Apparently, Bush's Department of Veteran affairs is tired of those soldiers Bush sent to Iraq
whining about a little shell shock.
The U.S. government is reviewing 72,000 cases in which veterans have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, claiming that misdiagnosis and fraud have inflated the numbers. Outraged vets say the plan is a callous attempt to cut the costs of an increasingly expensive war. . . .
LaBranche, however, may have to prove to Veterans Affairs a second time what the war has done to his mind. In a recent move that has set off a firestorm among veterans, the Department of Veterans Affairs has decided to go back and review more than 70,000 individual cases of vets who in the past five years have been considered disabled and unemployable because of mental trauma. Veterans like LaBranche now stand to lose some or all of their monthly payments.
There's more, motherfuckers.
So what's the problem? Well:
The report expresses concern that the number of veterans receiving payments for PTSD is growing rapidly, from approximately 120,000 cases in 1999 to 216,000 in 2004. PTSD benefit payments, it notes, have soared from $1.7 billion in 1999 to $4.3 billion in 2004.
Gee, wonder why that might be. We haven't launched any quagmires since 1999, have we?
Apparently, PTSD-wise Iraq has proven worse than other wars.
PTSD is a particularly acute problem in Iraq because combat is marked by constant threats that can come from any direction at any time, and the line between civilians and insurgent enemies is blurry at best. A study by the Department of Psychiatric and Behavioral Sciences at Walter Reed Hospital, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2004, showed 17 percent of troops returning from duty in Iraq met the strict screening criteria for mental problems such as PTSD.
The article says that the comprable number from Vietnam is 30 percent.
Well, I guess nickle-and-diming Iraq war veterans is just something Bush has got to do. After all, when you're trying to eliminate the estate tax, certain sacrifices have to be made.
Or to put it another way, servicemen and women have been the only ones asked to sacririfice for war so far, so why spread around the sacrifice at this point?