Editorial: A lack of care

Sunday, July 29, 2007 | 7:05 a.m.

Civilian government employees and private contractors often work side by side with U.S. military personnel in Iraq, living in the same conditions, eating the same food and enduring the same dangers from enemy fire.

But when they return home wounded from combat, these non-military personnel often don't have access to the medical care afforded military personnel.

Stories published during the past three weeks by The New York Times and The Washington Post say thousands of civilians and contractors working for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't receiving adequate treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder or physical combat injuries because private insurers and government workers' compensation programs don't have categories for combat-related illnesses and injuries.

Certainly, medical treatment programs for wounded military personnel are, as another editorial in today's Las Vegas Sun says, in desperate need of repair. But at least military personnel are entitled to government care. Civilians wounded in combat are not.

Mike Helms, a Defense Department civilian intelligence worker who was sent to Iraq to assist the United States, told the Post in a story last week that he lived, ate and faced enemy fire as the soldiers did. Helms suffered shrapnel and brain injuries in 2004 when a roadside bomb tore into his unit's Humvee, in which he was manning the machine gun , as usual.

Upon returning to the United States, Helms was turned away from military hospitals and clinics. And neither the federal workers' compensation program nor his private physicians are equipped to handle combat injuries.

A July 4 story by the Times describes similar roadblocks for private contractors who are attacked while providing support services to U.S. military operations. One psychologist estimates that "tens of thousands" of undiagnosed cases of post-traumatic stress disorder are among the 126,000 non-military workers in Iraq.

Pentagon and Defense Department officials told the Times that they have not examined the issues confronted by private workers returning from the war.

The U.S. military medical system is barely able to adequately care for the thousands of wounded American soldiers who need treatment. But that does not excuse the government from taking care of civilians who are wounded while they are living, eating and fighting alongside soldiers in combat.