Washington, April 01: Implementation of a law signed by US President Barack Obama last year to provide aid for caregivers of US war veteran has been slow or severely limited.
Caregivers to US war veterans thus do not receive the benefits promised to them by law, a Press TV correspondent reports.
The Department of Veterans Affairs missed a January 31 deadline to kick off the so-called Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act.
The program would have provided financial assistance, healthcare and counseling to qualified veterans.
The United Health Foundation and the National Alliance for Caregiving recently released a survey of those who care for the disabled veterans, according to which nearly all the caregivers are women.
Primary caregivers of veterans are usually spouses or parents, which is not the norm for ordinary caregivers in America.
“Some of the injured can be as young as 19 years old. And you could be doing this for quite a long period of time,” says Barbara Cohoon, from the National Military Family Association.
Two-thirds of the caregivers to war veterans find themselves in “high-burden” situations, which involve helping the veterans with such basic activities as dressing, bathing and feeding, and many have been in that role for a decade or more.
Experts say the burden of being a longtime veteran caregiver has serious negative effects. The majority of caregivers ignore their own basic health needs, while the children of caregivers offen experience emotional or academic problems.
After a decade of wars in which many US veterans have served multiple tours of duty in stressful combat zones, the United States is left with many thousands of veterans that suffer from serious physical or emotional disabilities.
More than half of the caregivers say that their disabled veteran has a severe mental illness; nearly 30 percent report that their veteran has a traumatic brain injury, and one in five cite paralysis or spinal cord injury as the cause of the disability.
——–Agencies