Billions of compensation to hundreds of thousands of citizens suffering from diseases such as … eczema, hemorrhoids, acne or phlebitis! This is not a scenario of an imaginative comedy or news that concerns a (familiar) Balkan state but the reality of the hundreds of thousands of their army veterans and which brings to light a thorough survey of the Washington Post newspaper.
This model is even reminiscent of the Greek patent of his scandal, with thousands of former soldiers, non -commissioned officers and officers receiving thick compensation for many years, not of course for sheep, but for illnesses non -existent or irrelevant to their military duties.
Compensation industry
The conclusions of the report, which extends to a time of 25 years, arise in combination with documents obtained following the newspaper’s lawsuit to the Ministry of Veterans and the Ministry of Justice, by interviews with journalists of the same media with veterans and on -site visits.
The findings reveal a true factory of disability compensation, the aberration of an extremely weak control mechanism, an exaggeration in exaggeration or even complete deception. It is indicative that 556,000 veterans received disability compensation, citing eczema, 81,000 due to acne and 74,000 due to varicose veins. On the contrary, only 10,900 were the beneficiaries of the compensation program diagnosed with brain injuries, while 1,700 beneficiaries were amputated in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.
They were legal advisers, companies that benefited from the grid of relaxed to non -existent control mechanisms and some veterans who urged their former teammates to resort to relevant methods of deception. The amounts are not at all disadvantaged if one considers that the competent ministry manages $ 193 billion resources and that the average compensation amounts to $ 25,046 and is usually given for life.
Miracles and errors…
The post report even refers to a number of characteristic cases of deception that have seen the light of publicity alongside research. Among them, a veteran female, who received $ 1.1 million, representing the paralyzed, spending much of the amount on a Caribbean vacation and bets in Las Vegas, and a Veteran warman in Vietnam, who was playing for $ 29.
The publication, however, also highlights a number of structural errors of the programs intended for veterans, since they were designed at another historical context. The very nature of the war has changed both from the World War II era that has caused rapid changes in the exposure of staff to dangers and therefore their ability to reintegrate the labor market. Returning to the statistics, only 4.1% of veterans are exposed to unemployment, while at the same time the natural end of a generation of 20th -century wars (BIP, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq) has reduced the absolute number from 26 million to 17.6 million.
The report leaves none of the two major US parties in the stupid, pointing out that the framework for what is characterized by disability has been consciously relaxed since 2001, under the responsibility of democratic and Republican legislative representatives. Indeed, he points out that the biggest “facility” took place in 2022- under Biden presidency- when veterans were given the opportunity to attribute a number of diseases to the environmental conditions in the local war fields.
The scandal, however, in addition to yet another confirmation that no species is not fit into the “art” of deception, confirms the global tendency of political officials to deny the very existence of customer behaviors and problematic institutions. “The far -left Washington Post believes that many veterans are not entitled to the benefits they correspond to,” Pitt Casperovic, a spokesman for the responsible ministry, said in another grotesque parallel with the handling of Greece.
