VA Health Care MIA - Missing in Alaska

VA Health Care MIA - Missing in Alaska
Anchorage Daily News | December 02, 2007

Alaska Natives and American Indians combined have the highest rate of military service of any group of Americans, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski noted during a congressional hearing on health care for Alaska Native veterans in Anchorage on Friday.

Some Alaska Natives have died while serving in Iraq, and many more have been wounded, Murkowski said. And yet when those same Soldiers, Airmen and Marines return home to rural Alaska, they find themselves without ready access to standard VA health care -- which is offered in clinics in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Kenai but nowhere in Western Alaska.

"So are we offering them a viable benefit?" Murkowski asked participants in the Senate Indian Affairs field hearing in a small room at the Egan Convention Center.

The answers that followed -- from Soldiers, tribal health officials and Native leaders alike -- amounted to a collective "no."

Some rural veterans have to pay as much as $1,000 to fly from their villages to Anchorage and back simply to get a check-up, said 1st Sgt. John Flynn, a member of the Alaska Army National Guard unit based in Bethel.

But that's not necessarily new, added Alaska Federation of Natives vice president Nelson Angapak, who served in the military during the Vietnam War.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,157381,00.html

needs. Often they do not have qualified in the sense of specialized medical people to meet the Veterans War wounds.

Bureau of Indian Affairs

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) responsibility is the administration and management ... Department of Health and Human Services - Indian Health Services ...

www.doi.gov/bureau-indian-affairs.html


Other isolated mainland Indian Reservations also have the same problems as the Alaskan Indian or Eskimo (Inuit).