IT'S OK TO DIE JUST DON'T GET WOUNDED

I guess this really pissed me off - I mean the death toll is bad enough (though by earlier war standards its quite low) but the wounded casualty numbers are outrageous. Modern military medicine has reduced the death toll from war but increased the wounded casualty numbers! And then to see that the Bush administration and the Republicans don't want to adequately fund the veterans administration and its looming health care demands. Many of these veterans of this war will require health care (24/7) for the rest of their lives. Well its just enough to make an average American cry. And to think it was all about oil.

Veterans Say '08 Budget Flawed
While nearly providing adequate funding for veterans health care and other programs, the DAV finds shortcomings in the President's proposed budget more...
http://www.dav.org/news/news_20070207.html

And this from Sen. Akaka of Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs:
The budget requests approximately $34.2 billion for veterans health care, a mere 6 percent increase over the 2007 funding level of $32.3 billion in the Joint Funding Resolution expected to pass the Senate. Once inflationary costs are subtracted from the Administration’s budget, the real increase is far from adequate. This budget will not allow for any new initiatives, including enhancements to mental health services desperately needed for our returning servicemembers. Without adequate funding, the VA health care system will find it more difficult to provide quality care for Hawaii’s 117,000 veterans and troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senator Akaka said today he’s especially concerned about out-of-pocket expenses veterans would be forced to pay under the Administration’s new budget proposal. “The doubling of drug copayments for veterans – who make as little as $28,000 a year – seems particularly cruel. Take the example of a veteran living on Oahu, where the cost of living is so high, who takes seven different prescriptions each month: his out of pocket cost goes up by $600 a year.

“Why are we asking veterans to suffer in order to finance a war? This Administration consistently fails to consider the cost of caring for veterans as part of the cost of war,” Akaka said.

Or this, from the Cneter for Budget and Policy Priorities:
Hospital and Medical Care for Veterans: The President proposes to increase funding for these programs by nearly $1.4 billion (or 4 percent) in 2008. But the increase would only be temporary. The President proposes to cut the programs in this subfunction in each subsequent year, from 2009 through 2012; in each of those years, the programs would be funded at levels below the amount provided for 2007, adjusted for inflation. In 2012, the cut would be $2.7 billion, or 7 percent.[iii]

Well, I remember three things from my youth about veterans: As a Boy Scout and it being the fifties/early sixties I was in a lot of Memorial Day/ Veterans Day parades. Most of those men who got being 'into the parades and marches' never left the states. In the late sixties, my father was in the veterans hospital in Pittsburgh and I can remember seeing many a kid not much older than myself in a hospital bed missing a limb. Lastly, my father had a history book of his infantry regiment's service during WWII. In it were marks my father had made next to names of men in his company (that didn't come home). He never once talked about it.

We ask people to serve their country - we owe them the best, regardless.