What we have become

It’s clear in how we treat our veterans

Monday, August 25, 2014

How should a great nation treat its best, those citizens who have defended it--and the cause of freedom--all over the world and over many years?

Be warned: The answer to that question isn't assuring. But it's all too clear. Just listen to what a 50-year-old Navy veteran named Valerie Hinton had to say at a public hearing in Little Rock about her treatment by the Veterans Administration: After a botched hysterectomy at a VA hospital put her life at risk and sent her to UAMS, she did get better. But now she has other problems, the financial kind: "I had to go to private doctors. I have bills. It's a result of me coming to the VA and not getting the treatment I need. Who's going to pay those bills?"

It is a good thing the still new secretary of Veterans Affairs has ordered hearings across the country at which veterans can talk about their treatment, or rather mistreatment, by the federal department he heads. Valerie Hinton's experience is scarcely unique. Over the past several months, all kinds of problems with the VA have come to light--especially long waits for treatment compounded by attempts to cover them up.

And now Secretary Robert McDonald, whose predecessor resigned in the wake of these revelations, has told local officials--like Michael Winn, director of the VA's health-care system in Central Arkansas--to take testimony from local vets about their experiences with the system.

Mr. Winn needs to do more than listen to these veterans and take notes with a concerned look on his face. He needs to see that such problems are fixed, and guarded against in the future.

As one of the bureaucrats accompanying him at this meeting--Miles Brown, a PR man for the VA--put it, "We were looking for direct feedback from veterans, and we got it. We can't fix it if we don't know what the issues are. That's what it's all about, getting that feedback. And we got lots of it."

But it's not enough to get feedback; what counts is what the VA or whoever's in charge of it, if anybody is, does about it. We the outraged People should see that something is. There's no sense in holding all these hearings just for show, or only to compile a record that will be filed away, or to provide the basis for still another "study" that will be left to gather dust.

Tony Davila, an Air Force veteran at the meeting, knows how that works. Or doesn't. "Nothing ever happens after these meetings," he told a reporter. "They invite people and the media out to make it seem like they're doing something." But nothing changes. Or as he put it in plain GI-speak, the VA holds such meetings to "cover their asses."

Valerie Hinton, on the other hand, seemed to leave the meeting hopeful. ("I'm going to get my bills paid.") Here's trusting she'll let the paper know when the check--or the insurance payment--is in the mail. That's what a free press is for in a free country--to help keep our public servants accountable to the public. Eternal vigilance isn't just the price of liberty, but of good health care.

The big mistake--the original sin, if you will--may have been committed when it was decided long ago, in the Hoover administration, to segregate veterans from the general population and assign them to their own vast, separate-but-equal health-care system and bureaucratic maze. Yes, it would have been better to set up a veterans' administration that would have been just a disbursement agency, like Social Security, mailing out checks every month and letting the recipients spend them for the best health care they could find in their best judgment, like everybody else.

Instead we created this precursor to Obamacare with all its complications and exceptions and constantly changing rules. And the scandals its very structure invites. But it's much too late now, and hardly politically feasible, to go back and start all over again.

Instead we're got to face all these veterans' complaints about the all too real Veterans Administration that we've got, and do our best to fix it. Now.

Editorial on 08/25/2014