After downsizing health care for years, Pentagon says medical readiness was a casualty
MAY 2, 20245:00 AM ET
Quil Lawrence
Jenn Ackerman for NPR
The Air Force put Todd Rasmussen through medical school, and he planned to serve a while and then go into private practice at the renowned Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He started his military career as a vascular surgeon in Northern Virginia, a few weeks before Sept. 11, 2001.
"You could sort of see smoke from the Pentagon. I thought, boy, my military career as a surgeon ... it's gonna be vastly different than what I expected," he recalls.
Rasmussen switched to trauma surgery as casualty numbers soared to the highest rates since Vietnam. At first, the way patients arrived within days from the war zone thousands of miles away amazed him. That wore off though, when he realized patients weren't getting care soon enough. By the time they reached the U.S., their wounds were contaminated and sometimes too late to treat without amputation.
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/02/1246636334/pentagon-military-healthcare
