Veterans are largely protected from being thrown off the \u201cfiscal cliff\u201d if the Republicans in Congress can\u2019t reach a nonpartisan compromise with the Obama Administration.<\/p>\n
Largely protected \u2026 but still not nearly enough.<\/p>\n
Vets won\u2019t get their benefits cut, says Rep. Jeff Miller, Fla., who chairs the House Committee on Veterans Affairs.\u00a0 \u201cThe good thing is that the law states and the president has agreed that veterans dollars and their benefits are off the table as it relates to the sequestration,\u201d Miller explains. \u201cThe only area that the VA is vulnerable in is in some of the administrative areas or some of the areas that (the Department of Defense) actually handles, like Arlington Cemetery.\u201d<\/p>\n
That spares the VA from $1.2 trillion in sequestration cuts, but the problem is that the Veterans Administration is completely overwhelmed at the moment with the influx of Vietnam and current-era vets seeking help. Even with a budget that has doubled to $125.3 billion over the past decade, it can\u2019t begin to handle more than 1 million new Iraqi-Afghan vets, about a third of whom are seeking mental health care.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith as many as 1 million troops due to become veterans in the next five years, on top of the 22.3 million already in the system, the agency is staggering under backlogs in disability compensation claims, bottlenecks in mental health care, and criticism over a general lack of accountability,\u201d Bloomberg News reported last month.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe system is completely overwhelmed,\u201d Craig Bryan, a clinical psychologist and associate director for the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Utah, told Bloomberg News. \u201cWe did not prepare the VA system for what many of us would argue is the natural consequence of combat and protracted warfare, and we\u2019re trying to play catch-up.\u201d<\/p>\n
In mid-November, the VA had about 896,000 disability compensation and pension claims pending, almost double the number of cases pending at the end of October 2009. Two thirds of those claims had been in the system for more than 125 days, which is the agency\u2019s target time to have such claims resolved.<\/p>\n
Four months may not seem like a long time, but those delays are living hell to vets in physical and emotional pain. Dr. Bruce Swarny has patients who wait at least two months and drive 400 miles round trip to visit him in the Glendive (Mont.) Medical Center. He estimates that about half of them have contemplated suicide.<\/p>\n
Montana leads the nation in the rate of suicide, but it\u2019s also a huge problem nationally. The VA estimates that 18 vets a day take their own lives, and 1,600 to 1,800 veterans receiving VA care commit suicide each year, according to a 2011 report by the inspector general.<\/p>\n
To understand why, just take a look at Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment \u2013 a group of Marine Reservists from Salt Lake City. Tony Dokoupil tells their harrowing story in the Daily Beast.<\/p>\n
They arrived in Baghdad a day before the statue of Saddam Hussein fell. As they walked into the city, they accepted flowers from women and patted children on the head. Then their radio operator was shot through the head, and they were in the midst of a withering crossfire.\u00a0 To protect themselves, they shot at everything that moved \u2013 and they killed a bunch of civilians, including women and children.<\/p>\n
The Daily Beast reported that: \u201cAlthough all the men in the unit came home alive, many came home changed. Within five years, one in four had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Today one in two of them carries debilitating psychic wounds, according to an estimate by the men. They are jobless, homeless, disposed to drugs and alcohol, divorced from their spouses, and cut off from their former selves. One made love to his girlfriend, the mother of his twin daughters, then immediately drowned her in a warm bath. If you ask the military and mental-health establishment what happened to the men of Fox Company, the answer is simple: they lived through \u2018events that involved actual or threatened death,\u2019 felt \u2018intense fear,\u2019 and like the 300,000 other service members who share this narrow official path to PTSD, they were badly shaken by it.\u201d<\/p>\n