"Support the troops"? What's that mean?

In 1983, I joined the Air Force because of the educational benefits (and, yeah, because I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life at the time); I'd only planned to stay in for one tour. By the time that tour was up, though, I had a wife and two kids, and having a good health plan seemed like the way to go. So I reenlisted.

My second tour ended and I still had the wife, but now I had three kids. Staying in seemed like a much better idea. And by the time that enlistment ended, I had been in the military twelve years - over halfway to retirement.

The military pays the troops less than they would get doing the same job in the civilian world. If it hadn't been for the benefits, there isn't a chance in hell that I would have stayed in, and my attitude wasn't unique. It's almost universal among the enlisted members. (There are some rare exceptions, of course, and officers may be a different story - they're paid significantly more money than the grunts.) If you cut the benefits, your all-volunteer military is going to collapse.

So, what the hell is going on here?

Republicans and Democrats alike are signaling a willingness — unheard of at the height of two post-Sept. 11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — to make military retirees pay more for coverage. It's a reflection of Washington's newfound embrace of fiscal austerity and the Pentagon's push to cut health care costs that have skyrocketed from $19 billion in 2001 to $53 billion.

The numbers are daunting for a military focused on building and arming an all-volunteer force for war. The Pentagon is providing health care coverage for 3.3 million active duty personnel and their dependents and 5.5 million retirees, eligible dependents and surviving spouses. Retirees outnumber the active duty, 2.3 million to 1.4 million.

And some changes are already happening.

We pay a little more to get the Trophy Wife's prescriptions from Walgreens. They'd be free if I got them from the base hospital, but my wife works with Opera Unlimited, travelling across New Mexico to help music programs in elementary schools. If she is 500 miles away, and runs out of, say, Zetia (a heart medication) or Losartin/HCTZ (for blood pressure), Walgreens will get her an emergency supply to hold her over until she gets back to Albuquerque: their database clearly shows what she's taking and how often, and every Walgreens in the country can pull that information up.

But that's apparently going to change in January, because Walgreens and Express Scripts are locked in a contract dispute which may prevent Walgreens from handling prescriptions for Tricare, the Defense Department plan managed by Express Scripts.

But that's just an inconvenience. Thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan, we're getting more injured veterans pouring into the system than we have since Vietnam. And despite the challenges of readjusting to civilian life, they haven't been getting the help they need for years.

Plus, thanks to advances in both military and medical technology, more soldiers are surviving worse wounds than ever before. So, not only do they need more medical care, but their needs are only going to get worse as they get older.

The Pentagon estimates that as many as one in five soldiers are coming home from war zones with traumatic brain injuries, and current studies show that studies show that even a slight trauma to the brain doubles your chance of developing dementia later in life, meaning that many will need around-the-clock care.

Assuming that they can get any help at all.

Marine Cpl. James Dixon was wounded twice in Iraq -- by a roadside bomb and a land mine. He suffered a traumatic brain injury, a concussion, a dislocated hip and hearing loss. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Army Sgt. Lori Meshell shattered a hip and crushed her back and knees while diving for cover during a mortar attack in Iraq. She has undergone a hip replacement and knee reconstruction and needs at least three more surgeries.

In each case, the Pentagon ruled that their disabilities were not combat-related.

In a little-noticed regulation change in March, the military's definition of combat-related disabilities was narrowed, costing some injured veterans thousands of dollars in lost benefits -- and triggering outrage from veterans' advocacy groups.

But we have to cut expenses, right? We have to decrease spending somewhere, and defense spending is one of the larger chunks of the federal budget.

Well, funny you should mention that.

The 2012 military budget includes 134 billion dollars for equipment, but also includes almost 81 billion dollars in research for new weapons systems. You know, I think we kill people well enough already; ask the Iraqi people. (You know, the ones who are left...)

But how much good is that 81 billion dollars doing us, anyway?

Despite improvements, more than half of the Pentagon’s big weapons systems still cost more than they should, with management failures adding at least $70 billion to the projected costs over the last two years, government auditors said Tuesday.

The Government Accountability Office, a Congressional watchdog, said the biggest program, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, accounted for $28 billion of that increase. Other systems also had significant cost overruns, the agency said, adding that the increases could force the Pentagon to cut the number of ships and planes it buys.

The auditors said many of the problems occurred because the Pentagon began building the systems before the designs were fully tested.

In August of this year, Congress finished a comprehensive look at spending in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In its final report to Congress, the Commission on Wartime Contracting said the figure could grow as U.S. support for reconstruction projects and programs wanes, leaving both countries to bear the long-term costs of sustaining the schools, medical clinics, barracks, roads and power plants already built with American tax dollars.

Much of the waste and fraud could have been avoided with better planning and more aggressive oversight, the commission said. To avoid repeating the mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan, government agencies should overhaul the way they award and manage contracts in war zones, the commission recommended.
[...]
The commission said calculating the exact amount lost through waste and fraud is difficult because there is no commonly accepted methodology for doing so. But using information it has gathered over the past three years, the commission said at least $31 billion has been lost and the total could be as high as $60 billion. The commission called the estimate "conservative."

But that's OK. That's only the money we've lost in foreign countries.

How often does the Pentagon award contracts to defense companies that have already been proven to be defrauding taxpayers? A report the Department of Defense did at the request of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) reveals an answer that should make Washington very uncomfortable.

The report, released today, showed that hundreds of defense contractors found guilty of civil fraud received more than $1.1 trillion in defense contracts since 2001. The study took into account only companies that were found to have defrauded taxpayers of more than $1 million dollars.

More than $573 billion went directly to companies that were guilty of defrauding taxpayers, and when you factor in the awards that went to the parent companies of those contractors, the total is $1.1 trillion. Of that $573 billion, more than two-thirds—$398 billion—went to companies after they had been found guilty of fraud.

So maybe there's a few places out there where we can save money.

But as to the veterans, it's simple morality.

We have an all-volunteer military, but it goes both ways. When they sign on, they put, not just their lives, but their bodies, in harm's way. And if these brave men and women get hurt fighting for their country, we have an obligation to take care of them. For the rest of their lives, if necessary.

If you don't want to pay for wounded veterans, there's only one answer: stop making them. Stop sending soldiers to distant countries, where they risk their lives for some political agenda.

You don't get a choice on this. If you're going to play, you've got to pay; if you don't like it, get out of the game.

A bullet come an' drilled the beggar clean.

OK, I can beat the bacon story. And I don't even need to fisk it. The most I've laughed this week was when I tried to read it out loud. And the more research I did to see if it was true, the worse it got.

I'm not even going to try to rephrase this: I'm not sure I can write about it without commenting. I'm just going to assemble the story from three different sources, because nobody seems to have all the good details.

A security guard came up with a bizarre remedy to remove a wart - he shot off his finger with a shotgun.

Sean Murphy, 38, from Doncaster, had seen his GP repeatedly about the problem and also tried a variety of traditional ointments and creams. But when the persistent wart refused to disappear, he opted for the firepower of a 12-bore Beretta he claimed he had found under a hedge a few months earlier.

South Yorkshire Police are still trying to discover how the Beretta found its way to the hedge where Murphy found it. They know it was stolen in a burglary two years ago, but have no further record of its passage through the criminal underworld.

Murphy, who hails from Doncaster in northern England, had lost his job as a security guard shortly before the incident in March. The wart, which was about the size of a dime, plagued him for at least five years. "It was hurting a lot and causing my finger to bend," Murphy said. "I'd been to the doctors and tried all sorts of things, but it wouldn't go."

He said he drank several pints of beer to build up his courage before carrying out the operation outside the caravan where he was living at the time. He stretched out his left hand, pointing the end of the barrel at an angle to the offending wart, and used his other hand to hold the stock steady and pull the trigger.

Murphy denies that the beer affected his aim. He insists the fault lay with the weapon’s recoil."I didn't expect to lose my finger as well when I shot it, but the gun recoiled and that was it," he said. "The wart was gone and so was most of my finger. There was nothing left of it, so no chance of re-attaching it."

His lawyer, Richard Haigh, said Murphy "has been a victim of his own stupidity when domestic pressures got to him." Murphy was also ordered to complete 100 hours of unpaid community work and pay costs of £100.

After leaving Doncaster Magistrates' Court with a suspended 16-week prison sentence, Murphy said, "I'm happy with that. I know I could have gone to jail for up to 15 years for a firearms offence. My solicitor did a very good job. The best thing is that the wart has gone. It was giving me lot of trouble."

Bloody hell

On Friday, United Blood Services had another blood drive. The bus was parked outside of our office building for the entire day. I walked past it several times, but didn't even bother to go in.

I'm not boycotting UBS. In fact, every time I had to walk past them, it made me a little depressed. You see, it was about five years ago that UBS informed me that they no longer required my services.

This isn't because I was in Kuwait after the first Gulf War; even though I had to patrol through vehicle remains known to contain depleted uranium rounds, they really didn't care about that. And it didn't have anything to do with being one of the first units into Iraq after the invasion in 2003; that, it seems, wasn't even worth noting.

It's not because of anything in my private life. I've never had sex with another man, I've never had hepatitis and I'm not a drug user. (OK, the odd molecule of THC might have found its way into my body once or twice; let's not make a big deal out of it.)

It's because I lived in Germany.

You see, the FDA has decided that anyone who's lived a cumulative six months in Europe (or three months in the UK) can no longer give blood. Because, despite not having any evidence that there's any danger to anybody, the FDA is so ass-clenchingly frightened of mad cow disease that they're going to allow the US blood supply to become dangerously depleted.

Mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy - BSE - or new variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease - vCJD or nvCJD) was first identified in England in 1984. What happened was, although cattle are herbivores, a little extra protein makes them fatten up faster. Throughout most of the world, this protein has come from soybeans.

But soybeans don't grow well in Europe, and cattle farmers there began supplementing their cow's diets with some various waste products nobody was using - mostly bone meal, and occasionally organs that never caught on as food.

(For example, brains, which haven't ever been popular anywhere but the American Midwest, where diners near the stockyards of St Louis started serving batter-dipped, fried brain slices as sandwiches; their popularity has, unaccountably died out except in a few smaller establishments.)

To be clear, BSE is the name of the disease when it's in cattle; vCJD is the disease in humans. In either case, the disease essentially chews holes in the brain tissue, making it look like a sponge (hence, "spongiform"). But under either name, it qualifies as a TSE (transmissible spongiform encephalopathy).

The problem is that Mad Cow is transmitted by prions, which are neither a virus nor a bacteria, but more of a rogue protein. One that survives, incidentally, at remarkably high temperatures. And there hasn't been enough study of prions for scientists to really have a firm grasp on their properties.

There have been some suggestions that a change in British law allowing for lower-temperature sterilization of the beefy by-products was the culprit. But the British government has studied the problem pretty extensively, and determined that "changes in process could not have been solely responsible for the emergence of BSE, and changes in regulation were not a factor at all."

There are other diseases passed by prions: Scrapie, for instance, is similar to BSE, but affects sheep and goats; it's been known about since the eighteenth century, but doesn't seem to jump the species barrier.

In the Fifties, there was an epidemic of Kuru among New Guinea natives; kuru is a neurodegenerative disease (hmmm... so it makes the brain go bad...), and is only passed, as far as anybody can tell, through cannibalism. So that's a native cultural tradition that maybe we shouldn't respect...

However, there have only been 218 identified cases of vCJD worldwide since it was identified. Not exactly the epidemic that some people think.

When I was younger, I donated on a regular basis. Many people in the military see the importance of donating blood. Of course, since military members and their families are one of the most common types of Americans who live overseas for extended periods, this has taken thousands of potential blood donors off of the market.

And with the national blood supply dangerously low, this may be a policy that puts live at risk for little or no reason.

(It's not just blood products that have been affected, either. Sperm banks have been unable to import replacements to refill depleted stocks of once-popular Nordic sperm.)

So, on Friday, I walked past the Bloodmobile, a little sadder each time.

Moo.

Greed, Health Care Reform and the American Recovery Act

Middle America needs to get a grasp on corporate greed, and recognize it as the modern day King George. Two of President Obama’s major initiatives, Health Care Reform and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will fare much better if the working class skeptics see the role corporate greed plays in both issues.

Right wing media fear mongers have convinced Joe Sixpack and his buddies that their enemy in health care is the public option. They believe it will raise costs and lead to socialism, which will take away all of their money and freedom. They fail to look at the fact that their health care benefits have cost more and provided less at the hands of greedy private monopolistic insurance companies for years. Even with the threat of a public option on the table, the insurers are still unsympathetic to small businesses that would like to but cannot afford to supply their employees with decent health insurance. Greed has prompted insurance companies to favor their own profits over the services they provide to small businesses and consumers.

Similarly, polls indicate that Middle America feels the Recovery Act is failing to produce jobs, that it is costing money for no gain. Yet, there is gain; businesses are doing better. But the businesses are keeping the better for themselves. Despite the recent paths to economic recovery, employers are not willing to hire new employees. Current employees are often working longer for less in order to keep the jobs they have. The gloomy outlook in the job market is a result of reluctant employers rather than a failed stimulus package. Greed once again prompts businesses to favor their own corporate security over the well being of their employees and the people of America.

It is naïve to think we can rely on business to rescue us out of the mess they put us in to begin with. We need tea parties that put blame where blame is due: tea parties aimed at right wing legislators and their business cronies who exert their tyranny against the American public. Tell them we want a public option now, one that will reign in corporate greed in the health insurance industry. Tell them we want sanctions now against businesses and banks that have failed to use Recovery Act money to provide jobs and loans to small businesses. This is our time, our chance to legislate against corporate greed and for some financial fairness in our society. Let’s not lose it.

Enough is Enough

Years ago my mother was convinced that Medicare would turn the USA into a communist country. Now, at 91, she uses it gratefully. My recently deceased father-in-law was the same; swore Medicare would make us all communists, but then swore by it when it helped extend his life to 90.

I, on the other hand, spent one year with minimal health care. Fortunately, I was able to change jobs in 1984 to obtain adequate health insurance for my family. I had a disabled daughter and flimsy medical coverage that paid for little of her care at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Luckily, I was able to find a job with a good private health care plan. Millions, however, are unable to obtain any health care and are sick or dying as a result. They would be well served to have a national health program as an option.

Where are the outcries about deaths caused by a society unwilling to see that everyone has health care? Where is the outrage about the needless suffering of so many fellow Americans?

Why aren’t the radicals out there screaming “murder” when a young uninsured woman dies of cancer? Or when a middle aged uninsured man dies of kidney disease? Where is the hype to stop “murdering” so many of our uninsured citizens? The private sector insurance business has failed these people miserably while some private insurance executives have rolled big time in the money we pay as premiums. It is time to try something different.

We spend more on health care now than any nation in the world, yet rank 37th out of 191 countries in health care according to the World Health Organization. Canadians outlive Americans by two years, despite all of the American criticisms about socialized medicine. True, we are better service providers and insurers for certain specialty diseases than any other country. But then, aren’t we smart enough to overhaul the system so it is accessible to all, yet retain our excellent specialty care? Aren’t we obligated to do just that if we are, as we claim, the most moral country on Earth?

The time is now to act outrageously indignant that any American anywhere would shout out against giving another American a fair chance at life saving health care. I am fed up with ignorant people rudely interrupting health care town hall meetings geared to helping tweak the President’s health care plan. Those of us in favor of the plan, including myself, are screaming back: “Haters, move out of the way. We want good health care now for all Americans. We will not be stopped by your ignorance.”