Care program misses badly wounded troops

By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Apr 18, 2008 9:26:13 EDT

A new program that is supposed to provide a care coordinator to help severely injured service members navigate the military and veterans’ health care systems is failing to serve hundreds who were injured in the early years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, a Senate subcommittee learned Wednesday.

The hiring of so-called federal recovery coordinators has been good news for those who are helped, said Meredith Beck, national policy director for the nonprofit Wounded Warrior Project. Most families who have contact with one of the coordinators “are very excited about the program,” Beck told the Senate Armed Services personnel subcommittee.

But Beck said the coordinators are focused on service members in military hospitals, not on people being treated mostly as outpatients or people who were injured before the coordinator program was created.

“There is a common and dangerous misperception that if you were injured earlier on, then all your problems have been solved,” she said. “I can tell you from personal experience those families are often the ones in need of the most help. They are the ‘bow wave,’ often finding the problems and facing them alone.”

A high-level Pentagon committee that is seeking to implement improvements in military health care is trying to find a way to extend care to older cases.

Beck mentioned two other areas where Congress might help.

One involves a policy change that would allow service members with severe brain injuries the option of temporarily delaying their medical and physical evaluation boards so they can extend their active service.

“Unlike burn patients and amputees, those with severe brain injuries appear to be ‘boarded out’ of the military very quickly, some within days or weeks of their devastating injuries,” she said.

In some cases, more time is needed for a family to adjust to the “devastating and life-altering wound,” she said.

Another reason to delay is that some treatments, such as cognitive rehabilitation, available to people still in uniform are not available from the Department of Veterans Affairs or through the Tricare health insurance program, Beck said.

A deferment of board evaluations of up to one year would help in such cases, she said.

A second issue is the idea of making parents and next of kin of severely injured service members eligible for Tricare coverage, which is now limited to an injured service member’s spouse or minor children. With many young, unmarried service members receiving severe injuries in combat, parents and other family members are providing long-term care at home that often results in their leaving a job — and losing health insurance — to be full-time caregivers, she said.

“It is our responsibility to ensure that family members providing this care have the tools to maintain their own health, giving the service member the best chance of recovery,” Beck said.

Under the Wounded Warrior Project proposal, Tricare coverage would be available to parents or next of kin providing full-time caregiving services to a severely injured service member.

The personnel subcommittee, chaired by Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., is scheduled to begin writing its portion of the 2009 defense policy bill the week of April 28.

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