Is This Benefit Amputation Affordable?

RE: NY Times article, 9-19-11   “Retiree Benefits for the Military Could Face Cuts"

The proposal to "cut" and postpone military retiree pensions and health benefits as reported in the NY Times is one solution to fiscally imposed difficult choices.

What is most notable is the emotional outrage expressed in the quotation referring to the current system; “It cries out for some rationalization...Why should we ask somebody to sustain a system that’s unfair by any other measure in our society?”

Unfair?  To whom?   Fair by "every other measure"?  Are we measuring apples and oranges when we compare the cost of annual health insurance premiums for military personnel and their families with that of civilians?

“The fact that you are getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan does make it easier,”

Really?

The piece also states that the current price of military retirement may begin to interfere with military capability.  The question seems to be, can we afford military defense of this country?

How many civilians give up so much of their health as do military?  Do our families sacrifice as much time together, hardship making it on our own for extended periods of time, and based on well-publicized studies, the children of deployed military endure increased rates of psychiatric illness relative to their civilian counterparts.  

I am one of those civilians, but I have spent one-half of my time during the last half of my medical career, attending either veterans or active duty personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.  I saw 2 young female veterans of the Persian Gulf War return to the same clinic, one needing a lung transplant, and the other, a heart transplant.  An active duty infantry officer with 3.5 years of combat experience, of which eighteen months were served contiguously in Iraq, was treated for an incipient myocardial infarction two years later at age 37.  His son, age 25 months upon his father’s return from Iraq could not bear to let go of his father for the next 8 months. 

Every day I saw veterans and active duty personnel with serious medical conditions related to the abuse their bodies suffer due to service.  In this population, to have knees and backs escape painful dysfunction to the same age as the average civilian is a rarity in my experience with this group. 

And of course, as is so commonly mentioned in the press, there is the post-traumatic lifetime re-experiencing of the horror of war, day and night, for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps the current context IS the most troubling of circumstances.   The January 2011 issue of The Veterans Post News reported that "$9 billion received by the Department of Defense from the sale of Iraqi oil and other revenue streams vanished” with 8.7 billion of the funds unaccounted for according to the online inspector general’s report. 

Is it fair to cut the benefits of those who give up and suffer so much, who are paid so little?   Is out-of-sight, out-of-mind a justifiable rationale for this amputation of benefits?  Can the civilian sector afford this particular tragic choice?   

Those who would answer affirmatively are predictably not those who have served, nor their relatives, friends, health care providers.  They know the lack of proportionality in self-investment by those in uniform who serve the rest of us.