Editorial: An ailing system

Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2007 | 7:04 a.m.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered an independent investigation of the outpatient care program at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where the recent discovery of appalling conditions includes a building for housing recovering soldiers that has been infested with mold and vermin.

In a series of stories by The Washington Post last week, the descriptions of outpatient care at the Army facility that sits just five miles from the White House sound like something out of a Third World country. Mice, dead cockroaches, crumbling walls and ceilings and a lack of heat are found throughout the facility's Building 18, which houses soldiers who have been maimed physically and psychologically in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Post reports.

Even soldiers whose quarters are in better condition than those found in Building 18 are fighting to recover from amputations and other devastating injuries while tangled in a confounding, disconnected web of government paperwork that loses track of treatment regimens, follow-up medical appointments and even patients, the Post reports. Soldiers' case files and forms are processed through 16 different computer record-keeping databases, few of which connect to each other.

Patients - including those with severe post-traumatic stress-related psychological disorders - often just wander off without anyone noticing or are dropped from the system and forgotten, the Post reports.

Gates said Friday that he has dismissed the soldiers "most directly involved" in the substandard care and has promised to hold accountable those responsible. But current and former employees and patients say these problems have existed for years. Why didn't former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fix these horrific conditions? President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney routinely have visited the hospital's inpatient wards to glad-hand veterans for media cameras. How could they be oblivious to the frightful conditions endured by hundreds of other war veterans in the very same facility?

While it is commendable that Gates is moving quickly to improve conditions at Walter Reed, it is unconscionable that such conditions ever existed. They would be appalling in any U.S. medical facility. But they are especially shameful when they exist in a government-run hospital charged with treating soldiers who have sacrificed so dearly for their country.