National Nurses United

Walter Reed Scandal Symbolizes a Broader Pattern here's another side to the scandals at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other Veterans Administration facilities. The Bush administration's attitude toward our wounded veterans parallels its behavior toward the rest of our healthcare system—neglect, inadequate funding, and privatization. It also illustrates a disturbing pattern of misplaced priorities, record spending on a disastrous war while our healthcare security for veterans and millions of other Americans is left behind. Here's a snapshot of the administration's greatest domestic disaster since Katrina. It starts with brutally substandard care and abandonment of tens of thousands of veterans, not just at Walter Reed, but also at VA hospitals and clinics around the country, as the Washington Post has revealed in ghastly detail. Second, it's starving veterans' care. Since 2001, federal allocations for veterans' medical care lag behind overall healthcare spending, rather stunning when you consider we have sent 1.5 million of our young men and women to Iraq and Afghanistan and more than 184,000 have sought VA care after serving. Due to funding cuts, some 263,257 veterans were denied enrollment for Veterans Administration health coverage in 2005. Enrollment has been suspended for those deemed not having service-related injuries or illnesses. The final piece is privatization. As the Army Times noted, Walter Reed handed a five-year, $120 million contract to a private company run by an ex-Halliburton executive. The contracting out of support services was followed by a mass exodus of support personnel, one reason for the shoddy care. To make matters worse, there's the recent disclosure about the horrifying, long term costs of caring for our nation's war wounded. Harvard University recently released research findings predicting the U.S. will need to spend as much as $662 billion over T APRIL 2007 the next 40 years on medical costs for the tens of thousands of injured veterans. Sadly, the real social and health consequences could be far greater. In a July 2005 article in Harper's Magazine, Ronald Glasser, MD, wrote that a very large number of the war wounded are amputees and soldiers blinded and brain damaged, who will require extensive social support in a society that increasingly devalues our social safety net. Army neurologists, wrote Glasser, fear that the severe brain injuries are being under diagnosed and will leave many veterans with lasting cognitive and emotional damage that don't fit neatly into budgetary forecasts, but will be devastating to the veterans and their families. No wonder that when the president visited Walter Reed weeks after the story broke, the president of Veterans for America, Bobby Muller, told the conservative Washington Times, "Walter Reed is not a photo op. Walter Reed is still broken. The [Department of Defense] healthcare system is still broken." If you think the crisis of veterans' care is an aberration, look at other ways our healthcare safety net is being dismantled. Since President Bush arrived in Washington, the number of uninsured has ballooned by 11 percent. It's not much better for the insured. Nearly half say their insurer has refused to pay a medical bill they received, about a third say they have hesitated seeking needed care due to cost. Today a third of credit card debt is linked to medical bills. Concurrently, the number of public hospitals in America has fallen by 30 percent the past 30 years, a period in which the combined debt of state and local governments has grown by 852 percent to nearly $200 billion. The U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other nation, but much of it is diverted into the pockets of corporate CEOs, gobbled up in record profits for the healthcare industry, and consumed by administrative waste. The commission that advises Congress on Medicare reported last week that Medicare has to spend 12 percent more for care that is W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G administered through private insurers than through traditional Medicare. Meanwhile the healthcare lobby cheerleads for more privatization, and the Bush administration, joined by a number of politicians and even some advocacy groups, argue that the solution to our healthcare nightmare is more private insurance, not more healthcare. Then there's the war. While the Walter Reed disgrace was heating up, the administration was back on Capitol Hill, hat in hand, not for our veterans or the families who have to hold garage sales for their children's health. It was seeking another $142 billion in additional war funding. The same $142 billion would pay for 8.7 million hospital stays for heart attack victims. It's also nearly four times what the administration has proposed this year for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Compare our funding priorities to other industrialized nations. Our nation trails 36 other countries in the mortality rate for adults ages 15 to 60, 31 countries in infant mortality, and ranks just 26th in the mortality rate for cardio vascular disease. Yet we spend far more in defense, nearly four times as much of our gross domestic product as Japan, Canada, and Spain—three of the countries ahead of us in most health barometers. All those nations, of course, also have some form of guaranteed universal healthcare system, sort of an expanded Medicare as has been proposed for the U.S. in HR 676 in Congress, and SB 840 in California. The public is ready for it. The latest New York Times/CBS poll found that 64 percent said the government should guarantee health insurance for all, 55 percent identified it as the top domestic priority for Congress and the president. The Bush administration can fire a general or two, but until it shows the same commitment to caring for the war wounded and the rest of our nation's health that it does in waging war, Walter Reed will just be another name on a growing list of shame. —deborah burger, rn and cna/nnoc president REGISTERED NURSE 7

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