The Indian Health Service and the state of Israel

The Indian Health Service, underbudgeted and understaffed, operates almost 500 health care centers across the country. Most of them are in areas of significant public health challenges, mainly on Indian reservations, where poverty, disease and substance abuse are rampant.

Norman Bernstein

According to the agency's director, the Indian Health Service's Catastrophic Health Emergency Fund, which is used for trauma care and major surgeries, as well as other catastrophic events, will run out of money before the end of the year, and most of the agency's financing is now facing an additional five percent across-the-board cut due to the mindless indifference of our Congress and its sequester. The agency director also stated that this translates into more than 800,000 human beings who will not receive the medical care they need and are entitled to.

Under the 1985 sequester law, annual budget cuts to the Indian Health Service were limited to a cap of 2 percent, but the federal Office of Management and Budget overruled that interpretation and has subjected the Health Service budget to the five percent cut. Indian Health Service, already struggling with inadequate funding for inadequate services, is unprepared for the additional $220 million shortfall.

In contrast, House Bill 938, the "United States – Israel Partnership Act of 2013," was introduced in Congress on March 5th. The Bill exempts annual foreign aid to the State of Israel from any budgetary cuts, now and forever more. This year's aid to Israel is $3.2 billion, not counting some loan guarantees, which is about average, but could be significantly greater, given the very possible coming war with Iran.

Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, which has amounted to from $115 billion to $250 billion, depending on how you do the math and whether you include all loans, grants and in-kind services. HB 938 will move the funds allocated to "U.S. aid to Israel" to the part of the Pentagon budget that is exempt from the sequester five percent cut, and will grant Israel a newly created status of "Major Strategic Ally," a relationship that no other nation has.

Thus, the funding will not be cut and will provide Israel, for the first time, with deep penetrating "bunker bombs" and with F35 Lightning II stealth fighter bombers that have nuclear capability. Israel is also the only nation with nuclear weapons that has not signed any of the conventions regulating them.

Most of the U.S. foreign aid to Israel is military aid that must be purchased from U.S. companies for "U.S. defense equipment, services, and training." In other words, what the bill is exempting from the 5 percent mandated by the sequester, amounts to just another federal subsidy for U.S. corporations, the health of which is obviously much more important than the health of a few, or even a couple of million, Indians and native Alaskans who are covered by the Indian Health Service.

A later column will discuss the history of this unique relationship between the United States and Israel and how it came about. And why our government thinks that it is more important than domestic Head Start and other education programs, medical care centers for the poorest of our population, and our own community services.

(Norman Bernstein is a writer who lives in Havre.)