Right now, American service members are serving in the Middle East. Nobody in Paynesville questions that service. When the country calls, our people go.
This is about what’s waiting for them when they come home.
Raymond “Chuck” Sands was 77 years old. A Marine. Vietnam. He had lung cancer, and he was getting ready to fight it. Doctors at a Columbus hospital prescribed antibiotics to start treatment. The order went into the VA’s new computer system. Simple drug. Routine process. For thirty-six hours, the system showed the prescription was on its way. Sands and his wife had no reason to question it.
The pills were waiting for him the whole time at a VA pharmacy in Columbus.
When you are fighting cancer, thirty-six hours matters. Sands died eight days later. The VA classified its own error as “catastrophic.”
The prescription was right there. The system just never told him.
We can watch live from a satellite as a cruise missile fired from a ship in the Gulf of Oman lands within 16 feet of a target 1,500 miles away. And we could not get Chuck Sands his antibiotics.
When someone raises their right hand, we make two promises. We promise to give them what they need to protect this country and to do everything we can to bring them home. Then, when they do come home, we’ll make sure they have someone to call, somewhere to go, and care that matches what they gave.
The first promise, we keep. The Pentagon requested $200 billion in three weeks for the current operation. The technology works. The precision is something else.
The second promise gets whatever’s left over.
The computer system behind Chuck Sands’ death has caused more than 4,600 documented cases of patient harm. The doctors and nurses working inside it didn’t choose it. They fight it every day. The problem isn’t the people doing the caring. It’s a government that treats the trip over as an emergency and the trip home as a budget line.
According to VA workforce data compiled by the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, the VA lost a net thousand doctors in a single year. Nobody replaced them. The VA’s own Inspector General found that staffing shortages grew 50 percent worse that same year. Ninety-four percent of VA facilities are now short on physicians. The VA’s staffing guidelines assume each primary care doctor serves about 1,200 patients. Do the math on a thousand missing doctors and you start to see the size of the hole.
The VA also lost three thousand nurses and fifteen hundred medical support staff, the people responsible for getting a veteran into a chair across from someone who could help. The people who remain are stretched thin, working with fewer hands, worse tools, and a system that keeps shrinking around them.
Anyone around here knows what happens when a clinic loses its only doctor. The drive gets longer. The wait gets worse. Veterans face all of that, plus referrals, eligibility rules, and the same shortages on the other end through community care. One in four veterans lives in a place like this one, where the nearest clinic might be an hour away. The phones ring until the caller gives up.
A RAND Corporation study found that, early in the post-9/11 wars, roughly three out of four veterans who came home needing mental health care either never got treatment or received care that didn’t meet a basic standard. RAND was originally created for the military. These aren’t numbers from people looking to score political points. If you walked into CentraCare with those odds, it would make the news.
Perhaps you’ve heard about the new ballroom being built on the White House grounds. It will hold about 1,000 people. You’d need seven of them to hold the estimated 6,400 veterans who took their own lives in 2023. Sixty-one percent hadn’t seen anyone at the VA in the year before they died. The ballroom was funded through private donations, raised because a president decided it mattered enough to make it happen. That same power could be pointed at the system that lost those veterans.
And every day this operation continues, we are making new veterans. Every deployment, every strike, every service member who comes home carrying something they didn’t leave with. Linda Bilmes at Harvard Kennedy School has spent twenty years studying what wars cost after the fighting stops. Her projections for Iraq and Afghanistan turned out to be underestimates. She puts the long-term medical costs for the veterans of this war at $600 billion or more. There is no plan for that money. But there should be. If we can fund the war, we can fund what the war costs when it’s over.
We ask young people to leave home and accept the possibility that they will come back changed, or not come back at all. We spare nothing to send them. Then we hand them a system that misdirects prescriptions, can’t keep its doctors, and makes them wait on hold because there are too few people to answer the phones.
This isn’t what Paynesville wants for its veterans. This is about how Washington acts. Or doesn’t.
Veterans held up their end. We owe them ours.
