Ray Oliva went into the spare bedroom in his home in Kelseyville, Calif., to wrestle with his feelings. He didn't know a single soldier at Walter Reed, but he felt he knew them all. He worried about the wounded who were entering the world of military health care, which he knew all too well. His own VA hospital in Livermore was a mess. The gown he wore was torn. The wheelchairs were old and broken.
"It is just not Walter Reed," Oliva slowly tapped out on his keyboard at 4:23 in the afternoon on Friday. "The VA hospitals are not good either except for the staff who work so hard. It brings tears to my eyes when I see my brothers and sisters having to deal with these conditions. I am 70 years old, some say older than dirt but when I am with my brothers and sisters we become one and are made whole again."
I host a daily public affairs radio show in San Francisco called Your Call. It airs from 11 am - noon PST on KALW 91.7 FM. I am also happy to report that I recently got a book deal with PoliPoint Press to write about my road trip through the heartland and the interviews I did with people about why they vote the way they do (or not). It's scheduled to be out in September.
Monday, March 05, 2007
It's Not Just Walter Reed
Finally. Salon.com, AlterNet.org, and others have been writing about the poor treatment of soldiers for years. I wrote about homeless vets in 2005, but these stories didn't gain traction in the national media. The fallout continues:
If private companies had mismanaged outpatient care for veterans the way the V.A. system has, there would be strong calls from all the usual quarters for a government takeover, and proclamations of how we can't trust "greedy" for-profit companies to take care of veterans. Funny how this thought process doesn't seem to work in reverse, except among "free market ideologues," who have been criticizing the V.A. for years.
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