[Marxism] True cost of war -- wounded vets

["Nasir Khan" <nasir.khan@xxxxxxx>]

Republished; http://sudhan.wordpress.com and http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com 

AP: True Cost of War -- Staggering Number of Wounded Vets 

Editor & Publisher, March 07, 2008 7:40 AM ET 
NEW YORK: The number of wounded soldiers has become a hallmark of the nearly 
5-year-old Iraq war, pointing to both the use of roadside bombs as the 
extremists' weapon of choice and advances in battlefield medicine to save lives.

About 15 soldiers are wounded for every fatality, compared with 2.6 per death 
in Vietnam and 2.8 in Korea.

But with those saved soldiers comes a financial price - one veterans groups and 
others claim the government is unwilling to pay.

Those critics also say that the tens of thousands of soldiers wounded in Iraq 
are part of a political numbers game, one they say undermines the system meant 
to care for them.

The most frequently cited figure is the 29,320 soldiers wounded in action in 
Iraq as of Thursday. But there have been 31,325 others treated for non-combat 
injuries and illness as of March 1.

"The Pentagon keeps two sets of books," said Linda Bilmes, a professor at 
Harvard and an expert on budgeting and public finance whose newly published 
book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, was co-authored with Nobel Prize-winning 
economist Joseph Stiglitz.

"It is important to understand the full number of casualties because the U.S. 
government is responsible for paying disability compensation and medical care 
for all our troops, regardless of how they were injured," Bilmes said.

$2.3 billion increase 

Veterans Affairs predicts it will treat 330,000 veterans from Iraq and 
Afghanistan in 2009 - a 14 percent increase over the 2008 estimate of 263,000 - 
at a cost of nearly $1.3 billion. 

For the 2009 budget, the White House requested $93.7 billion for the VA, 
including $41.2 billion for medical care for all veterans - not just those from 
Iraq and Afghanistan. That's an increase of $2.3 billion over the current 
budget.

But critics say that is not enough for a system that has a backlog of about 
400,000 pending medical claims and complaints, especially in mental health care.

The VA "will not request enough resources to care for the troops - and in fact 
this is precisely what has happened in the past three years," said Bilmes.

Cynthia Smith, a Pentagon spokeswoman, rejected accusations that the government 
is trying to hide or obscure the number of wounded soldiers by placing the 
total in two categories on its Web pages.

"Both of the Web sites have equal importance. They are just counting different 
things," Smith said. "Neither is more prominent than the other."

James Peake, secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, said that funding 
for VA medical care requested for next year is "more than twice what it was 
seven years ago" before operations in Afghanistan started.

But Bilmes says the VA is hoping to offset some of the costs through increased 
fees and co-payments - putting more of the burden for health care costs back on 
soldiers.

"That is the thing that sticks in the gullet, the fact they're hoping to raise 
$2 or $3 billion through their fees, which is what we spend in Iraq and 
Afghanistan in about three days," she said. "For three days of fighting, we 
could not charge these vets a higher co-payment."

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, an advocacy 
group based in Washington, said the VA's budget request for 2009 also does not 
pay adequate attention to chronic problems facing Iraq and Afghanistan 
veterans, such as drug and alcohol addictions.

This week, a federal judge in San Francisco held the first hearing in a 
class-action suit filed by two vet groups, including Sullivan's, against the VA 
alleging neglect in treating suicidal soldiers. The suit seeks prompt screening 
and treatment of potentially suicidal veterans.

144 suicides through '05 

According to VA research obtained last month by The Associated Press, 144 
veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan committed suicide from the start of the war 
in Afghanistan in 2001 through the end of 2005. Statistics from 2006 and 2007 
were not yet available. 

Dr. Gerald Cross, a VA official, said during this week's hearings that 120,000 
vets from Iraq and Afghanistan using VA care have potential mental health 
problems, and that nearly 68,000 have potential post-traumatic stress disorder.

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