Monday, Sept. 15, 2003
Feds Charge Wounded GIs for Hospital Food
Marine Staff Sgt. Bill Murwin suffered a partial amputation of his left foot after a grenade exploded inside his Humvee in Iraq. The feds picked up his hospital bills ... but charged him $243 for food.
"Holy smokes," he said. "I'm in the hospital, and they're going to charge me for my food?"
Only three days after he received his first bill for the meals he ate at a U.S. military hospital in Germany, he got an angry past-due notice threating to send his account to a collection agency.
"Murwin, like thousands of other military personnel hospitalized every year, is expected to reimburse the government $8.10 per day for food. That's standard procedure because of a law Congress passed in 1981. But it has angered many military families over the years," the St. Petersburg Times reported.
"When Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Largo, and his wife, Beverly, heard about the problem, they personally paid Murwin's tab. Then the congressman introduced a bill to change the rules."
The congressman noted that the soldiers "were sent to war by their country. Many of them will be handicapped for the rest of their lives - and we're asking them to pay $8.10 a day for their food! There's something really wrong with that."
The rationale for the rule: Most servicemen get $8.10 a day as a "basic allowance for subsistence." The government, fearing that double-dipping is going on, tries to take the allowance back from those so lucky as to be dining on hospital grub.
"If I could be king for a day, I'd stop it in a minute," said Maj. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, who commands the Army hospitals in the eastern United States.
Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2003
Injured Troops Get to Keep Meal Allowance
The Defense Department can no longer try to recoup meal allowances from sick and injured servicemen while they are receiving treatment in military hospitals.
The U.S. Senate today inserted language prohibiting the practice into the Pentagon's $87 billion request for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Servicemen receive a daily stipend of $8.10 for food. Upon leaving a military hospital, where they received all their meals, they had been billed for the daily stipend to prevent double-dipping.
However, the nasty way that some wounded GIs were hounded for the money caused outrage in Congress.