Over at E&P at top of site was have AP story, which pretty much opens: "The most frequently cited figure is the 29,320 soldiers wounded in action in Iraq as of Thursday. But there have been 31,325 others treated for non-combat injuries and illness as of March 1. 'The Pentagon keeps two sets of books,' said Linda Bilmes, a professor at Harvard and an expert on budgeting and public finance whose newly published book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, was co-authored with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. 'It is important to understand the full number of casualties because the U.S. government is responsible for paying disability compensation and medical care for all our troops, regardless of how they were injured,' Bilmes said.
"Veterans Affairs predicts it will treat 330,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009 — a 14 percent increase over the 2008 estimate of 263,000 — at a cost of nearly $1.3 billion."
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1 comment:
The taxpayer is also paying for the dead and wounded civilian contractors under the War Hazards Act.
We know there as many contractors in Iraq as there are soldiers but we do not have accurate numbers on the casualties.
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