Jul 11, 2015 3 min read

A couple of years ago, about a dozen new cargo planes that cost taxpayers millions of dollars were shipped pretty much straight off the assembly line into storage in the Arizona desert because the Pentagon found it had no use for them.

That’s enough to raise your blood pressure in the best of times, but it’s even more appalling when you put it alongside the continuing struggles U.S. veterans face when they try to navigate the health care system that was established for their benefit.

One year after the Department of Veterans Affairs was shaken by allegations the books were being cooked to conceal inordinately long wait times for veterans seeking medical care, the news is good in some areas and despairingly bad in others. Although the department has gone on a hiring splurge over the last 12 months or so, recruiting more than 1,000 new doctors and about 2,700 nurses, according to a recent report in The New York Times, the number of veterans languishing on waiting lists for a month or longer has not gone down. In fact, it increased by 50 percent.

That point was underlined in an article that appeared in this newspaper last Monday as part of our occasional series on veterans, “Soldiering On.” In a story on efforts to assist ailing veterans waist deep in the big muddy of bureaucracy, Liz Salvador of the Pennsylvania Veterans of Foreign Wars remarked that “The VA backlog is outrageous.” She stops at the Carmichaels VFW post once a month to help its members get the benefits they are entitled to receive, and, so far, VFW posts have managed to help recover close to $7 billion in benefits for veterans over the last three years.

Why has the problem remained so stubbornly persistent even as the spotlight on it has grown brighter? Certainly much of it can be credited to Vietnam veterans reaching their late 60s and 70s and having to deal with more age-related ailments and chronic diseases. The influx of veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, many of whom are confronting post-traumatic stress disorder, lost limbs and other issues stemming from those long-running engagements, has placed an additional strain on the system.

And funding for the agency has not been sufficient to meet the demands on it. It is facing a shortfall of close to $3 billion, and led to talk of withholding a drug to fight hepatitis C from veterans who are in a permanent vegatative state, are in the latter stages of dementia or some other terminal disease so that money can be saved. But even as the number of doctors and nurses has increased, and increasing amounts of care have been farmed out to private providers, the Department of Veterans Affairs is still facing increasing numbers of patients seeking care at its facilities.

The agency could end up having to make cuts in other areas of its operations in order to fulfill its daily mission. But the onus is ultimately on lawmakers to assure that it gets the funding that it needs and that our veterans deserve.

It’s easy to serve up platitudes about supporting the troops, but that support must continue long after they have returned from the battlefront.