Bush budget plan cuts verteran's health care.

This is from.. This story doesn't seem to have been widely disseminated as yet. It seems that veterans medical care is one of the entitlement's that Bush intends to trim. It will not a popular move if he actually does it.


Bush budget plan cuts veterans health care

Cutbacks aimed to take effect after next president is in office

By Andrew Taylor THE ASSOCIATED PRESS





WASHINGTON— The Bush administration plans to cut funding for veterans’ health care two years from now — even as badly wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system.

Bush is using the cuts, critics say, to help fulfill his pledge to balance the budget by 2012.

After an increase sought for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing rapidly — by more than 10 percent in many years — White House budget documents assume consecutive cutbacks in 2009 and 2010 and a freeze thereafter.


The proposed cuts are unrealistic in light of recent VA budget trends — its medical care budget has risen every year for two decades and 83 percent in the six years since Bush took office — sowing suspicion that the White House is simply making them up to make its long-term deficit figures look better.

“Either the administration is willingly proposing massive cuts in VA health care,” said U.S. Rep. Thomas C. Edwards, D-Texas, chairman of the panel overseeing the VA’s budget. “Or its promise of a balanced budget by 2012 is based on completely unrealistic assumptions.”

Edwards said that a more realistic estimate of veterans costs is $16 billion higher than the Bush estimate for 2012.

In fact, even the White House doesn’t seem serious about the numbers. It says the long-term budget numbers don’t represent actual administration policies. Similar cuts assumed in earlier budgets have been reversed.

The veterans cuts, said White House budget office spokesman Sean Kevelighan, “don’t reflect any policy decisions. We’ll revisit them when we do the (future) budgets.”

The number of veterans coming into the VA health care system has been rising by about 5 percent a year as the number of people returning from Iraq with illnesses or injuries keep rising. Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans represent almost 5 percent of the VA’s patient caseload, and many are returning from battle with grievous injuries requiring costly care, such as traumatic brain injuries.

All told, the VA expects to treat about 5.8 million patients next year, including 263,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The White House budget office, however, assumes that the veterans’ medical services budget — up 83 percent since Bush took office and winning a big increase in Bush’s proposed 2008 budget — can absorb a 2 percent cut the following year and remain essentially frozen for three years in a row after that.

“It’s implausible,” U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said of the budget projections.

The White House made virtually identical assumptions last year — a big increase in the first year of the budget and cuts for every year thereafter to veterans medical care. Now, the White House estimate for 2008 is more than $4 billion higher than Bush figured last year.

Returned US vets face long waits for treatment

In the recent budget Bush attacks entitlements such as Medicare and Medicaid as being too expensive while at the same time he promotes huge military expenditures. However, returned vets have medical entitlements. It seems he is already cutting back on those.


Troops return to painful wait for needed help


Monday, 05 February 2007
By Andrew Weaver and Ray McGovern

The California Nurses Association reported that in the first quarter of 2006, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs "treated 20,638 Iraq veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder, and they have a backlog of 400,000 cases." A returning soldier has to wait an average of 165 days for a VA decision on initial disability benefits, and an appeal can take up to three years.

This is unacceptable and reprehensible.

02/05/07 "ICHBlog" -- - The saying "War is hell" doesn't begin to describe how horrible it has been for tens of thousands in our military in Iraq and Afghanistan. War inevitably involves witnessing and sometimes engaging in gruesome acts of violence. It is a shocking confrontation with death and devastation. It is normal for human beings to react to war's psychic trauma with profound fear, anger, grief, repulsion, helplessness and horror - or with emotional numbness and disbelief.

Trauma is the Greek word for "wound." Just as a physical wound from combat can cause suffering in the body, psychological trauma can cause acute suffering of mind and spirit.

It is not surprising to find that an assessment of more than 220,000 military personnel returning from Iraq published in the April Journal of the American Medical Association found that nearly one in five has significant mental health problems. Repeated tours of duty increase the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder by 50 percent.

At the same time, we are hearing disturbing news reports that these traumatized soldiers are not receiving the mental heath care they urgently require. Last month, National Public Radio journalist Daniel Zwerdling did an extensive story on the military's treatment of personnel returning from Iraq who suffer from emotional problems, including PTSD.

Veterans coming home stated that their superiors have harassed and punished them for seeking help for psychological problems triggered by their service in Iraq. Several of the soldiers' supervisors acknowledged the callous treatment.

A recent national study by the Government Accountability Office found that most of the troops who show signs of PTSD were not referred to mental health professionals, despite Pentagon claims, in NPR's report, "that providing support to soldiers with emotional problems is a top priority" and "that resources are being made available to returning veterans."

If the same disastrous pattern unfolds that affected Vietnam-era veterans, and these PTSD sufferers do not obtain appropriate and timely assistance, tens of thousands will become unnecessarily and tragically addicted to drugs or alcohol, and many may commit suicide. Besides the 58,000 lost in combat, we lost tens of thousands of Vietnam-era military personnel to suicide and drugs.

The American people must actively advocate and demand appropriate treatment for veterans who have been psychologically wounded by war.

Andrew J. Weaver is a United Methodist minister, research psychologist and author in New York City. His e-mail is aweaver747@aol.com. Ray McGovern was an Army officer and a CIA analyst and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. His e-mail is rrmcgovern@aol.com.

First published by
the Baltimore Sun

Medical costs of US Iraq and Afghan vets could be above 600 billion

This will be a huge extra cost on the system of entitlements in the US. Many US politicians continually carp about the costs of entitlements and try to cut them back. There will surely be a backlash against attempts to cut these benefits as well there should be.


Care for U.S. veterans could cost $662 bln: study

Reuters
Friday, February 2, 2007; 2:08 PM



BOSTON (Reuters) - Medical costs for U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could range from $350 billion to $662 billion over the next 40 years, as soldiers survive injuries that would have killed them in past conflicts, according to a Harvard University study.

Due to improvements in battlefield medicine and equipment, there are now about 16 "nonmortally wounded" soldiers for every death, far more than the 2.6 soldiers wounded per death in Vietnam, the study said, citing Department of Veterans' Affairs data.

The author of the study, Linda Bilmes, a lecturer at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, presented her findings at an academic conference in January. They were released publicly by the university this week.

The potential costs include medical care, disability payments and other benefits paid to injured veterans and assume that 44 percent of veterans eventually claim disability. That was the percentage of claims from the first Gulf War. Bilmes' calculations assume that by 2016, 2 million soldiers will have participated in these wars.

Spending on health care has been on the rise in the United States in recent years and now accounts for more than 15 percent of the U.S. economic output, according to data from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group that funds research on health care.