VA’s reputation for health care takes a thrashing

[unhappycamper]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal_government/vas-reputation-for-health-care-takes-a-thrashing/2013/09/12/dcff3180-1bbc-11e3-8685-5021e0c41964_story.html

VA’s reputation for health care takes a thrashing
By Joe Davidson, Published: September

~snip~

Joseph committed suicide in the Atlanta VA Medical Center in Decatur, Ga., in November, “locked in a hospital bathroom dead in his wheelchair, a plastic trash bag tied over his head with a blue cord around his neck,” reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

His case calls to mind my colleague Steve Vogel’s story about Daniel Somers, once a Humvee turret gunner in Iraq. He became so frustrated with his attempts to get VA medical and mental health treatment that he felt the government had “turned around and abandoned me.”

He wrote those words not long before he shot himself in the head on a Phoenix street in July. The note to his family said he was “too trapped in a war to be at peace, too damaged to be at war.”

The VA failed him, as it has too many others.