For your consideration, a policy proposal that combines moral imperitive and strategic politics.
Over at Working for Change, Andrew Boyd points to a Washington Times story (yeah, yeah, it's okay) about the tragedy facing physically and mentally injured Iraq vets:
U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq are beginning to show up at homeless shelters around the country, and advocates fear they are the leading edge of a new generation of homeless vets not seen since the Vietnam era...
[A returning vet] said he felt pushed out of the military too quickly after getting back from Iraq without medical attention he needed for his hand -- and as he would later learn, his mind.
"It was more of a rush. They put us in a warehouse for a while. They treated us like cattle," Arellano said about how the military treated him on his return to the United States...
An Army study...showed that 17 percent of service members returning from Iraq met screening criteria for major depression, generalized anxiety disorder or PTSD.
Read the rest to get angry. Read below for what we can do.
It's actually quite simple when you say it: top-notch medical and mental for all vets. Period.
POLICY
It's not as if we don't know how. According to Phillip Longman's piece in the January Washington Monthly ("The Best Care Anywhere"), VA Hospitals now (in stark contrast to their disgusting state of decades past) provide among the best health care in the nation.
So where's the disconnect between the great care at VA Hospitals and the tragedy unfolding on our streets? Presumably (and those more expert should jump in here and correct me if I'm wrong) it's about rising demand and under-funding.
The VA is doing amazing things given the strain under which they are operating. According to the Longman article, even as patient load increased 70% between 1999 and 2003, funding only increased 40%. With numbers like these, it's no surprise that the VA can't accept all those who need care.
So the policy proposal is straightforward: find out resources the VA needs to provide access to its excellent to all our veterans. Then fund it.
Many of the injustices unfolding under the Bush administration are complex—this one has a simple solution. And as to the cost, well, remind me how much we're spending in Iraq?
POLITICS
So now let's jump over to the political side. I see huge upsides for Democratic candidates who grab this one and run with it, and even bigger upsides for the party as a whole if this plank is widely adopted:
- Who supports the troops? A unified Democratic offensive on this front makes it clear.
- You can't talk about this issue without underscoring the disastrous effects of this disastrous war — not just on those who die, but on those who survive. Our country needs to hear about this story.
- As Longman makes clear in his Washington Monthly piece, the VA is a demonstration of what good government programs can do — a huge counterexample to the GOP's warped view of the world where everyone fends for themselves.
- And as Longman also points out, building popular support for the VA medical system is a natural way of leading the political discourse back to a policy overwhemlingly supported by the electorate: health insurance for everyone.
People want to know what the Democrats have to offer? Here's a good place to start. We've got:
- A clear moral imperitive
- A non-traditional issue that broadly crosses party lines
- A program that's proven to work
- And the GOP has already done all the "framing" we could possibly want. ("You say you support the troops? Prove it but supporting this bill.")
We can do this. And we should.