Can VA Health Care System Cope?
Dec. 1, 2006 at 3:13 PM
by Blogmaster
Can VA Health Care System Cope with Impending Wave of Returning GWOT Vets? By Larry Dean, Dec 1, 2006 The combination of remarkable advances in defensive armor and personal armor along with vastly improved battlefield medicine has permitted many, many soldiers to survive injuries that were not possible in past wars. Since the Vietnam War, there have been gigantic leaps in the quality of medical care provided to soldiers wounded on the battlefield ? help arrives faster, and medical advances in the treatment of trauma are vastly improved. This ?good news? means that the survival rates of troops injured in combat has shot up significantly during the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Now for some ?bad news? ? it is doubtful that the VA Health Care System, as currently established and funded, will be able to meet the needs of the survivors of the GWOT. Surviving warriors WILL require health care on an ongoing basis throughout their remaining life ? care that is the responsibility of our Veterans Administration Health Care System to provide, but it?s doubtful that the VA Health Care System will be up to the task. Many of our GWOT warriors are discharged soon after recovery - on 100 percent disability. After discharge they will need still more surgeries - some will require lifetime health care and they will be counting on the Veterans Administration to pay for it. This means the government (the VA Health Care System) will be facing massive costs in the VERY near future. According to recent research by Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard economist Linda Bilmes[1], ?caring for Iraq's wounded will cost the government $127 billion.? Also, from that same study, some other sobering statistics can be derived: ? The VA Health Care System experienced an increase of patient load from GWOT of 144,000 in the first quarter of 2006 ? 23% MORE than the current administration?s estimated case load for all of 2006. ? VA Health Care Costs have increased by $228 Billon in the last year alone. ? There were 250,000 new beneficiaries approved by the VA in the past year ? AND there is currently over 800,000 claims cases backlogged for adjudication in VA Claims centers ? half of those are from GWOT veterans. ? There were over 7,000 (over 20% of the injuries reported in 2006) cases of major head or spinal injuries reported among veterans returning from the GWOT during the past year. ? There were 6% of all injuries during the past year who are amputees (2100). "The costs that we see today are just the very, very tip of an enormous iceberg," says Bilmes. More than a quarter of returning Iraq veterans are filing claims for permanent service-related disabilities. And the researchers say Veterans Administration hospitals are already overwhelmed. "We have essentially another entitlement program, like a mini-Medicare situation," Bilmes says. "We have a large amount of costs that is going on for many years, and we have the Veterans Administration, which is completely ill-equipped and under funded." As a Vietnam veteran, with many relatives, friends and acquaintances who also Vietnam veterans - some of which were wounded in that war - I can comfortably state that the VA Health Care System did not adequately care for my generation. Without more, soundly based, projections for funding, the VA Health Care System will fail this generation of soldiers, too. We, as a society, must NOT permit the failures of obligatory support for past generations of veterans, to be repeated for our children. The Department of Veterans Affairs has made great improvements in recent years. Its hospitals now offer some of the best medical care in the world. The problem is that there are not enough facilities or staff to fulfill the VA?s obligations to war veterans. Only more money, furnished on a timely basis, can take up the slack that exists in the system today ? a situation that WILL be orders of magnitude worse in the VERY NEAR future. In spite of the supplemental funding provided to the VA in supplemental Defense Spending Appropriations, the Claims and Health Care functions continue to lag need. Case in point: in 2004, the VA had a backlog of 400,000 claims cases; in 2005 that backlog grew to over 500,000 cases; as of October, 2006 the backlog had grown to over 820,000 cases! These numbers are a pathetic statement of the VA System failure already facing veterans - and the really big influx of returning GWOT returning veterans has not even hit yet. All this is taking place in spite of the increases of funding for VA Health Care so diligently lobbied for by veteran?s organizations ? especially the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States national organization and letter writing campaigns of its State Departments and Posts. One simple action could improve the funding process for the VA ? Congressional leadership must pass a resolution to separate Veterans Administration funding from any other appropriations bills and agree to permit no riders to be attached to the VA appropriations bill. This simple step would then completely insulate veterans funding issues from partisan politics. If, after reading this paper, you agree with what has been presented here, please take action to contact your Senators and Congressmen and express your sentiments to them. You may use this document freely from which to extract any information that you wish to convey to your representatives. To find out how to contact your Congressman or Senator, click on either Senators on the Web or Representatives on the Web. [1] Encore: Iraq Hemorrhage," Update of "The Economic Costs of the Iraq War," by Joseph Stiglitz, with Professor Linda Bilmes, The Milken Institute Review, Fourth Quarter, pp. 76-83. What do you think?? Post a Comment below - just click on "Post a Comment".
