Reports of squalor at a US military hospital show how out of touch America's elites really are, argues a leading US professor in this week's BMJ.
According to several recent reports in the Washington Post, seriously wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Hospital are housed in rodent infested facilities with holes in the ceilings and paint peeling off the walls right in the nation's capital, less than six miles from the White House.
Meanwhile, a flood of reports from wounded soldiers and veterans elsewhere suggests that America, in too many instances, fails its wounded warriors and veterans in general, writes Professor Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton University.
Americans never tire of professing in words their gratitude to the brave men and women who fight the nation's wars, he says. Yet, with few exceptions, America's government, financial, academic, and business elites are routinely shielded against the blood cost of war, as few of their offspring volunteer to serve in the military.
It is perhaps understandable, if not forgivable, that an elite so carefully shielded from the physical and fiscal consequences of war, and so self absorbed in accumulating wealth and power, will almost innocently neglect its wounded soldiers, taking it on faith that "someone" will take good care of them, without ever bothering to check whether it is so.
He believes that the army must shoulder part of the blame, saying that the sorry conditions of some facilities at Walter Reed and the mindless and often cruel bureaucracy routinely visited on wounded soldiers should have been known to the generals in charge.
And he concludes, "Conditions in US military medicine will not change until its entire bureaucratic system is imbued with the idea that wounded soldiers no longer are pieces of human capital ??¦ but that they are fellow human beings worthy of our utmost gratitude and compassion, in deeds and in words."
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