The battle of the wounded

At the same time, wounded veterans trying to obtain disability checks are being tied up in a bureaucratic nightmare. The Veterans Benefits Administration has a backlog of 400,000 pending claims -- and rising. Veterans must wait from six months to two years to begin receiving the money that is due to them while the agency plods through paperwork. The staff eventually helps veterans secure 88% of the benefits they ask for -- but in the interim, thousands of veterans with disabilities are left to fend for themselves.

The situation is about to go from bad to worse. Of the 1.4 million service members involved in the war effort from the beginning, 900,000 are still deployed on active duty. Once they are discharged, the demands for medical care and counseling will skyrocket, as will the number of benefit claims. The Veterans for America organization projects that VA medical centers may need to treat up to 750,000 more returning Iraq and Afghan war veterans and that half a million veterans may visit the Vet Centers.

And then there is the cost. After the Persian Gulf War in 1991, half of all veterans sought VA medical care, and 44% filed disability claims. Assuming that this pattern is repeated, the lifetime cost of providing disability payments and healthcare to Iraq and Afghan war veterans will likely cost U.S. taxpayers between $300 billion and $600 billion, depending on how long the war lasts.

President Bush is now talking about spending more money on recruiting in order to boost the size of the Army and deploy more troops to Iraq. But what about taking care of those soldiers when they return home? The VA's solution is to hire an additional 1,000 claims adjudicators to cut the backlog.

A better idea would be to stop examining each application and instead automatically accept all disability claims, then audit a sample (like the IRS does for tax filings) to weed out fraud. Or at a minimum, simple claims should be fast-tracked and settled within 60 days. We should also place more counselors and more claims experts in the Vet Centers and harmonize recordkeeping so veterans can move seamlessly from the Army's payroll into VA hospitals and outpatient care.

One of the first votes facing the new Democratic-controlled Congress will be another "supplemental" budget request for $100 billion-plus to keep the war going. The last Congress approved a dozen such requests with barely a peep, afraid of "not supporting our troops." If the new Congress really wants to support our troops, it should start by spending a few more pennies on the ones who have already fought and come home.