July 7th, 2009

Sen. Arlen Specter voiced concern about the treatment veteran’s received at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

“My proud veteran father, Harry Specter, fought and was wounded in the Argonne Forest in 1917. Years later, in an act of unparalleled political folly, the federal government refused to redeem in advance the war “bonuses” promised to veterans, even though the Great Depression had left thousands of them unemployed. My father felt helpless in his home in Wichita, Kan., as his former comrades in arms, who had survived enemy fire on the battlefront, were cut down by American troops while protesting on the main boulevard of the nation’s capital.

No veteran should ever have to await his “bonus.” The nation owes its veterans a debt it can never repay. Foremost among its obligations to them is safe, reliable health care.

The bungled radiation treatment of close to a hundred veterans with prostate cancer over a six-year period at Philadelphia’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center falls far short of the government’s promise to veterans. Ninety-two of the 116 veterans who received a kind of radiation treatment for prostate cancer there got inadequate or misdirected doses, which may have damaged adjacent tissues and organs, such as the bladder, peritoneum, and rectum. In many cases, the victims did not know they had received substandard treatment until months or even years later.

If this had been a consumer product, we would be talking about a breakdown in quality control. That is essentially what happened here.

All of the safeguards of quality care were missing. There was no peer review, no government or agency oversight, and not even a definition of what constituted a reportable “medical event” – which might have alerted authorities to the problems sooner. The bottom line is that problems with the procedure, known as permanent implant prostate brachytherapy, went undetected for more than six years.”

For the full story from the Philadelphia Inquirer click here.