Privatize, privatize, privatize...pay for rich tax cuts...

From American Progress:

MILITARYThe Walter Reed Pattern

In today's Washington Post, we learn the story of Army Spec. Roberto Reyes Jr., who "lies nearly immobile and unable to talk" in his hospital bed. "

Once a strapping member of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, Reyes got too close to an improvised explosive device in Iraq." His mother and his aunt are "constant bedside companions; Reyes, 25, likes for them to get two inches from his face, so he can pull on their noses with the few fingers he can still control."

But his family complains about his medical care. "They fight over who's going to have to give him a bath -- in front of him!" his aunt said. "Reyes suffered third-degree burns on his leg when a nurse left him in a shower unattended. He was unable to move himself away from the scalding water."

Perhaps surprisingly, these horror stories are not from Walter Reed hospital, but the VA Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y. They are evidence not of a few tragic isolated problems, but of systemic neglect that has nearly crippled the U.S. veterans' health system.

"I've...written the same story from Fort Stewart, Georgia. I've written the same story at Fort Knox," says journalist Mark Benjamin, who first reported on the neglect and deplorable conditions at Walter Reed two years ago. Likewise, the problems that led to this crisis are also systemic.

"For all its cries of 'support the troops,'" columnist Paul Krugman writes today, "the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can."

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