Injured soldiers' financial, emotional costs grow
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Cut off too soon
However, many veterans and families say the VA often restricts rehabilitation or cuts it off too quickly.
Former Army Ranger Jeremy Feldbusch, of Blairsville, Pa., was blinded and brain-injured by artillery shrapnel in Iraq, but he and his mother decided to get some care outside the VA. His mother, Charlene, says some specialists, especially brain experts, are better in the private sector.
Insurance for major injuries is available at low cost to service members. It pays out up to $100,000 to help cover costs of rehabilitation. But many think it isn’t enough.
In Odessa, Fla., the family of John Barnes decided to save most of his $100,000 payout.
They could easily have spent more of it. His mother, Valerie Wallace, estimates her expenses at more than $35,000 to help care for him while he deals with a brain injury and paralysis from a mortar attack on a base outside Baghdad. She took time off from her nursing job, paid $17 an hour for a home health aide, and transported her son to countless rounds of therapy.
Still, she wanted to preserve his insurance money. “John’s going to need that money down the road,” she says. Instead, she stopped saving, closed out investments, and borrowed against her own insurance.
Disability payments supply monthly income to the wounded, but the VA focuses on replacing lost earnings. A presidential commission has recommended broader compensation for lost quality of life — a concept in line with civilian law. Co-chair Donna Shalala, a former U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, estimates that the committee’s package of recommendations would cost at least several hundred million dollars.
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He can still do yard work, odd jobs, and go to culinary school. But Elmore, who has two little girls, complains that he can’t run and sometimes limps when he walks.
Some wounded veterans turn to private health insurance and other programs outside the federal government, swelling costs for states and towns. Sean Lunde, an Iraq veteran at the Massachusetts Department of Veterans’ Services, says his agency rushes emergency funds to some wounded veterans.
Service nonprofits also pay for emergency shelter, housing, job training, food, clothing and transportation for wounded veterans who risk slipping into coverage gaps.
T.J. Cantwell, of Rebuilding Together, says his group puts an average of $20,000 — plus donated supplies and labor — into houses it modifies for injured soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Rosedale, Md., the group added handrails, new light switches and door knobs, a garage door opener, and other improvements to the home of Army Sgt. 1st Class Juanita Wilson. The 33-year-old mother of two lost part of her arm in a homemade bomb blast in Iraq, but she remains on active duty to preserve her retirement.
Meanwhile, she says of the remodeling job, “If I had to pay for it, probably very little would be done.”
Despite all this help, many families drop tens of thousands of dollars on travel to hospitals, stays in hotel rooms, extra therapies, and on making their homes and vehicles accessible to the disabled. Intent on the best care, parents sometimes quit jobs and lose their own health insurance.
Denise Mettie, of Selah, Wash., and her husband have been living “paycheck to paycheck” while she helps in the recovery of her son, Evan. A car bomb in Iraq propelled shrapnel into his brain, and he can no longer walk or talk. His mother gave up her $30,000-a-year bank job and had to buy health insurance for herself and her two daughters, just to watch over her son’s hospital treatment, she says.
“What the VA has to offer is insufficient economically to take care of the impact of what happens,” says psychologist Michael Wagner, founder of the nonprofit U.S. Welcome Home Foundation and a retired Army medical officer.
Veterans groups finally sued the VA a few months ago. They claim that the crush of shattered troops has sent the agency into a “virtual meltdown.”
'Not taking care of the things they should'
Upset by his visits with wounded veterans, defense hawk Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who chairs a defense spending subcommittee, dropped his support for the Iraq war in 2005.
Speaking of the wounded, he now says federal officials are “not taking care of the things they should and ... we’re trying to change the direction.”
Many recommendations have come from veterans, federal advisers and others. Some involve quicker and heftier disability benefits. And nearly everyone begs for more VA money and staff for medical treatment, though few specify where they’d find extra resources.
Rep. Chris Carney, D-Pa., a military reservist, is promoting a bill to set mandatory annual spending levels for veterans’ health care. Prospects are unclear.
Either way, it may be too late for veterans like Awad, who nervously awaits the approach of imagined enemies around what was once his castle.
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