For veterans in rural areas, care is hard to reach. [View All]

[madfloridian]

This is tragic what is happening to so many veterans. I heard someone here today talking about the problems they are experiencing, having to drive much further than they ever did before....and then the waiting.

And we are not a rural area.

For veterans in rural areas, care hard to reach

NORTHEAST KINGDOM, Vt. -- A cold March rain had washed out the dirt road that winds up the hill past his small farm, so Fred Swallow left the Dodge pickup with a Purple Heart emblem in the back window at the foot of the drive and walked the rest of the way.

He was tired and frustrated, but it was much more than that. The steep road isn't only his way into town. It is his lifeline.

He had just returned from a four-hour round trip drive to the nearest veterans hospital for treatment of wounds sustained in Iraq. It was the latest, draining stage in a battle he and his wife, Doreen, have been waging with the sprawling bureaucracy of the federal Department of Veterans Affairs to get the care he, like all veterans, had been promised.

There is a photo gallery about halfway down. Here is a picture from it.



From the day Fred Swallow left the military hospital system, where he says his care was superb, he has felt lost in the VA health care system and isolated from it by the long distances he must travel from the mountain home in the northern reaches of Vermont where he lives.
(Globe Staff Photo / Bill Greene)

More about problems rural veterans face:

The VA is struggling and often failing to do right by the many veterans with serious combat injuries who need closely supervised care but live in remote areas, a Globe review has found. Realigned in the 1990s to concentrate specialized care in urban areas, the system now finds itself overwhelmed by the wounded from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- engagements that have, even more than other modern-day conflicts, been fought by soldiers from rural America. Interviews with dozens of wounded vet erans who live in hill towns and farm country across America found story after story much like Swallow's. The system that provides the hospital care most wounded soldiers praise has, for many of the nation's 6 million rural veterans, no adequate equivalent once they leave the service.

This administration planned nothing, left everything to chance, and our veterans are suffering. They do not deserve this treatment from this once great country.



Some states like Vermont have recognized the need to reach out to rural veterans hidden in the hills who are in need. Travis Jones hands out fliers in National Guard armories and responds to tips from a network of veterans and their families but concedes that the effort is just getting underway and has barely dented the problem.
(Globe Staff Photo / Bill Greene)