Lack of health care killed 2,266 US veterans last year: study

reply to post by Seiko


Hey tell all veterans you know, I said thanks for serving. I hope they gets the care they need. They are definitely heroes.

[edit on 11-11-2009 by HotSauce]

Screwing veterans has been a time-honored American pastime, from the Revolutionary War onwards. Civil War vets were ignored, WWI vets were beaten and shot for protesting broken promises to them, Korean War vets, Vietnam vets, now Iraq and Afghanistan vets...it's the same story all the time. Billions for fighting, hundreds for healing and helping.

Be all patriotic and support the policies forcing the soldiers to fight, but when the bill comes due, switch to the accountant hat and pinch pennies. Most conservatives scream about needless waste and expenditures when it comes to taking care of the veterans who they supported with cheers and slogans as long as they were fighting, then dismissed as soon as they couldn't fight anymore and became an unsustainable expense in their eyes.

Never changes: patriotitsm great as long as it doesn't cost money, or your life or limb.

But it sure isn't unique to the us, pretty much every country shafts their vets.

I started as a priority 8 low income veteran because i was broke and between jobs.

One of the first things i did was to apply for service connection for my hearing loss and tinnitus from working in engine rooms on ships when i was in the navy.
When i got service connected for tinnitus (10%) my status changed to priority 3 when my hearing gets bad enough for hearing aids i will go to 20%.

And if congress ever allows blue water agent orange claims for the agent orange that our ships evaporators picked up and we drank i could go as high as 50 to 60% for my diabetes. They call sailors who's ship operated off the coast but never set foot on shore of Vietnam blue water vets, but the ship i was on we worked so close to shore the water was always brown from shore runoff. This would put me into the priority 1 or 2 level.

I worked as a EMT in Calif and Nevada and seen the ERs of many hospitals.

I will have to say that that the VA has always been the best. with the lest waiting times for treatment i have ever seen. (no illegals helps)

I know that the one i go to is good at heart attack and bypass surgery because i gone went through that. have not had any problems since.

reply to post by Seiko


An employee is any person hired by an employer to do a specific "job".

If your ultimate payer is "The State", then by default your employer is the "The State" no matter how many layers of bureaucratic B/S you lay on top of it or inject into the system.



Edit Add (supplemental)

Per CNN, the bill passed by the House would cost $894 billion. Now if you look at the projected costs of Medicare, Medicare Hospitalization, Medicare Hospitalization, Medicare Home, SCHIP, Medicare Prescription Drug... which were collectively supposed to cost 80.4 billion, and compare them to what they actually cost, 251.8 billion (a 313% increase), you will get an idea of what this thing is going to morph into.

A 2.8 TRILLION dollar pig trough.

And that just using previous Government Mandated programs as a guide.






[edit on 11-11-2009 by RoofMonkey]

reply to post by lucentenigma

You can also call the above "rationing", exactly what will happen if the government runs health care for all of us.

Exactly, they ration Medicaid and medicare now also,

Originally posted by ANNED
I started as a priority 8 low income veteran because i was broke and between jobs.

One of the first things i did was to apply for service connection for my hearing loss and tinnitus from working in engine rooms on ships when i was in the navy.
When i got service connected for tinnitus (10%) my status changed to priority 3 when my hearing gets bad enough for hearing aids i will go to 20%.

And if congress ever allows blue water agent orange claims for the agent orange that our ships evaporators picked up and we drank i could go as high as 50 to 60% for my diabetes. They call sailors who's ship operated off the coast but never set foot on shore of Vietnam blue water vets, but the ship i was on we worked so close to shore the water was always brown from shore runoff. This would put me into the priority 1 or 2 level.

I worked as a EMT in Calif and Nevada and seen the ERs of many hospitals.

I will have to say that that the VA has always been the best. with the lest waiting times for treatment i have ever seen. (no illegals helps)

I know that the one i go to is good at heart attack and bypass surgery because i gone went through that. have not had any problems since.

Excellent post.

How many vets are denied the coverage they deserve because something is still 'classified' or outright denied?

BS...





[edit on 11-11-2009 by lucentenigma]

reply to post by lucentenigma


Probably not a whole lot.

Where the points of contention come in are where the Military claims there was no hazard but there was a hazard. The specifics of the activity that caused the exposure would not necessarily be part of the treatment issue. Even it it is, that's one of the side benifits for having military doctors... much easier to get them cleared.

Originally posted by RoofMonkey
reply to post by lucentenigma

 

Probably not a whole lot.

Where the points of contention come in are where the Military claims there was no hazard but there was a hazard. The specifics of the activity that caused the exposure would not necessarily be part of the treatment issue. Even it it is, that's one of the side benifits for having military doctors... much easier to get them cleared.

If one is denied coverage that is one to many IMHO.

And using your statement of their being a hazard when there was a hazard falls back into military/government secrets, how can you make a claim when no claim exists?

Have you ever read about the military employees at Area 51 (burning toxic chemicals in open pits) that sued the government for health issues and were denied because it is a state secret?

When the State comes before the people the State is no longer for the People the People need to rise up...



[edit on 11-11-2009 by lucentenigma]

Originally posted by lucentenigma

Have you ever read about the military employees at Area 51 (burning toxic chemicals in open pits) that sued the government for health issues and were denied because it is a state secret?

Yes I have... and I also have a good friend who was never in Laos working at the other end of the runway from Air America while not attached to USAID. And while he was not there he was also not on active duty in the USAF.



The problem with Area 51 is getting them to acknowledge that it exists. If I remember correctly, they were finally able to get some recognition of the hazards.

A similar issue exists with the Squalene in the Anthrax vaccine.








[edit on 11-11-2009 by RoofMonkey]

Originally posted by RoofMonkey

Originally posted by lucentenigma

Have you ever read about the military employees at Area 51 (burning toxic chemicals in open pits) that sued the government for health issues and were denied because it is a state secret?

Yes I have... and I also have a good friend who was never in Laos working at the other end of the runway from Air America while not attached to USAID. And while he was not there he was also not on active duty in the USAF.


[edit on 11-11-2009 by RoofMonkey]

Sorry about your friend who was never in Laos...

Originally posted by lucentenigma

Sorry about your friend who was never in Laos...

Oh he's fine... He just had a bugger of a time dealing with where he was officially at as opposed to where he was not... until the US gov acknowledged it years later.

I don't doubt that this article was written because of the healthcare reform bill making news, but it disturbs me that so many have the knee jerk reaction dismissing this as a healthcare supporting article. We shouldn't have any veterans that are not covered, period, and that should be the focus IMHO.

I also thought that every vet was automatically covered, so I'd like to know if this is true. If the article is wrong then that's good, but let's figure it out. This should not be made into a political debate.

Everyone who retires from the service is covered until they are old enough to get Medicare. Those hurt while serving are covered. The ones not covered did not serve enough time to collect retirement and make too much money at their present jobs to qualify.

Originally posted by RoofMonkey
reply to post by lucentenigma

 

Probably not a whole lot.

Where the points of contention come in are where the Military claims there was no hazard but there was a hazard. The specifics of the activity that caused the exposure would not necessarily be part of the treatment issue. Even it it is, that's one of the side benifits for having military doctors... much easier to get them cleared.

Probably a lot more then you think.

Case in point is trichloroethylene (TCE)we use it to clean many things in the navy in the 1970s-80s most of this cleaning was done with full strength trichloroethylene.

In the late 1990s the military banned trichloroethylene from all military installations because of its toxicity.

There are many lawsuits that have been won for health problems in civilians that drank water at levels of a few Parts per million in drinking water.

Yet veterans are not able to get service connection for there problems from using trichloroethylene at pure 100% strength.
www.epa.gov...

The EPA list the max level for TCE in drinking water at 5 parts per billion

I used a lot of pure TCE cleaning parts in the navy and off vietnam when our fresh water evaporators were not working right we would clean oil off our bodies with PURE TCE.

The military had gone to TCE because they had been using Carbon Tet that had killed a few military personal and we were told that TCE was Safe.

As it stands now its a tossup as to which it was that gave a lot of us blue water navy personal off vietnam our health problems agent orange or trichloroethylene.

Very few veterans have ever got service connection for Trichloroethylene.
the VA still claims its harmless.
vets4politics.blogspot.com...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...
books.nap.edu...
www.congress.org...
www.mwsg37.com...

the VA has even banned Trichloroethylene from the facilities.


[edit on 11-11-2009 by ANNED]