NRL News
Page 1
September 2009
Volume 36
Issue 9

Today’s VA Seems to Be Losing Its Way
By Sgt. Wayne Cockfield

I never heard the explosion, but I live with the memory. My last footstep took place 39 years and nine months ago in the jungles of Vietnam, and I have lived in a wheelchair ever since. Of all my memories of that fateful day, the most vivid is lying alone, unable to move, completely helpless, and intently staring at the bushes behind me.

It’s been said that waiting to die concentrates the mind, and my mind was concentrated, believe me, as I searched for the gun barrel and the enemy soldier that would end my life. He never came, thank God.

I spent the last 14 months of my 27 months of hospitalization in a Veterans Hospital. The care was first-rate, the caregivers had true compassion, and the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) completely carried out its mission statement to “fulfill President Lincoln’s promise—‘To care for him who shall have borne the battle’… ”

But that was then, this is now. Today’s VA seems to be losing its way and the very people it was created to help are now the ones targeted for elimination. It is clear that the VA has immersed itself in the quagmire of the quality of life death bias. It is now pushing a 52-page booklet, Your Life, Your Choices, authored by an assisted suicide advocate that purports to help disabled veterans decide if their life is worth living. The answer, unsurprisingly, is heavily weighted toward—“of course it isn’t.”

The book was first published in 1997 “and later promoted as the VA’s preferred living will throughout its vast network of hospitals and nursing homes,” according to former Bush official Jim Towey, who blew the whistle in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. When the Bush Administration learned of how it greased the slippery slope that could end with denial of care, it was removed. But under the Obama Administration, the VA has resuscitated Your Life, Your Choices.

“Worse, a July 2009 VA directive instructs its primary care physicians to raise advance care planning with all VA patients and to refer them to Your Life, Your Choices,” Towey wrote. “Not just those of advanced age and debilitated condition—all patients. America’s 24 million veterans deserve better.”

To fully understand the incredible dreadfulness of this booklet, and the underlying dehumanization of disabled veterans, one must only look at the section, “What makes your life worth living?” Of the 18 conditions listed, most are common to many wounded and disabled veterans. The very first condition pertains to my own personal situation—“I can no longer walk but get around in a wheelchair.”

According to this exercise, the best-case answer to using a wheelchair is, “Life would be difficult but acceptable.” The second best answer is, “Barely worth living”. Can we say “bigotry” here? Nowhere is the answer I would give, “Life is wonderful.”

Other conditions range from “I am in severe pain” (no mention of pain control), “I live in a nursing home,” “I am a financial burden on my family,” to something as simple as “I cannot seem to shake the blues.” The implication is clear: any physical impairment makes life difficult at best, and not worth living at worst. Shouldn’t the patient just do the right thing and die? This is an astounding position for a government-run hospital system whose primary task is to care for wounded and disabled veterans.

The Veterans Administration’s view of its disabled patients must be seen in context with the ongoing health care debate. Denial of care through rationing is only one threat of government-run health care. Denial of care through the dehumanization of the disabled, the elderly, and the chronically ill is just as much a threat.

Moreover, the ever-changing, fluid definition of just who is “terminal” is a backdoor mechanism that places all disabled veterans in the bulls-eye of euthanasia. The VA’s own definition of terminal includes this statement, “Terminal illness definitions need not require that death be imminent, and may include in their scope chronic conditions from which there is no hope for recovery” (VHA Handbook 1004.3, Protocols, Definition of Terminal Illness).

According to the above definition, as a 100% disabled veteran, I have a terminal condition. I am unable to walk and have no hope of recovery, at least in this life. Is not the danger apparent? Because I can be classified as terminal, I am also a candidate as a patient to have medical care or food and water withdrawn. And if Comparative Effectiveness protocols are enforced, I will probably be at the head of the line to be denied lifesaving treatment and subjected to “death with dignity.”

I don’t want to be a troublemaker here, but I believe that combat disabled veterans have a right to not be denied lifesaving care by our government because we happened to be disabled in service to the same government that now seems to want us dead. I need for the Veteran Administration to remove combat disabled veterans from the terminal classification.

VA hospitals are chronically underfunded and so are Medicare and Medicaid. Just as the government-run veteran hospitals are pushing pro-death propaganda in booklets authored by assisted suicide advocates to disabled veterans, so they may also to the sick, the poor, and the vulnerable in a civilian government-run health care system. Unless a sustainable health care system is created, such as that supported by National Right to Life, the future for all of us is an underfunded, unsustainable health system that saves money by spending lives.

So, after all these years, it has now come to this. My combat days are over, but my mind is still concentrated and I am still looking for my killer. The difference is, I am no longer helpless on the ground, waiting for a soldier holding a rifle to kill me. Now I am on a bed looking at a white screen. The person behind the screen is no longer wearing a uniform, but a white lab coat. The hand that emerges is no longer holding a rifle, but is instead withholding my treatment. The circumstances have changed, but unfortunately, I will be just as dead.

Sgt. John Wayne Cockfield is a retired Marine and a recipient of the Bronze Star for Valor. He serves as an at-large director on the Board of National Right to Life.