By Jonathan Walker
Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
Monday, May 26, 2008
If you spend much time reading the news in Fort Wayne, you would get the impression that “Veterans Don’t Deserve Health Care†reflects how we feel about our veterans. For instance, there have been numerous reports about veterans trying to maintain the inpatient services at the Fort Wayne VA Medical Center so that they don’t have to drive to Indianapolis to obtain care. And veterans are not the only ones having trouble with health care. The family members of active-duty soldiers are given an insurance plan that is so bad that it can be hard to find a doctor. I have a patient who is married to a soldier in Iraq, and she has to drive from LaGrange to Huntington to see the only primary care doctor who will accept patients on the plan.
It gets worse. A recent study in the American Journal of Public Health indicated that almost 2 million veterans are uninsured, along with almost 4 million of their family members. This means that one in every eight uninsured Americans is a veteran or a member of a veteran’s household. You may have thought that veterans can automatically be treated at a VA hospital, but this is not the case. Veterans who have a service-connected injury can get care, but uninjured veterans face a “means test†before they are allowed into the VA system. They have to make less than 80 percent of the local median income before they are eligible, which explains why there are so many uninsured veterans – they make too much to be eligible for the VA (or Medicaid) but not enough to afford their own insurance. This rule was implemented in 2003 to save money.
Unfortunately, even if the VA was allowed to cover every veteran, it would still leave about half the uninsured veterans without care because they do not live near a VA hospital. Think about that for a minute. Although the VA can provide excellent care, it is impossible to have a VA hospital near every veteran. There are laws that make it illegal for an insurance company to force patients to drive an excessive distance just to stay in the network, yet we think nothing of making veterans drive long distances to get the care to which they are entitled.
It seems strange that a society that prides itself on “supporting the troops†would treat our veterans so poorly when it comes to health care. It so happens that if you become sick and lose your insurance, you will eventually become eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, assuming you can survive long enough to go bankrupt. You have to hit bottom first, but then you can get free medical care anywhere.
It would be so simple to expand these programs to veterans and their family members – so they never have to hit rock-bottom. It would even be cheaper than leaving them uninsured: A 2004 Kaiser Commission study found that the uninsured cost society twice as much compared to the cost of simply giving them insurance in the first place.
Veterans should have unfettered access to the best care we can give them. We should be ashamed that so many of them go without the care they deserve.
Jonathan D. Walker, M.D., is a member of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan. He wrote this for The Journal Gazette.