Don't let government officials tell you they didn't know about troubles in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The oft-ignored Government Accountability Office has warned of increasing strain on military health care for years. Even worse, letters from distressed families were sent to high-ranking officials in both parties, including the Democratic senators from California and the Republicans from Maine. According to Annette McLeod, wife of former Walter Reed outpatient Cpl. Wendell McLeod, she even complained to the two-star general who ran the dilapidated hospital when she ran into him at Burger King.

"They're good enough to sacrifice their lives," McLeod said in her testimony at Monday's Congressional hearing. "But we give them nothing."

While a few stragglers still insist on blaming The Washington Post story about the rat-infested, mold-coated, bureaucratic hell that is the Walter Reed outpatient center for ruining a few careers, Monday’s hearings proved this is no longer a partisan issue. Lawmakers from each party have made countless visits to Walter Reed, and never thought to inquire further than the tour guide took them.

The Walter Reed story has garnered so much attention because it is so fundamentally embarrassing for an American middle class increasingly disconnected with military life. With local bases closing down under Rumsfeld's realignment plan and a combat burden that is shifting to the low-income population, average Americans have come to the realization that they have no idea what happens to those who fight the war they finance. Even more frightening, all signs point to broad systematic flaws in the military's health-care system. After all, Walter Reed is supposed to be the "crown jewel of military medicine."

We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, but wary of solutions seeking increased privatization of these services. Soldiers still deserve government accountability for the actions of medical administrators.

This national disgrace is indicative of the low premium our government puts on health care as a whole. We neglect our servicemen for the sake of fiscal responsibility while defense contractors abroad deliberately under-stock supply trucks to run up delivery fees for the government. Nonetheless, it has given the media a much needed wake-up call on the heels of The Associated Press announcement that it would no longer write stories about Paris Hilton, and even MSNBC has been too ashamed to cover Anna Nicole Smith as of a few days ago.

Scandals are agents of change, and however embarrassing, public officials should make some good come out of this neglect for the nation as a whole. With health care on top of the agenda, the government has a unique opportunity to affect radical change in a system that has left too many hard-working Americans behind. This shouldn't just be a rallying cry for liberals, either. While political parties argue about the best strategies to improve health care, the American people just want something that works better. In a more perfect world, the Bush administration would take this opportunity to reach out to conservative Democrats and create a consensus plan to insure all Americans. After all, politics will go out the window if enough Democrats are willing to sign on to a proposal.

But this isn't a more perfect world, so how about a more perfect state? In a few weeks, a proposal spearheaded by former state budget director David Riemer will be introduced in the state Senate. His Wisconsin Health Plan seeks to reduce the number of uninsured in Wisconsin from 500,000 to 50,000 by charging employers an indexed percentage of total wages and putting these funds into a buying pool that would still allow for consumer choice.

"The roughly $14 billion that employers are spending for employees' health insurance would largely disappear," Riemer said in a phone interview. "On the whole, most employers would see a reduction; all would have to pay their fair share." (I'm not going to bore you with more specifics from this plan, visit www.wisconsinhealthplan.org, or e-mail me; I love to talk health-care plans with folks.)

Hopefully, state officials will have a real debate about this workable proposal and find ways to compromise and tweak it. Flexibility is the true virtue of this plan, and Riemer stresses that WHP is not "socialized medicine." Sadly, it will probably fall victim to the partisan name-calling that distorts the intent of many sensible reforms. To be sure, local politicians will be tempted to take a default position against now stigmatized "universal" health-care plans to please constituencies who crave red-meat politics. But who knows? If Democratic and Republican leadership in the state Legislature can avoid the petty squabbling that has plagued this term, Wisconsin could become a national example in health care.

I am convinced the Walter Reed debacle can be an opportunity for national and local governments to turn public attention toward health-care solutions. Let's hope they learn from their mistakes and don't fall into another spiral of neglect.

Bassey Etim ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and journalism.

* A correction was made to the original story that printed March 7, 2007.