More beans, another sampling of how we're all gonna go broke under Bush's multi-trillion dollar tab... Amy Goodman interviews Linda Bilmes, Havard professor whose study caused the VA and Pentagon to "re-calculate" how wounded US service personnel are counted.

Hidden Costs of War: Long-Term Price of Providing Veterans Medical Care Could Reach $660 Billion - Over 200,000 soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated at Veterans Affairs medical facilities thus far, with 900,000 still deployed on active duty. A new study from Harvard University predicts that the cost of medical care and compensation benefits for returning veterans will skyrocket once those troops return home... (more) A new study from Harvard University reports that the hidden financial costs of war in Iraq and Afghanistan will overwhelm the Department of Veterans Affairs for decades. The study, titled “Soldiers Returning from Iraq and Afghanistan: The long-term costs of providing veterans medical care and disability benefits,” finds that the Veterans Administration is both under-funded and under-equipped to deal with the current and future costs of veterans’ health care.

The study estimates that since the Global War on Terror began, 16 US soldiers have been wounded per fatality, a casualty rate that exceeds the rate of previous wars. Over 200,000 soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated at VA medical facilities thus far, with 900,000 still deployed on active duty. The study predicts that the cost of medical care and compensation benefits for returning veterans will skyrocket once those troops return home. It also estimates that the cost over the soldiers lives will amount to up to seven hundred billion dollars.

The author of this study, Professor Linda Bilmes, joins me now from Boston. Professor Bilmes is former Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration, and a Lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Welcome to Democracy Now!

* Linda Bilmes, lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Author of the study, “Soldiers Returning from Iraq and Afghanistan: The Long-term Costs of Providing Veterans Medical Care and Disability Benefits;" Linda Bilmes was Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration. She is co-author, with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, of “The Economic Cost of the Iraq War: An Appraisal Three Years after the Beginning of the Conflict.”

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: A new study from Harvard University reports the hidden financial costs of war in Iraq and Afghanistan will overwhelm the Department of Veterans Affairs for decades. The study is called “Soldiers Returning from Iraq and Afghanistan: The Long-Term Costs of Providing Veterans Medical Care and Disabilities Benefits.” It finds the Veterans Administration is both under-funded and under-equipped to deal with the current and future costs of veterans’ healthcare.

The study estimates since the global war on terror began, sixteen US soldiers have been wounded per fatality, a casualty rate that exceeds the rate of previous wars. Over 200,000 soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated at VA medical facilities thus far, with 900,000 still deployed on active duty. The study predicts the cost of medical care and compensation benefits for returning veterans will skyrocket once those troops return home. It also estimates the cost over the soldiers lives will amount up to $700 billion.

The author of the study, Professor Linda Bilmes, joins me now from Cambridge. Professor Bilmes is former Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration, a lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Bilmes.

LINDA BILMES: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Lay out what you have found, what you were most surprised by, in this study.

LINDA BILMES: Well, what I was trying to do was to understand how prepared the Veterans Administration is to cope with the large influx of soldiers who were returning from the war. And what we found was that the VA is really overwhelmed by the sheer volume of returnees on three dimensions. First of all, in terms of the disability claims, see, when soldiers come back who have been injured or down the road suffer some kind of problem or a problem was exacerbated by being over there, they can claim for a certain amount of disability payment. And right now, the Veterans Administration has a backlog of 400,000 pending claims. many of them even from previous wars. So they really are not prepared to cope with a large influx of additional claims.

Secondly, the care provided by the VA is very good, but many veterans are having to go onto long waiting lists, particularly for mental health care, because such a very large number of veterans have been seeking help for mental health conditions.

And thirdly, the cost of providing care, good quality care to the veterans will range from a minimum of $350 billion to nearly $700 billion, depending on the length of the war and the percentage of veterans who seek care through the VA. (watch/read/listen to the full interview)

in related news, Sen.'s Barack Obama and Olympia Snowe have teamed up to demand accurate causualty counts from the VA and Pentagon...

Snowe asks Pentagon to include non-combat injuries in reporting
Wednesday February 07, 2007
WASHINGTON (AP) Veterans groups and Sen. Barack Obama say government officials are obscuring the actual number of wounded in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars by leaving out of some public documents troops who suffer non-combat injuries.

From the Pentagon Web site to press materials handed out at the opening of an amputee center in Texas last week, the number of wounded in the wars often circulated publicly is around 23,000.

That number only accounts for those wounded in combat. When troops from those wars who were wounded in other ways are counted, the number more than doubles, to about 53,000.

That latter number is not heavily circulated by the Pentagon. Recently, a Defense Department official publicly criticized a researcher who used it and pressured another government agency to change a public document to report the smaller number.

``This is a clear pattern by VA and DOD to conceal the escalating human and financial costs of the two wars from Congress, the press and the public,'' said Paul Sullivan, veterans advocacy director with Veterans for America.

Obama, D-Ill., and a presidential hopeful, wants the government to be more straightforward in reporting on the wounded. He has introduced legislation with Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, to require the Veterans Affairs Department and the Defense Department to ``start keeping honest figures on our troops and the potential future costs of the war.''... (full report)