While fixing the economy will certainly be a dominant issue for both President-elect Obama and the 111th Congress, we hope, on this Veterans Day, that health care for our wounded warriors will also be a top priority. Regrettably, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to continue to add to the numbers of veterans in need of mental and physical treatment and rehabilitation.
To meet this need, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) must have sufficient resources provided in a timely and predictable manner next year, and for years to come.
About 18 percent of men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have already returned home at risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression, according to a recent study by the Rand Corp.
By Raymond Dempsey
The Washington Times
Another 19 percent are estimated of having experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by improvised explosive devices that “rattle” the brain. In total more than 300,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may already be suffering from these often invisible wounds of war.
In too many cases, the VA is unable to properly treat the physical and mental scars of war, in part because its budget has been late for most of the past two decades, and the amount of funding – which has thankfully grown in the last two years – is wildly unpredictable from year to year.
The result is that the VA is severely constrained in trying to plan or manage its budget. Robert Perreault, a former Veterans Health Administration chief business officer, has rightly noted in congressional testimony that “VA funding and the appropriations process is a process no effective business would tolerate.”
Such haphazard financing can directly affect the quality of care at VA hospitals and clinics across the country. Insufficient or late funding can mean an increase in waiting times for appointments. Purchasing new and replacement medical equipment may be put on hold, further delaying the delivery of needed medical treatment. And life-altering conditions such as PTSD and TBI may go undertreated or are not treated at all if specialized mental health care personnel cannot be hired when needed.
Read the rest:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/
nov/11/remember-health-care-for-veterans/
Only in America: Boundless Technology; Brilliant Youth
February 22, 2008“Never have so many owed so much to so few.”
–Winston Churchill
By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
Friday, February 22, 2008
Wednesday, USS Lake Erie’s sailors launched an SM-3 Missile that streaked into space to hit an errant U.S. spy satellite exactly as planned: right amidships of the 1,000 pound toxic hydrazine fuel tank.
The satellite was at about 133 miles in altitude and traveling at 17,000 miles per hour or 24 times the speed of sound.
In the twinkling of an eye, America demonstrated new, or at least unknown and unproven, technology and capability. The United States, for the first time, exploded a satellite in shallow space or just before reentry using tactical systems: ships and missiles and men trained to fight “in the air” were reaching into space: for the first time ever.
My Vietnam-born bride said, “Only in America.” Then she said, “The sailors did it.”
As she so often does, my wife Lien was making a huge statement with the fewest of words. She, in one breath, extolled the wonders of American technology as well as the devotion, care and brilliance of our American people: especially our often maligned American youth.
The next day, Serbian youths ransacked the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade and several other Embassies that violated their ideas about what was right and wrong about Kosovo.
I don’t recall America’s youth rioting to this extent for a while.
Sailors love, cherish, care for and maintain their ships and often high-tech and high-cost equipment with the greatest precision and detail. They are devoted, driven and professional. They are both hard working and delightful.
If you have troubled kids or a dim view of American youth: visit a U.S. Navy ship.
I’ll extend this line of thinking to U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. Marines and U.S. Air Force airmen. I’m no Ollie North but I’ve been around the U.S. military and around the globe.
I have one unshakable conclusion: our young Americans are serving superbly.
We are a nation at war.
The war is a war of ideas. We oppose no nation, no people and no religion. Yet the people with other ideas are armed and dangerous: they use improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and women and children and the mentally infirm with bombs wrapped around them.
We are using about one percent of our population to fight, with arms, the war against terror.
“Never have so many owed so much to so few.”
That one percent is sacrificing life and limbs, and I mean arms and legs are lost every day, for You.
I am reminded every day of Sir Winston Churchill: “Never have so many owed so much to so few.”
I am moved by the wonders of the U.S. Navy reaching into space and the dichotomies of this nation.
Some geniuses at the Pentagon, as they prepared to blast a satellite to smithereens and then watch the chucks or, as military analyst John Pikes calls them, “gravel,” of the space debris reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up; said: “We need a toxic debris clean up team!”
But of course.
America needs a “Toxic Space Debris Clean Up Team.”
Never mind that junk in the form of meteors have been hitting the Earth for centuries and that satellites and their parts have been crashing to Earth since the 1950s without incident.
America needs a “Toxic Space Debris Clean Up Team.”
Funny, I don’t recall China’s “Toxic Space Debris Clean Up Team” when they blew up a satellite last year. Do you?
They have 1.3 Billion people. We Americans have a 0.3 Billion. That is about 300 Million.
We stand, in terms of history and population, in China’s margin.
My wife submitted this commentary. “Only in America.”
So, with haz-mat suits at the ready, a quick response team stood on alert Thursday, the day after the satellite was destroyed, to head anyplace on Earth that the pieces of a lame satellite shot down by the U.S. Navy might fall.
And for the ultimate dichotomy: inside the “Toxic Space-Only Rocket Fuel Mop Up Kit” do you know what you’ll find?
Kitty litter.
Only in America.
Next time you have a cat stuck in a tree or sewer or a hunk of burning space debris smoldering on your lawn, dial 911.
Only in America.
American has ambulances almost everywhere. In India, they pack you into the back seat of a taxi and hope for the best.
My friends in the world community will forgive me for this. Others will castigate me. But I believe in the wonder and wonders of America.
I live in a land of Boundless Technology and Brilliant Youth.
It might not always be so.
But for now, as my wife says, “Only in America.”
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