Heal vets - and VA
When staff doctors at a hospital warn that emergency-room patients may be in danger there, it gets your attention. If they say the workload is excessive and the training inadequate, a prospective patient might want to look for an alternative facility.
But if your alternatives are limited or nonexistent, it may just plunge you into despair.
That’s no way to treat the U.S. military veterans who have fought the nation’s wars and are coming home from the current conflict in Iraq, adding to the patient rolls that are overwhelming Veterans Administration hospitals in Spokane and elsewhere.
So much so that 10 staff physicians wrote a letter last June to the Spokane medical center’s management, warning that inadequate staffing has rendered the emergency room unsafe.
Just what vets need, one more cause for anxiety.
About a year ago, the only cancer specialist in the Spokane medical center went into private practice, causing the hospital to enlist a retired doctor to care for cancer patients, with the help of videoconferencing.
That episode coincided with a contest congressional representatives were waging to keep the Veterans Administration from shutting down the Wainwright VA Medical Center, which serves nearly 70,000 veterans in the Walla Walla area.
In the meantime, the Government Accountability Office has reported that the VA lacks resources to provide mental health counseling and treatment to veterans arriving home from Iraq, where the stress and tension of being vulnerable to attack at any time and in any place have had severe psychological consequences.
To combat the rising caseload, the VA came up with a review policy that makes it harder to approve applications for 100 percent disability or treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, but easier to disapprove them.
If the federal government doesn’t want to be in this line of work, the question needs to be asked whether it would be more efficient and effective to remove the VA hospital network as we know it and contract instead with the private and nonprofit hospital structure to provide for qualified ex-military personnel’s health care.
When the administration, facing a growing stream of Iraq veterans returning home with service-related health conditions, asked Congress for increased funding last year, officials said another $1 billion would be sufficient.
Those like Washington Sen. Patty Murray, who said that was less than half of enough, were overruled.
But within months, VA Secretary Jim Nicholson came around to agree with them.
However, a radical reordering of veterans’ health care is not going to happen soon, if at all.
In the meantime, the country owes more respect and gratitude than it’s giving to the men and women who fight its wars.
Waiting periods need to be shortened and red tape relaxed.
Services need to be tailored to match the needs of the veteran community, including those tormented by emotional scars suffered in service to the nation.
And emergency rooms clearly need to be resources for healing and cures, not danger zones.
No matter what war they served in, and no matter whether it was popular, Americans who assumed the patriotic duty of fighting for their country have earned appropriate health care.
Political penny-pinching over their needs does not do them credit.