Doctor my eyes

John McMaverickypants doesn't want you to have the health care he's had his entire adult life. And he doesn't want Iraq veterans to have that same health care.

Don't you think we're entitled to know what our tax dollars have been providing him?

From the great folks at Brave New Films:

John McCain has not yet released his medical records to the public. McCain is 72 years old, and has been diagnosed with invasive melanoma. In May of this year, a small group of selected reporters were allowed to review 1,173 pages of McCain's medical records that covered only the last eight years, and were allowed only three hours to do so. John McCain's health is an issue of profound importance. We call on John McCain to issue a full, public disclosure of all of his medical records, available for the media and members of the general public to review.

Indeed.

Money, money, money bags, There goes mingy Stingy

Email from Courage Campaign today:

Last Monday, at a Memorial Day event in the 26th Congressional District (just outside of Los Angeles), Rep. David Dreier -- chair of the California Republican Congressional Delegation -- said:

"What we say to honor those who serve will never be more than lip service if we don't ensure that our veterans are cared for when they return home."

Turns out, lip service is all Rep. Dreier has for our troops. On May 15, Mr. Dreier voted against the "21st Century GI Bill" -- a bill that would fully fund four years of college for our returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

That GI bill overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives, 256-166. Then, on May 22, the Senate passed a similar version of the same bill, 75-22. This week, that Senate bill is being sent back to the full House for a new vote and, if passed, will then be sent to the President.

With the Senate version of the "21st Century GI Bill" coming to the House, Rep. Dreier has a new opportunity to stop paying lip service to veterans. You can tell Rep. Dreier that he owes more than words to the troops he and President Bush sent to war -- he owes them his vote. Please sign our petition to Rep. Dreier ASAP and we'll deliver your signatures to his San Dimas office after 12 p.m. on Thursday:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/NoMoreLipService

St. McCain also voted against this bill. He no longer has any national security or military support credibility. From VetVoice:

Yesterday VoteVets.org delivered a petition with 30,000 signatures to the office of Senator John McCain. Through that petition, we asked him to support Senator Jim Webb's new GI Bill. And less than 24 hours later, we have an answer:

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, seemed to give a thumbs down to bipartisan legislation that would greatly expand educational benefits for members of the military returning from Iraq and Afghanistan under the GI Bill.
McCain indicated he would offer some sort of alternative to the legislation to address concerns that expanding the GI Bill could lead more members of the military to get out of the service.

Both Democratic presidential candidates - Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., - have signed on as co-sponsors, and the bill has gained bipartisan support from 54 senators on Capitol Hill in addition to Webb.

The reason for McCain's refusal to support the bill is about the most disturbing rationale one could imagine.

Officials in charge of Pentagon personnel worry that a more generous and expansive GI Bill would create an incentive for troops to get out of the military and go to college.

Right. God forbid.

Indeed.

Brian Buetler writing at The Nation has the true story of McCain's startling indifference to men and women wearing the uniform he once did. Elitism and privilege, Right-wing hypocrisy in hatred of spending money to help anyone else, who knows? And who cares? Read the whole thing, it's startling:

Times have changed since McCain needed veterans services so urgently. And for many of those thirty-five years, McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, the candidate who talks the best talk on veterans issues, has demonstrated a tendency to work against veterans' interests, voting time after time against funding and in favor of privatizing services--in other words, of rolling back the VA's improvements by supporting some of the same policies that wrecked Walter Reed.

During a March 2005 Senate budget debate, McCain voted to kill an amendment that would have "increase[d] veterans medical care by $2.8 billion in 2006." That amendment lacked an assured funding stream, but lest one mistake this incident for a maverick's stance against budget-busting, there's more. Just a year later McCain voted against an amendment that would have "increase[d] Veterans medical services funding by $1.5 billion in FY 2007 to be paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes." Two days after it failed, he voted to kill "an assured stream of funding for veterans' health care that [would] take into account the annual changes in the veterans' population and inflation to be paid for by restoring the pre-2001 top rate for income over $1 million, closing corporate tax loopholes and delaying tax cuts for the wealthy." That amendment died quietly, forty-six to fifty-four.

In September 2006 McCain voted to table an amendment to a Defense appropriations bill that would have prevented the department from contracting out support services at Walter Reed. The amendment was indeed tabled--by a vote of fifty to forty-eight, the sort of margin a true veterans' senator might have been able to flip if he really cared about veterans' healthcare.

Straight-talk about McCain is that he's a hypocrite, even worse than Drier, who is just a closet-case self-loathing Republican stooge.

Bastards. Both of 'em.

Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes

VA Hid Suicide Risk, Internal E-Mails Show

In San Francisco federal court Monday, attorneys for veterans' rights groups accused the U.S. Department of Veteran's Affairs of nothing less than a cover-up - deliberately concealing the real risk of suicide among veterans.
[...]
The charges were backed by internal e-mails written by Dr. Ira Katz, the VA's head of Mental Health.

In the past, Katz has repeatedly insisted while the risk of suicide among veterans is serious, it's not outside the norm.

"There is no epidemic in suicide in VA," Katz told Keteyian in November.

But in this e-mail to his top media adviser, written two months ago, Katz appears to be saying something very different, stating: "Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilities."

Katz's e-mail was written shortly after the VA provided CBS News data showing there were only 790 attempted suicides in all 2007 - a fraction of Katz's estimate.
[...]
And it appears that Katz went out of his way to conceal these numbers.

First, he titled his e-mail: "Not for the CBS News Interview Request."

He opened it with "Shh!" - as in keep it quiet - before ending with
"Is this something we should (carefully) address … before someone stumbles on it?"
[...]
Last November when CBS News exposed an epidemic of more than 6,200 suicides in 2005 among those who had served in the military, Katz attacked our report.

"Their number is not, in fact, an accurate reflection of the rate," he said last November.

But it turns out they were, as Katz admitted in this e-mail, just three days later.

He wrote: there "are about 18 suicides per day among America's 25 million veterans."

That works out to about 6,570 per year, which Katz admits in the same e-mail, "is supported by the CBS numbers."

In related news:

In 2005, for example, in just those 45 states, there were at least 6,256 suicides among those who served in the armed forces. That’s 120 each and every week, in just one year.

Dr. Steve Rathbun is the acting head of the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department at the University of Georgia. CBS News asked him to run a detailed analysis of the raw numbers that we obtained from state authorities for 2004 and 2005.

It found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 than non-vets. (Veterans committed suicide at the rate of between 18.7 to 20.8 per 100,000, compared to other Americans, who did so at the rate of 8.9 per 100,000.)

One age group stood out. Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror. They had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age. (The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000, while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000.)

Obviously, aside from the song lyric at the top of the post, suicide isn't painless. For an individual to commit, or even attempt, suicide they have to be in overwhelming pain. And the individual doesn't care whether it's physical or mental. And the pain inflicted on their families is probably worse.

Even taking into account the difference between civilian and military, age 20-24, suicide rates are still more than double what the Pentagon currently reports as 'deaths from combat.'

If you kill yourself because of what you've been thru in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, you are, and should be listed as, yet another death in Bush's War on Terrer (© Bush 200X)



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Evil in my head, in my head, inside this private hell

Special thanks to Dancin' Dave for the excellent graphic!

Veterans not entitled to mental health care, U.S. lawyers argue

Veterans have no legal right to specific types of medical care, the Bush administration argues in a lawsuit accusing the government of illegally denying mental health treatment to some troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
[...]
A federal law providing five years of care for veterans from the date of their discharge establishes "veterans' eligibility for health care, but it does not create an entitlement to any particular medical service," government lawyers said.
[...]
In his Jan. 10 ruling that allowed the suit to proceed, Conti said federal law entitles veterans to health care for a specific period after leaving the service, rejecting the government's argument that it was required to provide only as much care as the VA's budget allowed in a given year. A law that President Bush signed last week extended the period from two to five years.

In its latest filing, however, the Justice Department reiterated that Congress had intended "to authorize, but not require, medical care for veterans."

"This court should not interfere with the political branches' design, oversight and modification of VA programs," the government lawyers argued.
[...]
"Nowhere do I see any explanation of what kind of systems they have in place that deal with suicidal veterans," [Erspamer, the plaintiffs' lawyer said]. "There's no excuse for not spending the money Congress told them to spend on mental health care and leaving $60 million on the table when people are going out and killing themselves."

After I clean up the mess from my head exploding, we'll look at some numbers.
... ... ... ...
OK, here are the numbers, or lack thereof:

Suicide Epidemic Among Veterans
[...]
Beyond the individual loss, it turns out little information exists about how widespread suicides are among these who have served in the military. There have been some studies, but no one has ever counted the numbers nationwide.

"Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total," Bowman said.

Why do the families think that is?

"Because they don't want the true numbers of casualties to really be known," Lucey said.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee.

"If you're just looking at the overall number of veterans themselves who've committed suicide, we have not been able to get the numbers,” Murray said.

According to Department of Defense (DoD) statistics, three to 12 months after deployment in combat, up to 17 per cent of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) servicemembers screen positive for PTSD, while some 19-21 per cent screen for PTSD, depression or anxiety.
[...]
For both OIF and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) combined, the high-end estimate for PTSD prevalence is 19.9 per cent according, to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2004.

More than one in three soldiers and Marines who have served in Iraq later sought help for mental health problems, according to a comprehensive snapshot by Army experts of the psyches of men and women returning from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places.
[...]
Researchers have found that nearly two-thirds of Iraq veterans who "screened positive" for PTSD and other psychiatric disorders are not receiving treatment.

This is how bush supports our troops.

Any questions?



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak