Bush Asks Dole and Shalala To Clean Up Walter Reed Mess

Posted on March 7, 2007

President Bush has enlisted former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and former Clinton Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala to help him clean up the Walter Reed disaster. The unfolding story of how horribly our nation's veterans are being treated is a true PR nightmare for the White House.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee said the budget for veterans' health care has not grown enough to cope with the number of service members being wounded in combat, or to handle their disability claims. Senator Daniel Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, said the budget pinch meant that veterans� affairs offices were short-staffed, leading to delays in processing new claims.
As a result, he said, federal agencies were "two months short of the goal" of processing claims within 120 days. Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, said that there were too few doctors, nurses and other health workers in the system to handle the influx of war wounded, "and we are burning them out." He, too, called for more funds for treating and assisting veterans.
Mr. Dole, a former Republican senator and presidential candidate, was himself grievously wounded in World War II. Ms. Shalala is a former secretary of Health and Humans Services. The commission is being set up to investigate how wounded soldiers are treated and helped with the transition back to civil society. "If we come up with good suggestions, we could change the system over the next 30 years," Mr. Dole said.
He said that while American military and veterans' hospitals now generally provide high quality inpatient treatment, they do not do as well with outpatient and transitional care. "It's when we move them out that's the problem," he said.
The commission was formed in the wake of revelations about unsanitary living conditions, treatment lapses and bureaucratic failings at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, one of the nation's premier military hospitals. Soldiers who were treated there have told of being discharged only a few days after suffering serious wounds, and of having to fight their way through a confusing and unresponsive bureaucracy to get the outpatient treatment they needed.

The situation for wounded veterans is absolutely apalling. Senator Dole and Secretary Shalala have taken on a very difficult job. The longer the war drags on, the more wounded veterans we have. The system just isn't set up for large numbers of seriously wounded soldiers. Which is, of course, another reason why we shouldn't have gone into Iraq in the first place.