The shabby treatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Medical Center is inexcusable, but almost as disgusting is the way these warriors are now being exploited for political gain. During investigative hearings last week, a parade of members of Congress professed to be shocked when top-level Army brass claimed they were unaware of deplorable conditions at their own flagship institution. But the bureaucratic labyrinth faced by soldiers returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan is nothing new. It is more than puzzling now to hear people from the White House and Congress claiming they didn’t know about these problems, even though many of them have been frequent visitors to the facilities.
More than two years ago, UPI reporter Mark Benjamin discovered that it took more than a year for some soldiers on “medical hold” to be treated at Walter Reed while they grappled with the Army’s Catch-22 paperwork system. Conditions were even worse at Fort Stewart, Ga., where Benjamin found wounded warriors warehoused in cinder-block barracks without plumbing or air conditioning, with patients forced to hobble to a fly-infested communal bathroom. Other media reports came to similar conclusions, but nothing was done by Congress or the White House.
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Since 2001, the cost of the military’s health care system has doubled. It now consumes roughly 12 percent of the Defense Department’s $430 billion budget. But most of the system’s 9 million beneficiaries have never been in combat. Pentagon bean counters should have reduced their benefits, raised premiums or asked Congress for more money to treat the surge of returning wounded. Instead, in typical bureaucratic fashion, they cut the wrong corners, yet neither Congress nor the White House intervened.
So Walter Reed is merely a symptom of the real problem — an almost complete breakdown of accountability in both the legislative and executive branches at virtually every level. Our brave troops stepped up and did their duty, but they were the only ones in the federal government who did.
