Inside the Walter Reed scandal: Pentagon tried to run military healthcare like an HMO
The Pentagon’s top civilian official in charge of military healthcare wanted more money for bullets and bombs, and fewer benefits for soldiers.
Read original by Mark Benjamin in Salon
[Excerpts] The Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday is hauling up to Capitol Hill Dr. David S.C. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, and Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. Chu and Winkenwerder, who have held those jobs since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are the top officials beneath the secretary of defense with the responsibility for making sure returning soldiers get prompt outpatient care and fair remuneration for their service-related ills.
Critics say that Chu and Winkenwerder had the wrong priorities, focusing on cutting costs while greater numbers of returning soldiers struggled against an increasingly strained military health care system. Both men know how to manage costs: Chu is an economist and mathematician who once worked in an Army comptroller office. And Winkenwerder is a former health insurance industry executive.
But their résumés also point to the problem, according to their detractors. “The military tried to run military health care on the cheap — like an HMO,” said Paul Sullivan, who until March 2006 was a top project manager at the Department of Veterans Affairs in charge of data on returning veterans. “And the consequences are the medical catastrophe and the bureaucratic nightmare that we see right now.”
Chu shocked veterans’ advocates two years ago when he said, according to the Wall Street Journal, that too much was being spent on benefits for soldiers, as opposed to bullets and bombs. “The amounts have gotten to the point where they are hurtful,” Chu said about veterans’ benefits in a Jan. 25, 2005, article. “They are taking away from the nation’s ability to defend itself.”
Winkenwerder first responded to the Walter Reed scandal by holding a press conference Feb. 21, in which he emphasized that spending more money would not help improve the situation. “Let me just say, this is not a resource issue,” Winkenwerder told reporters. “There are resources to do all the things we need to do to take care of people.” He also downplayed the deficiencies at Walter Reed, calling them “quality of life experience” issues.
The White House announced the next day that Winkenwerder would be replaced in what was billed as a previously scheduled departure from the job.
