America's Veterans Left in the Lurch

By Jeanine Plant, AlterNet. Posted March 7, 2007.

Two years ago, Lorin Bannerman, a 43-year-old Sergeant in the Army National Guard, came home to his wife saddled with baggage from Iraq. He didn’t receive a full mental health screening from a veterans’ hospital for seven months and wasn’t diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, for months after that. Two years later, Bannerman and his family bear the lingering scar. He and his wife are now separated.

Jon Town knows he incurred short-term memory loss and severe hearing damage from the shrapnel that struck his neck in Iraq in 2005. Yet he’s been deprived of a signing bonus, disability pay, and medical support because his discharge papers state he had a personality disorder before he enlisted in the Army. Ever since, he’s been in a vicious struggle with the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). For now, he is unemployed and lives with his wife and son at his parents’ home in Findlay, Ohio.

This January, Jonathan Schulze requested admission to a Minneapolis VA. The former marine was haunted by the many casualties he had witnessed and deaths of close friends. But the VA’s waiting list extended through March. Schulze knew he couldn’t wait that long, so he went to a different VA in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He told a staff member there he was suicidal but was met with a similar response: He was number 26 on their waiting list. Four days later, Schulze committed suicide.

In the wake of stories like Schulze’s tragic demise, which got ample media coverage, more commonplace stories like Bannerman’s and Town’s emerge. And recent coverage of the decrepit conditions at Walter Reed, the military’s flagship hospital outside of Washington, D.C., has prompted a wave of enraged veterans with similar experiences to speak out. Though Walter Reed is run by the Department of Defense, all of these stories call attention to the VA’s appalling ineptness to adequately care for returning veterans. Chronic under-funding, nightmarish paperwork, and a cumbersome transition from DoD payroll to the VA system are hampering the VA’s ability to provide basic healthcare and dispense benefits to recent veterans.

While the VA has been traditionally under-funded over the years, a number of recent studies show that the department is increasingly ill-equipped to deal with the veterans in the system in spite of the rosy rhetoric of VA Secretary James Nicholson. And by such accounts, the VA is woefully unprepared for the possible influx of future veterans: the tens of thousands currently deployed in the war on terror.

“Before this war, during peacetime, the VA was staffed for a peacetime military,” Steve Robinson, director of government relations at Veterans for America, said during testimony in January before Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. “When the nation surged to this war, the VA did not surge with it. Now the VA finds itself playing catch up and in many states, they find themselves overwhelmed.”

Chronic Funding Shortfalls

Many critics attribute the VA crunch to lack of adequate funding. Chronic funding shortfalls happen year after year because much of the VA budget is beholden to the vagaries of federal discretionary spending -- a system through which the VA healthcare system competes with such programs as education and air and space travel.

This appropriations process has left the VA in a consistently vulnerable position, Carl Blake, the National Legislative Director of Paralyzed Veterans of America, said before the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs to advocate for the 2008 budget in mid-February. “No Secretary of Veterans Affairs, no VA hospital director, and no doctor running an outpatient clinic knows how to plan and even provide care on a daily basis without the knowledge that the dollars needed to operate those programs are going to be available when they need them.”

And despite a $2.8 billion increase in the VA’s budget for Fiscal Year 2007, which officially started on October 1, 2006, VA hospitals are only seeing that money now because, up until mid-February, it has been held up by Congress. Such delays force VA hospitals to hold off on hiring much-needed medical staff and to postpone long overdue construction projects.

See more stories tagged with: war, iraq, veterans, va, walter reed

Jeanine Plant is a New York-based freelance writer.

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