Medicine: Careless Care for Veterans?

The nation owes every disabled war veteran the best possible medical care; hardly anyone would dispute that. Yet last week, as for weeks past, newspapers, medical journals, lay magazines and veterans' lobbies were asserting that the care U.S. veterans are getting is second-rate.

Mississippi's turkey-gobbler John E. Rankin, chairman of the House Veterans Committee, which has been "investigating" the hospitals, last week gave them a clean coat of whitewash, just as newsmen had predicted he would: "Our veterans are receiving fine treatment and handling...."

Eleanor Roosevelt looked straight at Representative Rankin and wrote in her syndicated column: "In the interest of the taxpayer as well as ... of the young men who fought this war, I hope there will be a real investigation by qualified people."

The Journal of the American Medical

Association brusquely snapped that the

94 U.S. veterans' hospitals (not to be confused with the Army & Navy hospitals at which sick and wounded World War II servicemen are first treated) give "deteriorated service." There were cries of "cruelty," "red tape," "politics." Some said the trouble was that the Veterans' Affairs Administrator, honest, efficient, but hidebound Brigadier General Frank T. Hines, a layman, tries to prescribe the medical treatment for the 72,000 veterans in his care—a number being swelled by 8,000 World War II veterans a month.

15,000,000 Patients. Congress has authorized $500,000,000 worth of new hospitals for the 15,000,000-odd World War II veterans who will be eligible for care in them. But a series of hearings last winter convinced the Senate's Pepper Subcommittee on Wartime Health and Education (TIME, Jan. 15) that buildings are not enough. Preliminary findings: i) salaries in veterans' hospitals are too low to attract good doctors and nurses (doctors start at $3,200); 2) "hospitals are often isolated geographically and medically"; 3) the personnel shortage is severe.

Patients v. Doctors. Veterans' hospitals are always clean, but they are rarely pleasant places. Typical is the tuberculosis hospital at Rutland Heights, Mass., housed in a red-brick and stucco group of buildings at a lonely crossroads some 13 miles north of Worcester.* The morale of the 446 patients, 16 doctors and two dentists is decidedly low.

The patients, lying on their neat beds, lounging on the porches, tying fish flies, are bored, critical, worried. Day in & out, all they have to look forward to are the doctor's daily visit, a Gray Lady with some books, movies (if the patient is up to it) three times a week, and food three times a day. They talk to each other endlessly about every detail of their cures, tell outsiders horror stories (usually highly colored) of neglectful medical treatment.

But their bitterest complaints are about the food and the Veterans' Administration.

During this year's first three months, 50 patients left Rutland without hospital discharges. This high AWOL rate is characteristic of veterans' hospitals.

Veterans' hospital doctors realize that other doctors look down on them (few are taken into local medical societies and the American Medical Association) and that patients boast of telling them off.