The Wrong Walter Reed

My friend Mike had a good write-up of McCain's speech:

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/mccain-missed-the-mark/#comments

I made a comment at the end that the inclusion of the photo of the weird green-tinted Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, Ca. was a significant slip-up. The McCain campaign says, no, they wanted a picture of a school, it was no mistake. Which if true, is funny all by itself since the photo looks a lot more like a Beverly Hills 90210 campus than the school houses of "small towns" like the ones Sarah Palin and I grew up in.

But it seems more likely that they wanted to put him in front of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. While this was obviously an error by a staffer and not the candidate himself, the screw-up still speaks volumes.

I went to the text of McCain's speech and did a word search for "veteran" -- nada. Despite his powerful narrative of being an injured veteran himself, no where in his speech did he talk about other veterans or any plans to improve care for them. No where did he talk the significant number of soldiers returning home with head injuries, amputated limbs and PTSD who are clogging VA and military hospitals that are not equipped to care for them.

Surgeon/writer Atul Gawande had a great chapter in his book "Better: A Surgeons Notes on Performance" about how rapid advancement in battlefield trauma care has outpaced the medical infrastructure at home. Men and women that would have died 20 years ago, are being saved on the battlefield. But they are left with injuries that the VA system as it exists is ill-equipped to help them learn to live with.

There's a similar article on this he wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine:
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/351/24/2471

" There, after weeks in intensive care and multiple operations, he did survive. This is itself remarkable. Injuries like his were unsurvivable in previous wars. The cost, however, can be high. The airman lost one leg above the knee, the other in a hip disarticulation, his right hand, and part of his face. How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question."

If we truly honor the service of veterans, do we not have an obligation to actually help them cope with their sacrifices when they come home?

President Bush was shamed by the media for the state of Walter Reed Medical Center last year, and John McCain took the opportunity to speak up. However, what has John McCain actually done for VA and military health systems as a top lawmaker on the Senate Armed Services Committee? Here is a very, very partisan write up of the issue, but it includes citations, so you can easily look it up for yourself:

http://www.democrats.org/a/2008/02/walter_reed_ann.php

The salient points:

• "McCain has repeatedly voted against amendments in the Senate that would have added funding for healthcare services, but eliminated tax cuts for the wealthy. Funding would have covered such important services as improving care at veterans' hospitals, providing mental health services to soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse problems."

• "McCain voted against the Kerry amendment that would eliminate increased fees and co-payments for veterans in the TRICARE health care program by raising the discretionary spending limit by approximately $10 billion. The provisions would have been fully offset by eliminating creating corporate tax breaks."

• "McCain was one of only 13 Republicans to vote against an amendment that added over $400 million for inpatient and outpatient care for veterans. "

• "McCain missed an important vote this year that supported the funding of the troops in Iraq and guaranteed them adequate medical care upon returning home.

The VA over the next decade faces tremendous challenges. I might oppose that we went to war, but like everyone else, I want the very, very best for the women and men who serve. McCain is uniquely positioned by virtue of his biography-- even more than Obama -- to speak up about care for veterans. It's disheartening enough that he didn't mention health care for veterans (or health care at all, really) in his speech and downright disgraceful that his staff doesn't even seem to know what Walter Reed actually looks like.