Fr_J-H

A friend of mine who served in Iraq sent this along:

Regardless of where you stand on the issue of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, here’s a sobering statistic: There has been a monthly average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theatre of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2,112 deaths.

That gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000 soldiers.

The firearm death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000 persons for the same period. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in the U.S. Capital than you are in Iraq.

Conclusion: The U.S. should pull out of Washington.

Real Clear Politics Dennis Byrne March 10, 2007

The partisans who are scoring political points by gnashing their teeth over the outpatient failures at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are missing the point: The government did it.

It is especially aggravating because many of these same partisans want to turn the nation’s health care system over to…the government.

Or have they somehow missed the fact that the care of veterans is the responsibility of the government? Do they somehow believe that a single-payer health care system, or universal health care, or whatever else they want to call it will be immune to the kind of bureaucratic insensitivity, apathy and bungling that is integral to government?

Would the stampeding fault-finders please explain to the world how they would ensure that civilian outpatients, under a bureaucracy rivaling the military’s, would not be ignored in the same manner that the military bureaucracy abandoned the wounded veterans in Building 18? With hundreds of millions of civilian patients, instead of thousands of wounded veterans, would someone give us a clue how the government would keep track of them all? With outpatient veterans getting lost under mountains of paperwork and red tape, how would government be more responsive to the needs of hundreds of millions?

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