Half a billion dollar increase = spending cuts?
I'm not finding any hard numbers that explain why costs would be increasing at five times the rate of inflation. But I will readily concede that medical costs are rising, and it seems obvious that veteran medical costs would increase a lot during a war.
But a politically-charged newspaper article, largely devoted to one anti-Bush veteran, doesn't really answer the question.
There is no public polling data to demonstrate how pervasive Hill's views about Bush are among the nation's 25-million military veterans, nearly 2-million of them in Florida.
A flat-out lie, unless of course one assumes the reporter is just an idiot. It took me five minutes to dig this up, and another three minutes to find a poll specific to Florida. Note that the first poll largely predates the Swift Boat controversy. Be very interesting to see a more recent national one.
In this testimony before the Senate, a representative of the VA says medical research, including prosthetics, is funded to the tune of $1.7 billion.
I don't know much more than what I've found in the past twenty minutes. I'm willing to learn more.