DEMPSEY: Remember health care for veterans

Some of the mental scars can be addressed within our communities and churches by pastors, laymen and caring veteran mentors. I wish our health care illuminati and VA administrators understood this. I worked with a gentleman who was still traumatized from a combat situation in a church-based recovery group. He appreciated that I was a fellow veteran. This can be more effective and less costly than relying on drugs, something I've "preached" for years. Serious injury rehabilitation and the suicidally depressed should be the main focus.

One of the most significant recommendations and essentially at the top of the list of one hundred and thirteen recommendations in a report called “Honoring the Call to Duty: Veterans’ Disability Benefits in the 21st Century” produced by the Veterans’ Disability Benefits Commission and delivered in October of 2007 after more than two years of work, and also the first comprehensive review of veterans’ disability benefits in fifty-one years, is an immediate increase in compensation levels. I am most cognizant that in these days of substantial economic difficulties in our country that it may seem uncaring, unconcerned. and selfish for someone to ask, but as a disabled veteran - ask I must, where is this immediate increase in compensation levels? I find this most troubling especially in light that in these same times of substantial economic difficulties in our country, our same governmental leaders can fund multi-trillion dollar wars, as well as provide hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars to financial institutions which most, if not all, are the institutions most culpable for the substantial economic difficulties in our country that we are faced with at this time. The leaders, as well as most of the rank and file, of these institutions lavished themselves with unbelievable bonuses on top of their unbelievable salaries while they performed their economic folly in the times leading up to our present situation of substantial economic difficulties. Yet, our governmental leaders have not executed, or can not bring themselves to execute, the recommendations of their own commission for the benefit of the disabled veteran. Benefits that, comparatively speaking, pale greatly and significantly to the aforementioned billions and trillions of dollars. In closing I ask again: Where is the immediate increase in compensation levels for disabled veterans of the United States armed services?