2,000 x 2,300/month. That would be the current cost.
Do the math. $4,600,000/month. $55,200,000.
The cost of providing stipends to family members who take care of severely wounded veterans of our military endeavors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In today's New York Times you can read a piece by Frances X. Clines, A New Life Nursing Their Damaged Warriors, which begins
The two soldiers lolled speechless in wheelchairs, severely brain damaged by war, staring out at the home front from a diagnosis of "minimal consciousness." Their young brides fed them through gastric tubes, one of the frequent tasks in the women’s brave new careers as veterans’ family caretakers.
The Wounded Warrior Project says there are about 2,000 current cases, with perhaps 200/year more to come. Why?
It is a sweet and bitter fact of modern battlefield medicine that more warriors can survive devastating brain wounds that would have killed them in previous wars.
Today health care for the nation advances. But this is not about health care. After all, the military will care for such men as these two soldiers.
Read the article. You will meet Ryanne Noss, whose Ranger husband Scott was dragged from a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. She has given up her Ph. D. in Chemistry to care for him. And you will meet Ivonne Thompson, who Navy Medic husband "was rendered helpless" by a truck bomb in Iraq. She gave up teaching school. He may have been rendered helpless, but that did not make him any less loved.
RyAnne talks of what love is and what it can accomplish. "They knew we were strong women when they married us," she said, eying the two men in the sunshine flooding their room at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, N.J. Photographs of the men smiling and able-bodied in uniform gleamed from the walls.
Both women have encountered comments from clumsy outsiders that battlefield death would have been more merciful for everyone’s future. Their answer is that they can’t imagine life without their men, however much damaged, and without the chance to inch them firsthand back toward themselves.
Think of marriage vows. Ours did not include the words, but included the intent: in sickness and health, 'til death you do part. These women are living such vows. They are living their love.
Just like for health care, there are rival bills between the House and Senate, with the former covering only 200, while the latter expands those eligible to deal
with a fuller cohort of traumatically brain injured veterans, including those with the power of mobility and speech who can’t be left untended because of basic cognitive impairments.
It might be spouses, it might be parents. The cost is miniscule compared to
the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year the government spends on each severely injured veteran sent to a nursing home.
Charities help, and the two women are grateful. They are learning what it means to care for their guys. We as a nation should care, not only for their guys, but to support their families that have not abandoned them.
Charity is good, but insufficient, because this is the moral responsibility of the nation that sent these wounded to war.
Not only to the men, but to their families.
RyAnne and Ivonne are hoping all the good people they notice driving around with "Support Our Troops" stickers might get in touch with their lawmakers and demand that Congress pass the stronger Senate measure. That would be real support. The two wives seem impassioned enough to go out themselves and wave down traffic for their cause. But, as RyAnne says, "We can’t leave our guys."
And we should not leave them either. Nor should we leave caregivers like these wives.
Peace.