September 11th, 2008
Unwilling veterans of 9-11
An analysis of the World Trade Center database, created to follow over 400,000 people impacted directly by the events of 7 years ago, shows that asthma and PTSD have become pandemic.
While some are looking at the glass as half-full, noting the natural recovery among some witnesses, you can also see those same statistics as evidence of an inconvenient truth.
These are all unwilling war veterans.
The Veterans Administration, first created under that name in 1930, is designed to care first for the wounds and health of our heroes and only much afterward the cost.
That mission statement is behind the creation of VistA, the software platform that began as public record and is now found, in open source forms, on both the project and commercial level.
VistA is good software, but it lacks the complex billing and insurance interface components which hospitals need to get paid. This has slowed its industry adoption.
But the attitude behind VistA has had another result as well. The VA is a very efficient dispenser of medical services.
In the victims and witnesses of 9-11 we have a group of people unique in our history. They are veterans in the most basic sense of the term — they have been to war. But they are stuck in the same private health system the rest of us use.
The difference between the VA and the private system is that the latter assumes wellness as the common state, and illness as the exception. Once you get into the VA, as my friend Tommy Bass has found, it’s really the opposite.
The VA is geared toward dealing with conditions, like PTSD and the health effects of environmental toxins, from which the witnesses to 9-11 are now suffering, and likely will continue to suffer for the rest of their lives.
It’s common to say that our heroes deserve the finest care possible. Do those who were drafted into this conflict by terrorists deserve less?
And if we can deal with their care more efficiently through a system like the VA, what does that add to our ongoing national debate about health care?
Now, before anyone starts accusing me of getting all political on you, on this day of all days, some words of wisdom in the way of a prayer from another time and another war:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Amen.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 09/11/08
