New study gives scope and cost of combat-related conditions among veterans
A new Congressional Budget Office report examines the cost of care for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury and finds their treatment costs “run four to six times as high as patients without these conditions,” the NYT’s At War blog says.
“In a sampling of nearly half a million veterans of the two wars, 21 percent had P.T.S.D., 2 percent had symptoms of T.B.I., and 5 percent had both. For a variety of reasons, it’s hard to extrapolate these rates to the entire group of those who served.”
Table below from the report summarizes costs. (OCO stands for “overseas contingency operations.”) Spending over the four years studied was $3.7 billion.
