Salon.com: Walter Reed, On The Cheap

[Hissyspit]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/06/walter_reed/?source=newsletter

Walter Reed, on the cheap
The Pentagon's top civilian official in charge of military healthcare wanted more money for bullets and bombs, and fewer benefits for soldiers.

By Mark Benjamin

March 6, 2007 | WASHINGTON --

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Critics say that Chu and Winkenwerder had the wrong priorities, focusing on cutting costs while greater numbers of returning soldiers struggled against an increasingly strained military health care system. Both men know how to manage costs: Chu is an economist and mathematician who once worked in an Army comptroller office. And Winkenwerder is a former health insurance industry executive.

But their résumés also point to the problem, according to their detractors. "The military tried to run military health care on the cheap -- like an HMO," said Paul Sullivan, who until March 2006 was a top project manager at the Department of Veterans Affairs in charge of data on returning veterans. "And the consequences are the medical catastrophe and the bureaucratic nightmare that we see right now."

Several retired generals who worked close to Chu and Winkenwerder were similarly critical of their management approach. One retired general who worked in the Army's medical command and requested anonymity wrote in an e-mail that Chu is "an economist who has looked at military healthcare primarily from the view of the cost impact." That retired general also wrote that "Bill Winkenwerder has not anticipated the problems we are seeing now."

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[w8liftinglady]

1. Mark Benjamin has been a true advocate for wounded soldiers..going back to 2003

[northzax]

2. what everyone is forgetting

is that this was perfectly predictable. the administration does not believe in government provided healthcare. they don't want it to work, because that would show that government can, in fact, provide good healthcare, and their whole faith-based arguement that government provided healthcare will be awful is demolished.

do not forget this. When the clinton administration (believers in healthcare and government) got ahold of the VA, within a decade the agency went from sub-standard, developing world-esque healthcare to gold standard in many places (there was more to do, but it was a 25 year mess to clean up) and (get this part) the VA DELIVERED BETTER CARE THAN THE NATIONAL AVERAGE FOR LESS THAN THE NATIONAL AVERAGE. in 2001, the VA was a good place to get treated, so were the military hospitals, but the Bushies can't have this, they don't think you can fix government healthcare, so they ignore it and let it erode. it's a matter of faith.

[fed-up]

3. here is the Feb 18, 2005 salon.com article on Walter Reed

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/02/18/walter_reed/index.html

Behind the walls of Ward 54

They're overmedicated, forced to talk about their mothers instead of Iraq, and have to fight for disability pay. Traumatized combat vets say the Army is failing them, and after a year following more than a dozen soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, I believe them.

By Mark Benjamin

Pages 1 2 3
February 18, 2005

Before he hanged himself with his bathrobe sash in the psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Spc. Alexis Soto-Ramirez complained to friends about his medical treatment. Soto-Ramirez, 43, had been flown out of Iraq five months before then because of chronic back pain that became excruciating during the war. But doctors were really worried about his mind. They thought he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving with the 544th Military Police Company, a unit of the Puerto Rico National Guard, the kind of unit that saw dirty, face-to-face combat in Iraq.

A copy of Soto-Ramirez's medical records, reviewed by Salon, show that a doctor who treated him in Puerto Rico upon his return from Iraq believed his mental problems were probably caused by the war and that his future was in the Army's hands. "Clearly, the psychiatric symptoms are combat related," a clinical psychologist at Roosevelt Roads Naval Hospital wrote on Nov. 24, 2003. The entry says, "Outcome will depend on adequacy and appropriateness of treatment." Doctors in Puerto Rico sent Soto-Ramirez to Walter Reed in Washington, D.C., to get the best care the Army had to offer. There, he was put in Ward 54, Walter Reed's "lockdown," or inpatient psychiatric ward, where the most troubled patients are supposed to have constant supervision.

But less than a month after leaving Puerto Rico, on Jan. 12, 2004, Soto-Ramirez was found dead, hanging in Ward 54. Army buddies who visited him in the days before his death said Soto-Ramirez was increasingly angry and despondent. "He was real upset with the treatment he was getting," said René Negron, a former Walter Reed psychiatric patient and a friend of Soto-Ramirez's. "He said: 'These people are giving me the runaround ... These people think I'm crazy, and I'm not crazy, Negron. I'm getting more crazy being up here.'


"Those people in Ward 54 were responsible for him. Their responsibility was to have a 24-hour watch on him," Negron said in a telephone interview from his home in Puerto Rico. While Soto-Ramirez's death was by his own hand, Negron and other soldiers say the hospital shares the blame.

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