Who supports the troops?
Congress has decided not to support a bill that would put emergency contraception back in military health care facilities. The drug used to be on the Department of Defense’s Basic Care Formulatry, but was removed without explanation in 2002. Because why offer basic reproductive healthcare to the women who work hard to defend our country?
Well, maybe because 30 percent of them report being raped or attempted-raped during their time in the service. Or because 2,374 service members reported sexual assaults to military criminal investigators last year.
The Michaud/Ryan Amendment to the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act would put EC back in military healthcare facilities. The ACLU and other progressive organizations have signed on to this letter (pdf), encouraging Congress to give our servicewomen the healthcare they need. Give your congressperson a call, and encourage them to support the amendment.
Thanks to Rachel at the ACLU for letting me know about this.
Military health care facilities also serve the dependents of people in the military, so this affects the families of MOS’s as well as the MOS’s themselves.
Hmm…i would consider that…if my representative wasn’t Joe friggin Barton…and my senators weren’t Kay Bailey Hutchison and that other guy…
(J*n C*rn*n, if you care to actually know)
The military’s healthcare standards are very messed up. My husband is ex-Navy, and he’s told me that when you are in the military, technically your body is military property. A guy on his boat got fined for “destruction of government property” and dereliction of duty, because he failed to wear sunscreen snorkelling in Hawaii and got a terrible sunburn on his back.
Even worse than that, we heard about a guy who found out he had terminal pancreatic cancer immediately after he retired from his 20 year stint in the Navy. Thing is, the physical he had right before his final deployment had shown warning signs, but his doctors decided not to tell him. They also decided to send him off on a six month deployment, rather than delay his departure for further tests. They knew it was his last deployment before retiring, they knew that he should, medically speaking, be tested further ASAP, which would mean delaying his deployment. So the Navy Doctors chose to withold information from a patient for the convenience of the Navy, knowing it could be the difference between life and death for this poor guy. Happy retirement!
The level of disregard for the human rights of military personnel is sickening.
Woah! Great post! Thanks a million!!
Rosemary Grace Says:
Rosemary, if you can get me anything beyond hearsay I’d be more than happy to publicize this. Frankly, though, I think any major paper would just run with a story like this. Is there a lawsuit filed, is there copies of medical records?
As for the main story, I must say I’m appalled. What’s next, no birth control? The military isn’t anyone’s social program, If you have moral or religious beliefs that say no Plan B, you have not right to impose them on our troops or anyone.
Finally, something I can fax a letter to my congress-critter for.
Yes, absolutely! Family members are treated at these facilities as well. And even more are treated through the military Tricare program through civilian providers (who follow Tricare guidelines). I spent 9 years in the system, had 2 children and for the most part was satisfied with care.
But, as a military dependent, I went to the family clinic at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii (my assigned PCM) for the morning after pill sometime around 2000. They were hardly receptive. They told me that was unavailable. I argued (relentlessly) that I needed the pill (I was not in a situation to leave there empty-handed). The doctor (a young military intern) was really flustered. He finally gave me a prescription for birth control pills, then told me how to use them for the purpose I was after, but did not write that into the prescription. So I got what I wanted but it was after much a-do and bitchiness on my part and even then under the table. So they weren’t exactly proactive about it before 2002, in my experience.
And forget abortions. During both my pregnancies, they did the standard screenings for birth defects. But I was briefed both times that if the findings were troublesome and we decided to abort, that we would be referred out to the civilian community to do so at our own cost. Nevermind getting one for “elective” reasons.
Lawsuit? Active duty military cannot file malpractice suits against the military treatment facility. The military owns you.
When you are active duty, you cannot call in “sick”. You muster for sick call to your command. Your command medical person, usually a corpsman (sort of equivelent to a PA), decides whether or not you need further medical care. But this is the thing–the Corpsman’s boss is also your boss. And commands are eager to nip any “malingering” in the butt. The command also has an eye on manpower issues when deciding who gets further medical treatment/light duty chits/SIQ (sick in quarters) chits. So the Corpsman may be under indirect or direct pressure to keep you on duty despite your need for rest or care.
My ex-husband had ankle surgery in ’92. He needed to go back for for a second surgery a few months later to have screws removed. But his command didn’t have anyone to cover for him, so they told him to get the surgery when he reported for duty at his next command. In ’94, he reported and that command didn’t have a Chief in his division which made him the senior enlisted person in the division, so they “couldn’t afford to lose him”. By then he was back on sea duty, and surgery would mean a cast which would mean he couldn’t get on or off the submarine for 6 weeks. So no surgery. By the time he reported back to shore duty in ’97, the doctors told him the bone had grown over and he could not have the surgery without haveing to break the bone and risk complications. The lawyer (civilian) I worked for at the time told me if he was a civilian, we would have had a fabulous case for malpractice. But there was no one he could sue.
When he retired, he got a 20% disability for this medical issue (the screws are still there), but guess what? Due to offset of his retirement pay for the disability… he ends up at a wash.
Funny, there does not seem to be anything beyond the PDF on the ACLU website. I wanted to do some fact checking and get more background before I blogged, this is making it very hard. Oh, and creating the PDF so I can search the text and cut and paste text out of it would be cool too.
According to the PDF, it was added to the “Basic Core Formulary” and then removed one month later.
I’d like to be more sure it wasn’t just removed for example “as a cost cutting measure”. Plan B seems to be way overpriced compared to “off label” BC hormones.
I guess I’ll start working on blogging about Bush and his “All Your Telephone Record Are Belong To Us” instead.
Kat Says:
Kat, you make a good point here (and BTW you are making a good argument against socialized medicine, I hope you realize that)
How is that a good argument against “socialized medicine” (by which I assume you mean universal health care)? The problematic part about Kat’s ex-husband’s surgery was not the fact that it was provided by the government, but that it was provided by the same governmental entity that owned his ass and had an interest in doing what benefited the entity rather than the medical needs of the individual. You need only look at the national health care systems of most other first-world countries to see that that doesn’t happen in the civilian context anywhere like it does in the military context.
Oh goodness, don’t tell my sister! She would not be happy with me for that (Zuzu, are you there? Don’t look).
I’m really not trying to make an argument for or against socialized medicine. Just relating my personal experience with the military medical system in all its glory.
Besides, being active duty in a military medical system is probaly different than being a civilian in a social system. Because, as an active duty service member, your capability to complain about your lot is hindered by your desire to move up in rank. And your rights are limited by your enlistment. I’m not sure that applies to a socialized medical system for civilians.
For example, even as a military dependent (civilian), I was able to sue the MTF for malpractice.
Words, words, words. “Universal health care” seems to only imply that everyone gets coverage, suggesting (to me) that there’s a separate safety net for those who can’t afford regular insurance. Where as “socialized medicine” tends to evoke “From each according to their ability (people who make more, pay more) to each according to their needs(everyone gets the same level of awful)”. There are other terms I could have used such as “single payer system” (which is really confusing, why not say “government pays system”?) or a term I would not use here because I have some tact: “Hillary-Care“ (Politically charged, yes, but she did submit a bill that would have radically changed health care in this country, including a number of FELONIES, for example, if I were to go outside the “system” to secure my own health care advice, two felonies would be committed, one by me and one by the doctor who gave me advice)
I’m not saying there’s not something terribly wrong with our system, (specifically there’s nothing there as an incentive to control costs) but if you try to hold Canada’s system up as a shining example, you’re probably not noticing all the people “sneaking” across the border to get a prompt MRI in the USA.
First off, the right to medical privacy expands far beyond woman’s reproductive health issues. Hold up all the European health care schemes you want, the current push towards a standardized electronic universal medical records in the USA is not a step in the right direction, privacy-wise.
But directly addressing the issue, the military health care system has in the past been held up as an example how socialized medicine can work. My defense at the time (example: on this thread) was that it could not possibly scale, but I think you have given me some more ammo here.
That argument might be used by someone against a National Health type arrangement, but it’s not a good argument! The important distinction is that with socialized medicine, the health care professionals primary duty is one of care for the patient. Inside the military the health care professionals primary duty is to keep the military machine running by maintaining the person-shaped worker units in functional condition. Functional. Not optimal.
There are problems in socialized healthcare systems of getting funding to cover very expensive treatments. People are denied treatment, or have treatment delayed because of poor organization, or lack of funding. I know that in the UK patients in the more poorly funded regions get screwed over when it comes to the most advanced cancer treatments and surgeries. There is always room for improvement, but at least people in the UK don’t have to stick with a crappy demoralizing job just to make sure their kids have health coverage for basics like vaccines, checkups, common diseases and the odd broken bone.
I didn’t know the details of mustering for sick duty. This explains why my husband, in the 24th hour of a migraine, had to be talked into calling in sick this morning. He’s a civilian now, but working for a military contractor. I think he still can’t accept that it’s ok for him to be sick one day, that he won’t loose his job over it.
Yes, the Canadian healthcare system is far from perfect, in part because the federal government has been starving it of funds for over a decade. As in all developed countries, Canada is struggling with the fact that the average cost of medicine is much higher these days. And another handicap is that provincial governments have to provide health care for the citizens of their province, but a significant part of provincial budgets come from transfer payments from the federal government – which collects all taxes except provincial sales tax and municipal property taxes. In the early 90′s when the Liberals got hte federal government, the Tories had racked up major budget deficits and there was a high level of national debt (what is up with conservative political parties and over-spending? Aren’t they supposed to be the ones all concerned about fiscal responsibility?). One method the Liberals used to balance the federal budget was to cut transfer payments to the provinces, which hurt health care budgets even more than the already escalating cost of care. But a fair chunk of it has to do with political struggles over federalism vs. centralized government, and the feds’ lack of interest in putting up the money the provincial health care systems need, because they know the provincial governments run the services, and will therefore reap more political benefit from the increased budget than hte feds do. Far from perfect system, and beset by political issues which sometimes have a lot to do with healthcare and sometimes have fuck-all to do with it.
But you are most definitely able to sue a healthcare provider for negligence, malpractice, etc. The fact that they are part of the national public system does not mean that a doctor who fucks up egregiously (as in the US Navy example) can’t be held accountable. Very, very different system here from that which Kat describes. And, speaking as someone who’s been living in Canada for 28 years, in my experience and that of my friends and family, emergency care for lifethreatening problems tends to be excellent, but if you need to have a non-emergency surgery or tests, you may get bumped by emergencieas. Same thing if you have a non-life-threatening but painful health problem: you’ll probably be waiting a fair while to see a specialist. Of course, that meant that the one time I went to my GP with a health problem that turned out to be minor but had similar symptoms to a dangerous condition, I got an appointment with a specialist for two days later. I was so freaked out by my GP’s office having booked me in so quickly that I was convinced he must think I was dying! When I was a kid, a friend of the family had a brain tumour. Her mom took her to the pediatrician in the morning, she was sent for a CAT scan that afternoon, admitted to hospital that night and having neurosurgery the next morning. If they think it’s urgent, they’ll get right on it. Unfortunately, that means that someboy who had been scheduled for, say, a hip replacement that day may well find their surgery postponed because they are in debilitating pain but they’re not going to die if they don’t have surgery within 24 hours.
Another problem with Canada’s healthcare system is the lack of coordination between provincial organ transplant systems. Unlike the US, which has a national system, each province runs its own service, which leads to delays and other problems. However, there is public awareness of that inefficiency, the problem is being worked on (or so it’s claimed), and that system will hopefully improve in efficiency soon.
So, yeah, Canadian medicine definitely has its problems, but I’d still say it’s better than having to rely on a for-profit insurance company where you can max out of coverage or find yourself uninsurable, and potentially going bankrupt if you develop major health problems.
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[...] member often bows to what’s best for the military, as in this peacetime example from Kat shows: When you are active duty, you can [...]