How Are We Caring For Poisoned Veterans?
A New Report Claims The Time Veterans Wait From The Moment Of Exposure To Meaningful VA Medical Support Remains Shamefully Long.
On Monday, we celebrated Veterans Day, a national day to honor the 15.8 million people who have served in the U.S. armed forces.
For years, I’ve worked with military veterans and their families to help raise awareness about chronic, lifelong illnesses and conditions resulting from contact with toxic exposures during active-duty service. There’s no better cause than wanting to take care of our veterans and military families.
In the last century, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Congress have struggled to provide needed health care and earned benefits to veterans who were exposed to toxins and environmental hazards during their service.
In fact, a new report found that it takes more than 30 years after a service member has been exposed to toxins for the VA to acknowledge the illness, leaving tens of thousands of veterans waiting decades to receive compensation and health care.
The Disabled American Veterans and the Military Officers Association of America released the report in September, to take a closer look at the reasons for these delays and offering recommendations to shorten the time it takes to assist veterans exposed to toxins.
While many are familiar with the millions of Americans affected by the spraying of Agent Orange, a dangerous herbicide mixture that contained carcinogenic dioxin, during the Vietnam War, less people are aware of the toxins found on our home soil and in our water. It’s shocking to know that almost every military site in this country is seriously contaminated.
In fact, the Defense Department is a major contributor of PFAS pollution in the U.S., as spills, dumping, and the use of firefighting foam containing forever chemicals has created a backlog of contamination clean-up. More than 700 military installations are likely contaminated with PFAS. You can find an interactive map of them here.
Many of these sites also contain , dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls, trichloroethylene and other chemicals. Studies show that long-term exposure to these chemicals may increase the risk of developing cancer, reproductive and neurological harms and damage to the immune system.
Contamination from these bases, which are scattered throughout the American landscape, ranges from radioactive waste found in McClellan Air Force Base near Sacramento, California, to PCBs, chemical warfare agents, and radioactive waste found at the former army installation of Fort McClellan near Anniston, Alabama.
On top of all that is the issue of burn pits. Until the mid-2010s, U.S. overseas bases would burn trash often in huge, open-air lots, and some of these blazes burned continuously for years, releasing toxic smoke and particulate matter into the air that both troops and civilians breathed in. They were common in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These matters have been swept under the rug for too many years, and the science continues to catch up, showing the real health impacts of exposure to these contaminants. It’s a huge heartbreak.
The report found that veterans with toxic exposures often don’t become sick until years later, making it difficult to prove a connection to military service. Veterans also have a harder time obtaining evidence to support their claim of toxic exposure because they might not have known at the time that they were being exposed to hazardous materials or their health problems were related to it.
As Iraq and Afghanistan Army Veteran Isaiah James tells Jake Tapper in the above CNN clip from 2021, “The VA is basically victim-blaming. They tell you, the service member, prove to me that you got this cancer from the burn pit. Instead of, let me treat this cancer and then go back on the backend and audit it.”
In 2022, the PACT Act (Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics) provided the largest expansion of health care and benefits for toxic-exposed veterans in 30 years. In addition to expanding access for millions of veterans, the act created legal presumptions that dozens of diseases and illnesses were related to burn pits and other toxic exposures.
And it has offered more benefits and health care, more quickly, to more veterans than ever before. In 2024, the VA delivered $187 billion in earned benefits to 6.7 million veterans and survivors, and processed a record 2.51 million disability claims. VA delivered more than 131 million health care appointments and provided services and assistance to more than 88,095 family caregivers.
Thanks to the largest outreach campaign in VA history through the PACT Act, more than 796,000 veterans have enrolled in VA health care since the act was signed into law, a nearly 37 percent increase over the previous equivalent period, according to a VA statement.
These steps are encouraging.
Moving forward the report recommends that Congress needs to establish deadlines along with more oversight and monitoring for sites that potentially contain toxic materials and more research to confirm that service members were exposed to toxins.
“Expanding scientific understanding of toxic exposures and environmental hazards is essential to support VA efforts to provide timely, comprehensive benefits and health care to exposed veterans,” the report says.
What can we expect from newly elected President Trump?
Hopefully, the new administration will build on this momentum.
Last time in office, the Trump Administration sparked controversy for its push to expand private health care through the VA Mission Act of 2018.
The legislation was framed as increasing choice for veterans, as many veterans’ organizations classified it as a step toward privatization. Expanding private care options could divert resources from VA facilities, undermining the quality of care that veterans rely on. Read more here.
Speaking to NPR about it, Leo Shane III, deputy editor of Military Times, said:
“I think this is going to be a major thing that comes up again here because we've already seen it from some of the Republicans on Capitol Hill. There is a real push on this issue of privatization versus choice versus community care. The folks who support this say this is expanding choice. This is giving folks more options and it’s giving veterans’ better healthcare outcome because they can go see whoever they want. They can see the doctor down the street anytime they want if VA will pay for it.
The critics say this is really outsourcing what VA’s responsibility should be. It’s their job to take care of veterans. It’s their job to make sure they’re recognizing problems like PTSD, burn pit illnesses.
And those are things that specialized VA doctors are going to do a better job than a community doctor might be able to do. So they've said that pushing too much of that into the community is really just funneling federal money to private sector doctors.”
He went on to explain that in 2023, 40 percent of all VA medical appointments were sent out into the community, and that a lot of veterans are comfortable with it. The idea is to maintain those relationships for routine care, but that veterans should not get all of their care outside of VA.
“They really want to be able to keep tabs on them, not in a Big Brother sort of way, but to be able to say, hey, you know, what kind of problems are you having?” he said. “Here’s the other resources you have. A community care doctor might not know about the benefits that you’re eligible for.”
Another issue to watch for is a defense bill in the senate that aims to exclude a toxic compound from the official list of forever chemicals, redefining how perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are identified.
The Guardian reported in September how lawmakers and the military are advocating to keep fluorinated gases, or F-gases, from being defined as toxic PFAS forever chemicals, and allowing agencies and organizations to use the compounds without strict regulatory oversight.
The article details how this move is part of “a broader fight to exempt PFAS from potential regulation by changing the definition. Exemption would help shield F-gases, which are among the most lucrative PFAS for industry, from regulatory scrutiny and potential oversight despite them being the most widely used PFAS subclass.”
F-gases are used in refrigeration, air conditioning, and a range of other industrial processes.
Earlier this year, more than 150 scientists from around the world with PFAS expertise co-signed a statement, urging governmental bodies to adopt a science-based “at least one fully fluorinated carbon atom” definition of PFAS that includes fluorinated (f)-gases.
Keep the conversation going in the comments below. What improvements would you like to see in VA care for those exposed to toxins during service?