With the U.S. now committed to staying in Afghanistan until 2014, Jennifer Granholm and Tom Tarantino, Deputy Director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), discuss the rising accounts of traumatic brain injury (TBI) with veterans who face stigmas and bureaucracy while seeking treatment. Although combat survival rates are at an all-time high, long-term complications from TBI are creating a new set of problems for veterans, their families and support services.
Advocacy groups like the IAVA are facing the challenge of educating a public wherein, according to Tarantino, “there is a huge divide between the military community and the civilian community and it’s becoming increasingly harder for us to make sure that the men and women who have served in uniform are cared for when most Americans don’t have any connection to the war.” Tarantino calls for more VA research while dismissing Mitt Romney’s proposed solution of privatizing the VA: “Pretty much everybody across party lines — across all ideologies who actually knows how the system works — knows that would be an absolute disaster,” says Tarantino.
