VA Healthcare Shame

You see my problem is this
I'm dreaming away
Wishing that heroes, they truly exist 
--Oops! ... I Did it Again, 
Britney Spears

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. 
Shovel them under and let me work— 
I am the grass; I cover all
 --The Grass,
 Carl Sandburg 

Now you will not swell the rout 
Of lads that wore their honors out,
 Runners whom renown outran 
And the name died before the man 
--To An Athlete Dying Young, 
 A. E. Housman
___________________

The gross failures recently revealed within the Veterans Administration Health Administration are nothing new, and they reflect the true priority which the United States places upon its veterans.

Are we producing more disabled veterans than the system can support? The question of deciding whether to enter a conflict should not center primarily on the ability of the nation to muster the men and materiels to lodge the war. The primary consideration should be the ability of the nation to fulfill its obligations to those who are charged with executing that war after they return home.
 
The United States has failed abysmally on this account. It has reneged on its most important promise -- that of caring for its wounded fighting men, those who have borne the scars of the battle on their bodies and minds.

The VA healthcare system has long been held up as an exemplar of functional medicine: efficiency via in-house treatment and drug dispensation, and managed care on the vanguard of electronic record keeping. Redundancy was reduced, as were unnecessary tests, and procedures often enlisted teams from civilian medical systems, when necessary.

There has long been a backlog of care in the system, but with the casualties from within the system becoming younger and from more obvious malpractice or non-treatment, abdications in the chain of command were a necessary palliative. Now money will be thrown at civilian doctors to meet the need -- but why? If this has been such an exemplary system, why has it not kept its staff at the correct levels in-house to meet the need? 

The promises of medicine today are boundless: bionic men, artificial limbs actuated by thought and growing organs in the lab, but if the promise outstrips the ability to implement the new developments, what is there to celebrate? The Army's "No Soldier Left Behind" rings hollow. The myth does not back up any reality.

When the U.S. sends soldiers to be killed and seriously wounded in discretionary foreign wars, then pours money into chimerical projects of rebuilding these nations -- without the slightest hope of success -- while U.S. wounded soldiers are left to languish on the roles of the labyrinthine VA medical system, we have left these soldiers behind.

It is a cold truth: we soldiers are not left behind because we were never with it to start with. Out of the gate, we are tools and pawns, destined for irrelevance. Soldiers are expendable, and we know this.

The only thing we expect is that our lives not be wasted, and that if fractured, our lives will be as meaningful as possible. All the dead and wounded in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) have been in vain. The double shame of the nation which proudly hails the heroics of its soldiers and assumes the treatment of those damaged, is that has not only used them frivolously, but it did not fulfill its promise to the survivors.

The shame of the VA system is that it has shuttled off its charges, consigning to Kafkaesque hallways of confusion those least able to navigate them.