(CNN) — Erik Roberts, an Army sergeant who was wounded in Iraq, underwent his 13th surgery recently to save his right leg from amputation. Imagine his shock when he got a bill for $3,000 for his treatment. 
“I just thought it was bull—- that I’m getting billed for being wounded in Iraq doing my job. I always put the mission first, and now that I was wounded in Iraq, they’re sending me bills,” he said.
“I put my life on the line and I was wounded in combat, and I came back and they’re not going to take care of my medical bills?”
It’s a level of outrage shared by his mother, as well as the doctor who performed the surgery.
“It’s hard to understand why we’re not taking care of guys like Erik whose injuries are clearly related to their service. They deserve the best care of anybody,” said Dr. William Obremskey, an Air Force veteran and surgeon at Vanderbilt Orthopaedics in Nashville, Tennessee.
[...]
He retired from the Army in October 2007, because of his war injuries, and enrolled in college last fall at Youngstown State University, majoring in finance and minoring in economics.
But in December, he says, a golf ball-sized lump appeared on his wounded leg. He says he went to a Veterans Affairs hospital and was told not to worry about it.
A few days later, he says, he went to the emergency room after the lump flared up more. A doctor there, he says, told him that the leg was badly infected and that it might have to be amputated.
Desperate for help, his mother contacted the Army surgeon who had saved her son’s life two years earlier. That doctor referred him to Obremskey, the Vanderbilt surgeon.
The Robertses say the VA did not approve of them going outside the system. Erik Roberts says he had no choice — it was have surgery or potentially lose his leg.
“I thought my leg was more important than the usual bureaucratic mess,” he said.
His leg was saved. The $3,000 billed to Roberts wasn’t for the surgery itself. It’s a portion of the bill for six weeks of daily antibiotics to prevent the infection from coming back. His private insurance plan picked up the majority of the $90,000 in costs.
Tags: Barack Obama
Welcome to National Health Care.
savage,
Your words were my first thought, too. Word for word.
gmta, Rick…
BTW, how have ya been?
I cant get over how the government is bailing out AIG which doesn’t merit it.
And yet we will not give our vets the best health care possible.
No, we would rather reward bad business and stupid homeowners.
Hope and Change, welcome to welfare.
Savage,
Thanks for asking but an answer to that question would require an email. For a lot of reasons. But basically nothing’s changed and nothing’s new. Such is life. (That’s my new fatalist mantra.)
The only thing I’m really thinking about, though, considering all the crap that’s going on, is Mother’s Day/My Mom’s Birthday, which occur around the same time (May 11th). She’ll be 87. A Navy wife of 20 years (1942-1962), and whose first house was the one I grew up in (my second duty station, if you will). I was born on a Navy base and lived my first year or so (no memory) in Navy enlisted family housing. The things she’s seen. And believe me, the stories she can tell. I know, I’m the only one who asks her all the time. So many of my family never talk to her. They respected her food, but not her opinions; I was always in the kitchen with her, and one other aunt whenever we were together, cooking, eating, and talking. But I guess I’m a little prejudiced as she’s told me often that of her surviving kids (3 out of 4, my brother died 2 years before I was born [one 'baby' for another]), she always enjoyed my sense of humor best. Gotta love Moms who say the right thing at the right time! Every time!
Well, good for you Rick.
Give your mom a hug for me.
Savage, I gotta say, whenever a Mom hits 87, jumping the gun on such holidays is not a bad thing. This year will include a card with a letter (in large print). There really is no time like the present to say the things that one wishes later they might have said, but didn’t.
The way USA treats its vets is a disgrace. Never have I seen a vet begging car to car until I went to California. My dad is a WWII vet and he gets all medical and hospital on top of any national health and he gets driven around in a taxpayer funded taxi.
Why dont you guys support the vets?
aussie_dave
Good question.
If it was up to me, vets would be treated like mini kings.
Bar:
Ones that have seen action – sure.
The VA told him to not worry about a lump appearing in his leg…… typical VA. Watching my father go through the VA System in Minnesota and Oklahoma, I can say that I detest it.
Their first impulse is to give you a prescription, ther second impulse is to have you spend an entire day at the clinic to have a simple test run (which they’ll get to reading a week later, then prescribe another medication).
The doctors don’t pay attention to you, they just look at a computer screen and act as though your presence is an annoyance.
And, to think, this is where we are heading as a nation for healthcare. I don’t oppose socailized medicine because it will become the dmv (Heck, the dmv is pretty quick here in oklahoma). . . . I oppose it because it will become the va.
Soldiers ought to have all wartime injuries paid for by the United States government, at a doctor of the SOLDIER’S choosing.
4 bar
“I cant get over how the government is bailing out AIG which doesn’t merit it.
And yet we will not give our vets the best health care possible.”
The vets haven’t spent a decade giving gobs of shady money to the Democrats. And vets tend to be conservative.
11. LanceKates. “Soldiers ought to have all wartime injuries paid for by the United States government, at a doctor of the SOLDIER’S choosing”. Veterans get that here, even with the National health System. Everyone chooses their doctor for medical and vets can choose their surgeons.
It’s not that hard really, and cheaper than bailing out banks.