Civilians In Combat Risk All For A Few Dollars More

Service Civilians and the Wounds of War

Many Fill Vital Roles in Iraq, but Medical Care Can Be Spotty

By Ann Scott Tyson Washington Post Staff Writer

Traveling through Sunni insurgent territory north of Baghdad, the U.S. military convoy was nearing a base when a roadside bomb ripped into the lead Humvee, leaving its gunner, Mike Helms, bleeding and swaying from a strap in the open back.

Helms, 31, a civilian counterintelligence expert with the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group, had been sent to Iraq in 2004 to help fill a critical intelligence gap in the area known as the Sunni Triangle. While in Iraq, he lived with soldiers and ate military rations, took fire from mortar rounds and small arms, and clocked hundreds of miles manning a machine gun on the back of a Humvee.

Nevertheless, his status as an Army civilian would leave him stranded in the aftermath of the June 16, 2004, attack, when the bomb hit his Humvee so hard it blew his M-60 off its turret.

In the months that followed, Helms recalled, he was denied vital care for his wounds — ranging from shrapnel in his left arm to traumatic brain injury. Forced to rely on federal workers’ compensation and turned away from regular care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals, Helms has faced years of frustration grappling with bureaucracies unprepared to help a government civilian wounded in combat.

‘Izzy? . . . Bring Your Daughter Here’
U.S. Officer, Wanting to Save Interpreter’s Wounded Child, Faces a Snag (By David Finkel, The Washington Post)

 

There are thousands upon thousands of these stories developing every day. No one can convince me that these facts are unknown to Bush and Company. No one can convince me that Congress is not aware – these casualties come from their political districts, too. Whether they are soldiers or hired support or local collaborators, how we treat those who risk it all will determine our future. These casualties will determine whether we even have a future. Because, the mental and physical health care we offer will determine our own quality of life. Bush and Company cannot be allowed to downplay their responsibility to everyone they have put in harms way, including the American public!

Health Care vs. the Profit Principle

It’s always nice to see the President take a principled stand on something. The man formerly known as “43,” and now perhaps better named “29” for his record-breaking approval rating, is promising to battle any expansion of government health insurance for children — and not because he hates children or refuses to cough up the funds. No, this is a battle over principle: private health care vs. government-provided health care. Speaking in Cleveland this week, Bush boldly asserted:

• I strongly object to the government providing incentives for people to leave private medicine, private health care to the public sector. And I think it’s wrong and I think it’s a mistake. And therefore, I will resist Congress’s attempt … to federalize medicine…In my judgment that would be — it would lead to not better medicine, but worse medicine. It would lead to not more innovation, but less innovation.

Now you don’t have to have seen “Sicko” to know that if there is one area of human endeavor where private enterprise doesn’t work, it’s health care. Consider the private, profit-making, insurance industry that Bush is so determined to defend. What “innovations” has it produced? The deductible, the co-pay, and the pre-existing condition are the only ones that leap to mind. In general, the great accomplishment of the private health insurance industry has been to overturn the very meaning of “insurance,” which is risk-sharing: We all put in some money, though only some of us will need to draw on the common pool by using expensive health care. And the insurance companies have overturned it by refusing to insure the people who need care the most – those who are already, or are likely to become, sick.

Read the full story AlterNet 

Bush’s Private Armies Suffering Breakdowns

Contractors Face Combat-Related Stress After Iraq

WASHINGTON, July 4 — Contractors who have worked in Iraq are returning home with the same kinds of combat-related mental health problems that afflict United States military personnel, according to contractors, industry officials and mental health experts.

But, they say, the private workers are largely left on their own to find care, and their problems often go ignored or are inadequately treated.

A vast second army, one of contractors — up to 126,000 Americans, Iraqis and other foreigners — is working for the United States government in Iraq. Many work side-by-side with soldiers and are exposed to the same dangers, but they mostly must fend for themselves in navigating the civilian health care system when they come back to the United States.

With no widespread screening, many workers are not identified as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or other problems, mental health experts and contractors say. And, they add, the quality of treatment for others can vary widely because of limited civilian expertise in combat-related disorders.

Damn right TERROR is following us home!  The wave of haunted and terrorized casualties returning home number thousands more than official US military figures.  The symptoms of PTSD range from mild to totally PSYCHOTIC and AGGRESSIVE.   Both diagnosed and UN-diagnosed combat related mental illness will be trying to ASSIMILATE back into American society for years to come.  So, Yes, the terror has followed us home!  The American Taxpayer will foot the bill once again, one way or another.

Thanks George, your self-fulfilling prophecy comes true. 

Mentally Disabled? Skin A Little Dark? You’re Outta Here!

Re-Posted: Homeland Security Deports Terrorist? Oops! It’s a Mentally Disabled US Citizen! 

  Monday, June 18, 2007  FROM BLOG: All Spin Zone

 The following blog post is from an independent writer  not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.com.

 

Of course, it appears nobody will take responsibility. Pedro Guzman’s mother, Maria Carvajal, is left to walk the streets of Tijuana in search of her mentally disabled son while the Bush Administration’s Homeland Security Department does next to nothing.

TIJUANA, Mexico (June 17) – Clutching a photo of her son, Maria Carvajal walks Tijuana’s sweltering streets searching for the mentally disabled man she says was deported more than a month ago despite being a U.S. citizen and then disappeared in this chaotic border city.

Carvajal says she has searched hospitals, shelters and jails here looking for her 29-year-old son, Pedro Guzman of Lancaster, California, who was jailed for a misdemeanor trespassing violation, then sent to Mexico on May 11.

. . .

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed Guzman had been deported and said the agency had done so correctly. “ICE has no reason to believe that it improperly removed Pedro Guzman,” read a statement.

Officials at the U.S. consulate in Tijuana say they have made calls to help search for Guzman and asked other consulates in Mexico if they have information.

At least if they’d sent the guy to Gitmo they’d know where he is. But it seems incompetence and lack of responsibility reigns in the Department of Homeland Security, just like it does in the rest of the Bush Administration.

To be serious, they didn’t arrest the guy for terrorist charges, but assumed because he was brown and with a Latino name that he was illegal. The anti-immigration folks are calling for databases and walls and no tolerance, but if they make stupid mistakes like this, I know and you know that all those new enforcement ideas aren’t going to work with incompetent people operating them.

When in doubt, kick ’em out!

Don’t you feel safer now?  America’s policies regarding Mental Health are not just confusing, but totally inadequate.  When you consider this is a nation reliant on mood altering medication from St. John’s Wort, Zoloft to Prozac.  Add to this problem a system that’s PROFILE PARANOID and you have the crazies running the hospital.  Just assume anyone different from you is ONE OF THEM and you can do anything you want to get rid of them.

 The US is in bed with psychiatric pharmaceutical corporations –  but mental patients do not have a place in the big economic scheme of things unless they are official USERS of the preferred corporate drug of choice.  America’s policies toward the welfare of Mental Health patients are left behind at whatever hospital or system they leave behind.  Case in point, out of the mental health system and into a gun shop.  Make headline news for a few weeks, then the country forgets about it all until the next time.

The US has sanctioned the use of PROFILING (unofficially of course) to protect the nation from real or imagined enemies.  This has opened the gate for radical bigots to soar to the top of our security system.  With an attitude of ‘I told you so’ they are now free to act with prejudice against anyone that resembles a threat.  Resemble is the operative word.  This is no longer the America our Founding Fathers created – Amerika more closely resembles NAZI Germany.

Bush Screws His Private Armies, Too – PTSD or BTSD?

US contractors in Iraq suffering from psychological injuries repeatedly denied insurance claims

06/17/2007 @ 11:36 am  Filed by RAW STORY

US contractors serving in Iraq and Afghanistan who have sustained psychological injuries such as post-traumatic stress disorder are often finding themselves “caught in a morass of red tape and rejected insurance claims” finds a new Los Angeles Times investigation.  “Some seriously afflicted contract workers have been dumped into indigent medical care programs, according to court records,” reports the Times.

“Many have had to wage lengthy legal battles to win payments for psychological treatment. At least four have committed suicide after returning home from Iraq, according to court records and interviews with attorneys and family members.”

Insurance companies have fought claims for psychological injuries by using doctors of “questionable expertise,” says the paper. In one case, writes T. Christian Miller, an insurance company psychiatrist dismissed psychology as “baloney.”

Gary Pitts, a Houston attorney who has represented more than two dozen contractors with psychological problems, said contractors “put their lives on the line, and then they have to wait to get benefits” while insurance companies fight their claims.

The system “is costly; it’s inefficient; and it’s inhumane,” he said.

Contractors deployed to these war zones often experience the same kind of trauma that produces psychological problems in soldiers. Military surveys estimate that 15% to 20% of soldiers in Iraq show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, a debilitating condition often attributed to witnessing or participating in violence.

War, red tape haunt civilian workers

An analysis finds a pattern of blocked claims for psychological injuries sustained by contract employees in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By T. Christian Miller, Times Staff Writer  June 17, 2007

 Some seriously afflicted contract workers have been dumped into indigent medical care programs, according to court records. Many have had to wage lengthy legal battles to win payments for psychological treatment. At least four have committed suicide after returning home from Iraq, according to court records and interviews with attorneys and family members.