WaPo editorial: Rotten Homecoming

[Bhaisahab]

Rotten Homecoming
This is no way to treat a veteran.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007; Page A14

IF YOU LISTEN to the PR operation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the U.S. military's gleaming flagship hospital offers veterans the best treatment available. What doesn't get mentioned is the bureaucratic contempt and physical squalor that too often await badly injured outpatient soldiers on the Walter Reed campus, the subject of a four-month Post investigation detailed in articles published Sunday and Monday.

Reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull and researcher Julie Tate spent hundreds of hours inspecting conditions and interviewing injured troops and their loved ones at the Walter Reed outpatient facilities. Their findings: Veterans' rooms are rank; bureaucratic hassles and paper-pushing make the process of repairing buildings, redressing patient grievances and providing veterans with basic goods depressingly inept; administrators' neglect of patients' mental and physical health borders on the criminal; and, most distressing, many veterans leave Walter Reed without the compensation they clearly deserve for their sacrifices.

CONTINUED AT http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/20/AR2007022001490.html

[OneBlueSky]

1. what's even worse than the conditions at Walter Reed is the concerted effort . . .

by the Defense Department to minimize, and often completely deny, medical and disability benefits to injured vets . . . in many cases, they even assert that "pre-existing conditions" caused or contributed to the injuries . . . often the vets get so tired of waiting and fighting that they end up settling for far less than they're entitled to . . .

I can't think of anything more disgusting than trying to save money by denying injured vets the help they need . . . particularly when DOD is pissing away billions of dollars every day to Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, Blackwater, and the rest of the "contractors" in Iraq . . .