To me, honoring troops is not simply a bumper sticker. I remember in middle school pretending to be a newscaster like Walter Cronkite; there were the casualty figures from Vietnam. To a youngster, it seemed like war was a permanent fact of life. Then my Dad got orders to Vietnam. The war suddenly got very real to me--I was the oldest of 7, not even a teen. Even though Dad wasn't in the infantry, warzones are never safe. I was in a state of denial, not even going to the airport to see my Dad off. My Dad wrote in a Christmas message to me that I had to be the man of the house while he was gone. My Dad came back.
One of my Kansas friends was a diehard Green Bay Packers football fan. I had once reduced him to tears, insisting major league baseball was the national pastime, not football. Then it seemed he wasn't there anymore. My Mom later told me that his Dad didn't come back alive. All I could think about was that stupid argument and wishing I could take it all back.
It's not just about Dads and their kids. One of my sisters-in-law used to write these upbeat letters with smiley faces liberally sprinkled about. My brother was on an isolated tour in Korea at the time. One day I got a very uncharacteristic dark, gloomy letter and dashed back what I thought was an expression of concern over the change in tone. The response caught me totally off-guard; she wrote the following (somewhat paraphrased), carbon-copied to everyone in my extended family: "Of course I'm not doing well, you jerk. Your brother isn't here with me, I've got 4 kids to deal with, and I'm having to cope with everything on my own. I've started seeing a psychologist over it. There, I've said it. Are you happy now?" I was just stunned; I, of course, knew she missed my brother. My other sister-in-law, who doesn't write her letters with smiley faces, immediately replied to all, congratulating the former for having put me in my place.
The status quo involving veteran medical treatment is, in theory, that the VA will provide full, free medical care for any service-related condition. If the veteran gets treated at the hospital for unrelated issues, the VA will bill his insurance company reasonable charges. However, it seems like Medicare will not accept such charges. (See David Rehbein's recent Wall Street Journal article entitled "Will Obama Go AWOL on VA Health Benefits".)
Obama's proposal, until late Monday, was to make private insurance cover preexisting service-related treatment. (The justification was to extend related medical services.) Rehbein argues that Obama's position is a bait-and-switch from what he promised veteran groups during the general election campaign. He furthermore feels that it would make it more difficult for service-disabled to get a job with health benefits, for a small business owner to get private health insurance, and the veteran's own treatment costs may push his or her family's costs to the private insurance caps, leaving the veteran's own family uncovered.
Obama apparently has backed down, but not before meeting with several veteran groups, trying to sell them that "change we need" is the US government dumping the costs of service-disabled veteran health care on the private sector. This was unjust and unprecedented.
Let me make my position clear: veterans who put their lives and bodies on the line for this country deserve a commensurate response from a nation grateful for their service: the best medical treatment, no questions asked: whatever it takes. A solution to VA care does not make it harder for a veteran to find a job or to get his family coverage.
