IT'S CLOSING TIME
Stein, Jeff
It's Closing Time Ifell through the health-insurance safety net late one night last summer, right onto a cold steel gurney in the emergency room of a Veterans Administration (VA) hospital. I was,...
...Several others were put on eighteen-month probation...
...my recovery had been botched by an error in the menu...
...The move would save the taxpayers billions of dollars and eliminate wasteful and substandard care...
...It's time to close the system down...
...I was rupturing...
...Like millions of other veterans before me, I was about to be tossed to the mercy of the VA health system...
...Clements's idea is rooted in simplicity...
...A Congressional hearing showed that death rates for heart surgery in VA hospitals were as high as six times the national average...
...The men there—crippled by a hopeless and despised war—were helpless at the hands of callous VA doctors and nurses...
...Save the taxpayers' money for the veterans who have been forced to earn it...
...My complaints brought only vague, patronizing smiles or downright hostility from the nurses...
...It paralyzed him from the waist down...
...Eventually, Life magazine brought the outrageous story to a shocked public, and the Government was embarrassed into doing something about it...
...I had no health insurance...
...Calls for a nurse went unanswered while I uncontrollably vomited bad food...
...Jeff Stein (Jeff Stein, a Washington free-lance writer, is developing a new magazine to be called "Fathers...
...Urine bags overflowed...
...Heart patients were dying at an unseemly rate...
...My mind drifted to one particularly gruesome story...
...In that time, an intravenous device was tucked under my skin instead of into a vein, turning my arm into a summer squash...
...More than a minute a day of an attending physician's time—the physician usually being an intern—was a luxury...
...Horror stories about VA hospitals, especially during the Vietnam war years, were countless...
...VA medical officials promised to close as many as fifteen of the forty-seven heart units they had, but they shut down only four...
...In the end, I felt lucky to have escaped without further harm...
...My face and collar began to drip with sweaty apprehension...
...In the end, Bobby Muller's story became a movie called Coming Home...
...In 1970, Lieutenant Bobby Muller was leading a Marine patrol through a firelight when he caught a North Vietnamese bullet in the spine...
...I spent an hour getting it out and three weeks in recovery, relapse, and finally recovery again...
...He suffered a severe relapse...
...I was also panicking...
...My troubles began hours earlier as I walked down a sunny street in Manhattan, vaguely conscious of a low-intestinal pinching...
...Today's VA hospitals are largely warehouses for elderly veterans of World War II and the Korean war...
...Intravenous needles wiggled in their collapsed veins...
...They were plugged to catheters from long empty bottles...
...By the time I was airborne on the late shuttle to Washington, the hot, tender spot near my appendix told me unmistakably what was wrong...
...By late afternoon, gas pains were pushing all the way to my throat...
...Muller, a pole-vaulting champion in high school, ended up in a neglected, filthy paraplegic ward in a Long Island VA hospital...
...Give them the VA cards, too, and move them to empty suburban hospital beds, senior-citizen centers, and homes for the aged infirm...
...So, provide me and other far-from-the-front vets with escalating deductible plans...
...The men were ridden with bed sores, and cockroaches crawled over their unchanged sheets...
...A nearly recovered diabetic was mistakenly hooked up to a bottle of glucose instead of insulin...
...Removal of an appendix is a routine operation today...
...Saline-solution bottles sometimes hung empty for hours...
...Almost every veterans' organization argues that the VA medical system, with its $10.3 billion annual budget, should be expanded...
...Fifteen years later, scandal erupted again in the VA hospital system...
...The Government would pick up the tab, as it does now with wasteful inefficiency and high overhead...
...Among them, only the Vietnam Veterans of America, Inc., a 30,000-member group started by Bobby Muller, thinks the VA hospital system should be radically reformed or curbed...
...The military services need only provide their discharged personnel with plastic cards giving them access to private hospitals and physicians...
...Charlie Clements, a former Air Force pilot who turned against the Vietnam war and refused to fly missions there, has a better idea: Close down all the VA hospitals and move the patients to empty beds in the private sector...
...I was, you might say, "between policies...
...Another man had the wrong tooth removed and went septic for days...
...Like untold numbers of Vietnam veterans, I never came closer than a mile to a bullet fired in anger...
...As with Blue Cross-Blue Shield or similar systems, a veteran could pick his own hospital and physician, for either preventive or catastrophic care...
...Several private health-care analysts agree...
...In their fading years, these old soldiers should be given a chance at superior care...
...There's a good argument that I don't deserve a free medical ride with the VA anyway...
...Neighboring patients didn't fare so well...
Vol. 51 • May 1987 • No. 5
