovich, the former chief medical officer for the Israeli military, confirmed that the tests were conducted from 1998 to 2006 and that some of the volunteers had suffered side-effects.

While lying in your VA hospital bed and feeling ill

Be more assertive in beating off a persistent chaplain who notices you are an Orthodox Jew and decides you need to be converted.

While the staff decides you don't need kosher food.

Onward, Christian soldiers!

The Department of Veterans Affairs is in a paperwork shambles

But what else is new?

WASHINGTON - The Department of Veterans Affairs must change the way it evaluates former soldiers for post-traumatic stress disorder if it hopes to eliminate the wide disparities across the country in how much it compensates those who have the disability, a new report has concluded.

Released Tuesday by the highly regarded Institute of Medicine, the report says that the recent surge in cases of PTSD, coupled with ineffective VA rules, suggests that veterans could be getting disability payments that are too high or too low.

[snip]

Post-traumatic stress disorder is one of the most prevalent conditions - mental or physical - to emerge from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Often tied to intense warfare, the mental condition can manifest itself in hair-trigger nerves, flashbacks and nightmares, which often lead to intense feelings of fear, helplessness and horror. Some former soldiers isolate themselves or try to numb their memories with drugs or alcohol. Some, unable to cope, have killed themselves.

Although some soldiers always have had anxiety or shell shock in the wake of warfare, the acceptance of the diagnosis PTSD became common after the Vietnam War. The report released today shows that the number of veterans who receive disability compensation for PTSD has skyrocketed in recent years, although part of that growth might reflect a new tendency to diagnosis PTSD instead of similar anxiety diagnoses. Veterans diagnosed with PTSD linked to their military service are eligible for monthly compensation checks.

The VA has come under fire in recent years for the way it handles disability compensation cases, including its inability to bring down a huge backlog of cases and reduce its high number of errors. Wide variations among the 57 regional offices that handle cases compound the delays and mistakes.

Among the more vexing problems are the wide swings in the amount of disability payments depending on a veteran's regional office. Veterans in some states get more money per month than those in other states. Currently, a veteran who's considered 100 percent disabled is eligible for a monthly payment of $2,471.

It is so nice to see Bush's Plan A has given enough money to prepare the medical and psychological military services for an inundation of wounded soldiers....

Amazing how paperwork gets lost....

Whenever this administration has to actually help somebody. McClatchy's Wounded Warriors series continues:

A tale of a soldier injured in Iraq and unable to get benefits because 1) the DOD and the VA can't 'access the Defense Department's computer system to search service records', 2) somewhere his paperwork was lost. What makes this memorable is that the TV reporter managed to contact the soldier's sergeant who provided information, and presented it to the VA. At the end of the day, though, the VA still says it can't find the people that the TV found easily. [WTNH, Conn.]

I'm sure the Veteran's hospital is ready and waiting

To deal with these soldiers as they come home:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - High rates of mental health disorders are being diagnosed among US military personnel soon after being released from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to investigators in San Francisco.

They estimate that out of 103,788 returning veterans, 25 percent had a mental health diagnosis, and more than half of these patients had two or more distinct conditions.

Those most at risk were the youngest soldiers and those with the most combat exposure, Dr. Karen H. Seal at the Veterans Administration Medical Center and associates report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Seal's group based their findings on records of US veterans deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan who were seen at VA health care facilities between September 2001 and September 2005.

In addition to the high rate of mental health disorders, about one in three (31 percent) were affected by at least one psychosocial diagnosis.

The most frequent diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder. Other diagnoses included anxiety disorder, depression, substance use disorder, or other behavioral or psychosocial problem.

We're ready to take care of their problems. Right? Right?!

The way a country treats its needy, poor, and helpless

Shows the world its priorities, morality, and soul.

Americablog has delved into the horrors awaiting the Gulf veterans. Saying no to a legless vet wanting to be at a Bush ceremony honoring another vet, refusing aid to a soldier with mental difficulties, denying services at Walter Reed, abusing veterans, removing from a committee chair a GOP official too 'vet-friendly'.

Supporting the troops?

No, Soldier Bond, we expect you to die!

Update: Gee. Shine a little spotlight on the horrors Walter Reed is making our soldiers endure...and they fix the place up!

Walter Reed Army Medical Center began repairs today on Building 18, a former hotel used to house outpatients recuperating from combat injuries suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has been plagued with mold, leaky plumbing and a broken elevator.

The facility's commander, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, said Army staff members inspected each of the 54 rooms at the building and discovered that outstanding repair orders for half the rooms had been completed, but he said mold removal had begun on several rooms. He also said holes in ceilings, stained carpets and leaking faucets were being fixed.

Glenn Greenwald talks about Dana Priest's reporting:

Within the past few days, Priest (along with Post reporter Anne Hull) has published two separate, amply documented articles detailing the wretched conditions which the Bush administration has imposed on U.S. troops who are wounded in battle. Priest's articles powerfully demonstrate that those who exploit troops as a prop to shield themselves from criticism and justify a whole array of extremist policies could not, in fact, care any less for the welfare of the troops whom they exploit.

And takes apart Jonah Goldberg's pooh-poohing of her work:

Finally, whatever benign intent might have been inferred from Jonah's original post was undermined, I think, by his subsequent posting with approval of that anonymous e-mail which had no purpose other than to suggest that this whole story was overblown and contrived. Either way, it simply is striking that upon reading those very lengthy, well-documented, and somewhat wrenching articles, Jonah's instinct was to question the reporters' credibility and quickly post an unverified e-mail designed to dilute the entire story. But that reaction is preferable, I suppose, to Jonah's fellow troop-exploiting warmongers, who seem to want to ignore the story completely.

Bush Administration program to deal with veterans: Nonstop process of stalling.

One of the soldiers quoted in the Washington Post article:

"We've done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it," said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. "We don't know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling."

John Aravosis of Americablog reacts to the Washington Post article:

This is beyond sickening. We have to sit back and listen to GOP members of Congress, George Bush's White House, and that pig General Petraeus dare to tell us how WE'RE the ones turning our backs on the troops, when all three of them knew this was going on under their watch and none of them lifted a finger to fix it.

Our soldiers were lied to about this war, they were lied to about their enlistment, they were never given a plan for victory or the numbers of troops they needed, they still don't have the armor they need for their vehicles. And now, the young men and women wounded and maimed for our country are living in government-run pig-stys not fit for farm animals. The American Taliban and the detainees in Guantanamo get better conditions than this, all courtesy of the Republicans.

The Republicans want to talk about treason? They want to talk about slowly bleeding our troops to death? Fine. Forget the agenda Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid had planned. It's high time we helped our troops. And if the Republicans won't do it, then we will. Let's ensure that the American people and our troops know which party got them into this mess, and which party is getting them out of it. Let the hearings and investigation and legislation begin until we fix these problems once and for all.

Supporting the veterans

With excellent health care:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 Trauma center doctors in the United States can't access medical information needed to treat soldiers severely injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Physicians at four Veterans Administration trauma centers were receiving complete digital records from the Pentagon until the end of January when access to the Joint Patient Tracking Application was suddenly cut off, The Washington Post reports.
The action was ordered by the director of the Pentagon's Health Deployment Systems who said federal regulations and public law required that data use agreements and controls be in place in order for the physicians to use the system.

Since the cutoff, there have been meetings between the VA and Pentagon officials but access has yet to be restored.

Digital medical records track the care given wounded troops from the moment of their arrival at a field hospital through their evacuation to the United States.