A week ago, the Washington Post reported that Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.), the former chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, and his wife, used to routinely visit recovering troops at [tag]Walter Reed[/tag], but stopped in 2004 “out of frustration.” As the Post noted, “Young said he voiced concerns to commanders over troubling incidents he witnessed but was rebuffed or ignored.”
Young’s willingness to complain to military commanders was, I’m sure, intended to be helpful, and the article was damming for the Walter Reed leadership that failed to heed Young’s concerns. But the report raised another question: if the chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee saw first-hand that wounded troops were being mistreated three years ago, why didn’t he do more to address the problem?
Today, we learned the answer. Young said he could have gone public and brought troop neglect out into the open, but decided not to — in order to “avoid embarrassing the Army.”
“We got in Gen. Kiley’s face on a regular basis,” Young said, adding that he even contacted the commander of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda in the hopes of getting better care there for the patient with the aneurysm, though doctors at Walter Reed declined to transfer him….
“We did not go public with these concerns, because we did not want to undermine the confidence of the patients and their families and give the Army a black eye while fighting a war,” Young said.
Think about what Young is saying here. He and his wife, in one instance, found a wounded soldier lying in urine on his mattress pad in the hospital. They complained, but were ignored … and they dropped the issue. Young could have used his position to get these troops the help they needed, but intentionally kept quiet. Why? Because he was worried about public relations.
Remind me again why Republicans think they have the moral high ground on “supporting the troops”?
Indeed, in related story, [tag]Bush[/tag]’s [tag]VA[/tag] secretary was offered a proposal to help aid wounded veterans two years ago, but he decided it was more important to cut corners on his budget.
A proposal to keep seriously wounded vets from falling through the cracks of the bureaucracy was shelved in 2005 when Jim [tag]Nicholson[/tag] took over as the secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, according to the former VA employee who was responsible for tracking war casualties.
As a result, seriously wounded veterans continued to face long delays for health care and benefit payments after being discharged from the military, says former VA program manager Paul Sullivan.
The program, called the [tag]Contingency Tracking System[/tag], had been approved by Nicholson’s predecessor but died once Nicholson took over the VA, Sullivan told ABC News.
Sullivan said he was told the cost of the system — less than $1 million to build and requiring a handful of staff to maintain — was prohibitive.
When asked about the Contingency Tracking System at the White House Wednesday, Nicholson told ABC News, “I’m not sure I know what program you’re referring to.” He added that “when the VA gets patients…we instantly create an electronic medical record for them.”
In testimony before Congress today, a VA official confirmed that its current tracking system still depends on paper files and lacks the ability to download Department of Defense records into its computers, a key flaw originally identified as leading to veterans getting lost between the cracks.
I can appreciate the notion that $1 million may sound like a lot of money, but to put it in context, the United States spends well over $1 billion a week in Iraq. Nicholson, the Bush administration’s VA Secretary, chose not to spend one-thousandth of that on a computer system that would have stream lined the bureaucracy for all wounded veterans.
And then, just to literally add insult to injury, the president put Nicholson “in charge of an interagency task force to determine what can be done to deliver benefits and health care now to thousands of wounded vets who have struggled to receive care.” Breathtaking.
And as long as we’re on the subject, also take a look at the latest piece from Slate’s Fred Kaplan, who explains, “The scandals and shortfalls in the military’s health-care system stem from the same sensibility that produced the scandals and shortfalls in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It is the Bush administration’s sensibility of denial — its willful disinclination to face war’s true cost (in all senses of the word) and its readiness to use bookkeeping tricks to perpetuate the deception.”
Yet another national disgrace.