ONCE AGAIN, WHO CARES FOR OUR TROOPS?

War whores like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin constantly prattle about how lefties don't care for our troops. They never got around to investigating Walter Reed although the Washington "Compost," as Levin calls it, managed to. Now we find that the VA, once headed by a Bush buffoon, is also failing our veterans.


Suit claiming shoddy treatment of veterans goes to trial in S.F.
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, April 21, 2008

(04-21) 17:30 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week while the government stalls in granting returning troops the mental health treatment and benefits to which they are entitled, veterans advocates told a federal judge Monday in San Francisco.

The rights of hundreds of thousands of veterans are being violated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, "an agency that is in denial," and by a government health care system and appeals process for patients that is "broken down," Gordon Erspamer, lawyer for two advocacy groups, said in an opening statement at the trial of a nationwide lawsuit.

He said veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day - a number acknowledged by a VA official in a Dec. 15 e-mail - and the agency's backlog of disability claims now exceeds 650,000, an increase of 200,000 since the Iraq war started in 2003.