Health care costs will mushroom as injured veterans age
Improved battlefield medicine helps more survive, but is the Veterans Affairs Department equipped to handle the cost of their care?
Han , 27, joined the Army in 2004 and went to Iraq, where he drove a tank. On Memorial Day 2007 — one month after the birth of his second child — Han drove over an IED. Just 21, he lost his arm and the use of both legs, and now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. The Department of Veterans Affairs pays him $10,000 every month for his disability, his caretakers, health care, medications and equipment for his new life.
it is certain to be high, with the veterans’ higher survival rates, longer tours of duty and multiple injuries, plus the anticipated cost to the VA of reducing the wait times for medical appointments and reaching veterans in rural areas.
Medical costs peak decades later,” said Linda Bilmes, a professor in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and coauthor of "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."
As veterans age, their injuries worsen over time, she said. The same long-term costs seen in previous wars are likely to be repeated to a much larger extent.
Post-9/11 veterans in 2012 cost the VA $2.8 billion of its $50.9 billion health budget for all of its annual costs, records show. And that number is expected to increase by $510 million in 2013, according to the VA budget.
Injuries like Han ’s likely will lead to other medical issues, ranging from heart disease to diabetes, for example, as post-9/11 veterans age.
“So we have the same phenomenon but to a much greater extent,” Bilmes said. “And that drives a lot of the long-term costs of the war, which we’re not looking at the moment, but which will hit in 30, 40, 50 years from now.”
Veterans like Han with polytraumatic injuries will require decades of costly rehabilitation, according to a 2012 Military Medicine report that analyzed the medical costs of war through 2035. More than half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are between the ages of 18 and 32, according to 2011 American Community Survey data. They are expected to live 50 more years, the Ins ute of Medicine reports.
About 25 percent of post-9/11 veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and 7 percent have traumatic brain injury, according to Congressional Budget Office analyses of VA data. The average cost to treat them is about four to six times greater than those without these injuries, CBO reported. And polytrauma patients cost an additional 10 times more than that.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/...=publici-email
dubya, head, rummy and their BigOil paymasters, the gifters that keep on giving (aka, extracting wealth from Human-Americans)
your boy O' wants to bite off more than he can chew and do it again, this time possibly drawing in major world powers
I wonder how much an all out regional war in the middle east would cost?
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