Walter Reed not the issue

By Deborah Burger, RN
South Florida Sun Sentinel
April 9, 2007

There's another side to the ongoing scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center as well as 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 health care security for veterans and millions of other Americans is left behind.

For those too horrified to read the details, 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 at VA hospitals and clinics around the country, as The Washington Post has revealed in ghastly detail.

Second, starving veterans' care. Since 2001, federal allocations for veterans' medical care lag behind overall health care spending, rather stunning when you consider we have sent 1.5 million of our young men and women to Iraq and Afghanistan and over 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 notes, 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.

If you think this 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 health care than any other nation, but much of it is diverted into the pockets of corporate CEOs, gobbled up in record profits for the health care 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 administered through private insurers than through traditional Medicare.

Meanwhile the health care lobby cheerleads for more privatization, and the Bush administration, joined by a number of politicians and even some advocacy groups, argues that the solution to our health care nightmare is more private insurance, not more health care.

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 cardiovascular disease. Yet we spend far more on 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 United.States in HR 676. 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 is president of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.