McCain and sick veterans

Do you oppose the candidacy of John McCain? Do you subscribe to The Nation? If the answer to both questions is "yes", then check out my article in the current issue. If the answer to the first question is "yes", but the second question is "no", then either buy a subscription, or enjoy the first several paragraphs of said article. If the answer to both questions is "no", then I'm genuinely curious how you ended up at this blog.

The thrust of the piece, as you might imagine, is that, though John McCain says nice things about veterans, his record on their issues is, in true maverick fashion, fairly abominable. Teaser:

The way John McCain tells it, the injuries he suffered at the hands of his captors in Vietnam would have ended his career as a Navy pilot were it not for the help of physical therapist Diane Rauch. And that's basically true: after months of painful treatment, he was well enough to pass his medical screening. But that leaves out an interesting part of the story. In his biography of McCain, Robert Timberg details the treatment McCain received at two naval hospitals. Navy doctors in Maryland were, in fact, McCain's first physical therapists, but they offered a bleak prognosis. Fortunately for McCain, the story of his imprisonment and torture was so widely known that strangers from across the country offered assistance. One of those strangers was Rauch, who provided her services at no charge.

As a vignette, it's charming--a POW, just released from a long and brutal stretch in captivity, finally stumbling upon some good fortune. But it's hardly a working model for veterans' health services. Most vets, after all, need government-provided treatment for the rest of their lives--first, like McCain, at military hospitals and then, unlike McCain, at VA facilities.