Guaranteed Healthcare

What's wrong with this picture? Sen. John McCain, who has implicitly criticized his opponent in the Presidential campaign for inadequate support for the troops, now wants to limit veterans' healthcare benefits to those with combat injuries.

McCain's latest scheme, in fact, mirrors his overhall antipathy to anything that smacks of "government" health care, mirroring the views of the Bush administration. But is that the humane system our veterans deserve?

McCain's proposal for rationing Veterans Administration care to soldiers whose injuries "are a direct result of combat" came in a town hall meeting Wednesday in Dover, NH.

This was, understandably, big news in the Army Times whose readers presumably include many veterans and active military personnel who are in need of medical care and may well expect it is the least their country can offer in return for their service.

Here's what Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, told the Army Times. Veterans "should be very concerned by any effort to restrict access to VA health care and benefits by excluding other veterans with medical conditions clearly linked with their military service, such as illnesses related to Agent Orange poisoning, injuries incurred in the combat zone, injuries due to training, and the adverse side effects of vaccines and experimental drugs."

Good points. One might also note that post traumatic stress syndrome has become something of a plague for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. And, there's the Pentagon report from May that the Army's suicide rate has jumped significantly. Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, the Army surgeon general, concurrently acknowledged that the military's current mental health facilities are inadequate.

As astonishing as the McCain's proposal may sound, it bears a strong resemblance to the path already blazed by the current administration. As the Army Times notes, the Bush administration has repeatedly drawn a line between combat and non-combat injuries on a wide array of benefits, from disability payments to traumatic injury insurance to death gratuity payments.

Moreover, the administration has been systematically underfunding veterans healthcare, paring more and more veterans from enrollment, and privatizing portions of the VA system (the hidden story behind the Walter Reed scandal). 

For McCain, and for President Bush, ideology apparently trumps guaranteeing healthcare for our veterans. McCain has made attacks on Sen. Barack Obama's health plan as "government-run" health care (which it isn't) a common sound bite for his stump speeches. 

It's the reason Bush has worked to privatize significant segments of Medicare, and why McCain continues to make more deregulation a centerpiece of his own healthcare plan.

A compilation of U.S. Census Bureau data by Harvard medical faculty members J. Wesley Boyd and Danny McCormick  last fall concluded that one out of every eight living veterans under 65 have no private health insurance, no ongoing access to VA health care and little chance of getting medical or mental health attention when they need it.

In other words, veterans are increasingly in the same boat with other Americans at a time when 75 million are uninsured or underinsured and 20 percent put off needed medical care because of cost.

Instead of trying to cut more veterans off the humane healthcare they deserve, McCain ought to be finding ways to expand it.

With the billions we now spend on the war in Iraq, we could certainly spend some of those resources on assuring quality, comprehensive health care to those who have served there.

And, here's another idea. Everyone else deserves quality health care as well. Extend VA care or Medicare care to all Americans.