By Physicians for a National Health Program


Over 2,200 veterans died in 2008 due to lack of health insurance. Is this what our veterans were fighting for?

Harvard Medical School estimates 2,266 U.S. military veterans under the age of 65 died last year because they lacked health insurance and thus had reduced access to care. That figure is more than 14 times the number of deaths (155) suffered by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2008, and more than twice as many as have died (911 as of Oct. 31) since the war began in 2001.

How can we continue to support a fragmented, dysfunctional financing system that allows some of our veterans (not to mention tens of thousands of others of us) to die merely because we have placed a higher priority on nurturing the private insurance industry than we have on improving access for everyone through a more effective health care financing system? Our veterans. How can we let them down like this?

On a personal note, Veterans Day has always been a difficult day for me. In August of 1964, when I was driving from California to Texas to report for duty as an Army medical officer, we heard on the radio that our close friend, Dick Sather, was the Navy pilot who was just shot down and killed in the Gulf of Tonkin incident. (The other pilot shot down, Everett Alvarez, was held captive for over eight years.)

I was already a pacifist, but strictly on an ethical and not a religious basis. I believe, like so many others, that war is not healthy for children and other living things. The very worst possible way to negotiate international disagreements is to engage in war. And yet the United States does it over and over again. The school yard excuse, “but they started it,” doesn’t even seem to apply anymore.

After medical officer basic training in San Antonio, my first assignment to season me before being sent overseas, was as a battalion surgeon in Fort Hood, Texas. Yes, that Fort Hood.

Now you understand why I seem to be off message – the combination of my Veterans Day grief, the tragic slaughter that just occurred at my former military base, and now this new report on the unnecessary deaths of so many veterans due to a broken health insurance system.

Veterans Day is a day to think about the impact on not just our veterans but all of us, of record unemployment, war, and the unfair health care system that Bob Herbert writes about. We can fix all of them.

So what are we doing? More government money for Wall Street, and less for jobs. More troops for the war in Afghanistan, instead of withdrawal. More money for private insurers, while health care becomes ever less affordable for patients.

Is this what our veterans were fighting for?

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