Senate's VA bill could cost over half a trillion $ over next decade

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

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http://crfb.org/blogs/senate-vets-bill-could-create-new-500-billion-entitlement-program

wowza.

[Meursault]

Behold, the inevitable end-point of American soldier worship.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

While of course, any future Congress could always undo an appropriation, the only area of spending where there is a constitutional time limit is with army appropriations which cannot be for a term of more than two years.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

The VA system needs to be packaged within a national health service.

[Bozo the Clown]

This is costing money and lives.

[Indy Texas]

None of this should be shocking to anyone.

You've got veterans of one war (Vietnam) that will live longer than veterans of any war before them. The veterans of Korea and earlier wars were mainly dealing with superficial physical injuries - shrapnel caught in joints, limbs missing from mines. Vietnam vets dealt with significantly more psychiatric issues due to the nature of the conflict and different methods of diagnosis and treatment. They also dealt with the aftereffects of exposure to a number of chemical and biological weapons, including Agent Orange and the other "rainbow" agents, whose effects still aren't entirely understood.

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are in many cases dealing with traumatic brain injuries of the sort that weren't seen in earlier conflicts - both because the weapons causing them did not exist and because they are increasingly surviving the kind of incidents that ordinarily would have been fatal in earlier conflicts. Treating them in an outpatient setting puts an undue amount of stress on spouses, who often must quit their jobs because caring for their injured spouse becomes a full time obligation.

Just add this to the total price tag of the failed foreign policy of George W. Bush, the failed foreign policy of neoconservatism and the failed foreign policy of the Republican Party.

If fifty years from now, my grandchildren ask me, "Grandpa, how come you've never voted for a Republican for president?" I will tell them, "There are four letters that I will never forgive them for, I, R, A and Q."