I came across this in a Washington Post profile of Dole, and it didn’t make sense to me. Is it really so recent for the military to provide care for its veterans free of cost–particularly when their injuries were sustained in combat? I found this completely bizarre and incomprehensible:
Dole’s long ordeal is known by now. It is campaign lore: how, during an Allied offensive near Florence, 2nd Lt. Dole led a platoon that was ordered to capture a hill; how, when his radio man was shot, Dole dragged him into a foxhole, not realizing he was dead; how, afterward, Dole was hit in the shoulder by a bullet or a shell fragment and lay face down on the battlefield, in dirt bloodied to mud, believing his arms had been shot clean out of their sockets; how the Army shipped him home in a plaster cast, crated like a piece of furniture; how the people of Russell, Kan., collected money to pay his medical bills in a Santa Fe cigar box that Dole stores in his desk drawer on top of a chunk of the Berlin Wall; how for 39 months he endured a second infancy, relearning how to eat, dress, bathe, walk and use the toilet; how an orthopedic surgeon who’d lost a brother in the war cobbled Dole back together for free…
We’ve had Veteran’s Hospitals for a long time, but it has been a long road to get them to where they are today. These days most people who receive services from the VA rank it very highly, and consider it far superior to any available private health care system.
However, that’s not always been the case. As recently as the 1970s VA facilities for long term disabled or profoundly wounded veterans weren’t really the best at things like rehabilitation and such, instead they just housed the disabled in sort of long term storage.
World War II put massive strains on the VA. Many of the doctors and nurses who had worked as civilians for the VA joined the military and served overseas. Additionally, as the war ended some 15 million men became eligible for VA benefits, we had some 650,000 wounded in WWII. When Omar Bradley took over as the head of the VA I believe the entire system had around 85,000 beds. Very quickly this proved woefully inadequate.
But yes, in general after WWII Veterans were entitled to medical care and treatment. But the devil is in the details, in the 1940s treatment wasn’t seen the same as it is now. Now, if a soldier is wounded it’s common they will be treated with some of the most advanced medicine available, virtually no expense is spared in things like rehabilitation services, advanced prosthesis and etc. I’ve known veterans of the recent conflicts who have need of prosthetic limbs, and in general the ones they get are pretty much the best in the world and are very expensive.
In the 1940s Congress saw the VA as being responsible for providing some level of medical care, but not necessarily extensive rehabilitation. In general rehabilitation is something that has been dramatically improved in the past 70 years and the view of it as being a key part of medical care doesn’t appear to have existed in the 40s. It actually required Congressional approval for the VA to even be allowed to provide any prosthetic limbs at all for WWII veterans, prior to that providing prosthesis wasn’t seen as a core part of medical care.
Since Dole appears to have received extensive rehabilitation and highly advanced care for the 1940s, I think it’s likely that he needed money for his care because the stuff he was undergoing was just far more comprehensive than what the VA did back then.
My grandpa was in WWII (although the Nazis would have had to have crossed the Mississippi for him to have seen combat) and he always swore he’d die before he let somebody put him in the VA. Obviously, when he was a younger man the VA was a place you went to die, and badly at that. He was surprised to find in his last few years that things had changed a great deal at the VA - without medications from there he would have never been able to afford the care he needed after his stroke.
I believe, but am not sure, that his problems with artificial hips and knees stemmed party from poor care he received while in the military.
I just felt when reading that story that the detail about the collection box for his treatment was presented as sort of a heartwarming anecdote, whereas I took it as a woeful betrayal on the part of the U.S. military.