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.

Knowing from experience that any mis take means censure from above or a political stink, they are understandably reluctant to try anything new. Said a Rutland doctor last fortnight: "It isn't that the doctors don't practice medicine.

It's that the patients won't let them." Last year, when Boston newspapers took up the patients' fuss about food and their complaints that doctors were dictatorial and arbitrary in refusing privileges (i.e., permission to attend hospital movies or go to town), Rutland had a shakeup. Ad ministrator Hines appointed a new mana ger and clinical director, ordered that food be served hot, that doctors fit privileges to individuals instead of using blanket rules.

But the patients still beef about red tape, remote control from Washington, poor food. General Hines.

Moribund Medicine. Meantime outside doctors whisper about the life & death matter of the hospital's medical practices.

Over 100 patients died at Rutland last year. Many more went home to die. These figures are not high for a tuberculosis hospital, but experts thought they could be cut. Some of the hospital's doctors, it was rumored, could not make sense out of a chest Xray; many patients who needed surgery were not getting it. The doctors, it was said, were actually too lenient about giving in to their patients' demands for privileges; rest is essential in tuberculosis care.

True or not, these whispers are the logical result of the moribund medical atmosphere fostered by the 'Veterans' Ad ministration. General Hines is so deter mined that no one shall use ex-soldiers as guinea pigs that he leans over backward, refusing to allow new methods of treatment until long after civilian hospitals regard them as old stuff. For the same reason, he has always squelched any suggestion that interns be trained in veterans' hospitals.

Two months ago, Rutland's chest surgeon was transferred to another hospital to do general surgery. Since then, the surgery has been performed by outside experts: Boston's Drs. Richard H. Overholt (TIME, May 22, 1944) and Bert H.

Cotton. But the patients, now getting as good chest surgery as the U.S. affords and getting it when they need it, are still not satisfied. Reason: the transferred surgeon was the most popular man on the staff.

*Veterans' hospitals are of three types: general, neuropsychiatric, tuberculosis. More than half the patients are neuropsychiatric cases.

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