Last week the United States Army announced the closing of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, part of a series of cost cutting measures mandated under the Base Realignment and Closure Act of 2005. Though the Pentagon plans on consolidating the functions of Walter Reed with the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland and a new community hospital at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the decision to close the iconic Walter Reed Army Medical Center is a poignant reminder of the lowly status of the state of medical care for those who volunteer to serve the American people.
This closure, along with the government’s recent move toward defined contribution retirements for servicemembers, clearly demonstrates the U.S. government’s continued disregard for the well-being of servicemembers and veterans. However, while the end of the iconic Walter Reed Army Medical Center is disappointing, expanding the capacity for handling traumatic brain injuries, severe burns, and amputee rehabilitation is clearly not the key to sustainably improving the state of care for our servicemembers and veterans. Only prevention will limit the need for an expanding and increasingly expensive array of mental health and medical facilities; prevention that will only be realized once the current administration ends the senseless and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The misguided rush to war in Iraq and nearly ten years of continuous conflict in Afghanistan have left the United States with a generation of veterans permanently scarred by the visible and invisible wounds of war. If the U.S. government truly seeks to improve the lives of servicemembers and veterans it should not look to cut costs by shutting down desperately needed medical centers; instead, it must continue to invest more in health care, end the unfortunate and disastrous conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and finally bring our troops home.
