Word: walter
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...Walter E. Howell and Ted Kirby contributed to the reporting of this story. —Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu...
...front-page stories about frustrated Army spouses and televised hearings with perspiring generals under congressional attack were only the prelude. The Walter Reed imbroglio has now morphed into a real Washington scandal with President Bush's announcement Tuesday morning that he is creating a commission to investigate the problem of poor care and bureaucratic snafus in the nation's military and veterans' hospitals. To lead the commission, Bush's White House deftly picked a severely wounded ex-soldier, former GOP Senate leader and Presidential candidate Robert Dole, and an expert on health care, former Clinton Cabinet member Donna Shalala...
...Creating a commission is such an obvious idea, in fact, that the Pentagon has already beaten the White House to it. On February 23, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he was launching a panel to examine the care at Walter Reed and any other military medical facilities it chooses to examine. Headed by two former Army secretaries, the eight-member group will have 45 days to investigate and report back on its findings. Of course, it isn't being called a commission; that turf belongs to Presidents and lawmakers. The Pentagon's board is more modestly called an "independent review...
...hospital accomodations as a big step up from the conditions they're forced to endure daily in barracks. "If you want clean bed sheets and unstopped toilets, lose a leg," he quotes one soldier. "Otherwise, suck it up and drive on, soldier." A general who had been in Walter Reed told Scales that "the barracks at Fort Stewart, at Fort Bragg, at Fort Drum and at Fort Polk are far, far worse than anything I saw at Building 18," where some Walter Reed outpatients lived amid squalor, rodents, mold and cockroaches. "The sense is that Walter Reed is the symptom...
...military is a huge bureaucracy, and its medical components, while having its share of gems, also has its slums. That's how the gleaming wards of Walter Reed could stand so close to the vermin-ridden, mold-covered walls of Building 18 across the street. Even as the war generates more tenants for Walter Reed and other military hospitals, its $1 billion a week cost has sucked money out of stateside garrisons and hospitals. Last year, the Army had to trim spending by more than $500 million for posts at home and abroad to help pay for the war. That...