Over 2 million U.S. children are at risk for mental health problems related to a loved one being deployed for active duty warfare in the past decade. But these kids’ access to mental health services remains scarce, underscoring a major hole in the American medical system.

According to a new report by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), of the 60 percent of active duty military personnel who are married, 44 percent have children — most of whom are born at a younger age than civilian American families. Pediatricians are concerned that these children are exposed to stressful environments at a greater rate than others. That’s partly due to their separation from family members during wartime — but much of it also concerns the mental health problems experienced by their military family members.

In the five years after the commencement of the Iraq war in 2003, the number of U.S. military suicides ballooned by 80 percent, reaching a record high in January 2013. AAP’s report finds that over 30 percent of returning soldiers from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have encountered serious mental health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

While that may not be surprising for soldiers exposed to harmful environments, what’s less obvious is the effect that such disorders can have on children — especially the relatively young children of current active duty military and veterans. A recent study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that suicide can be “contagious” among teenagers — and the younger the child, the more prominent the effect. According to the AAP’s findings, “one in four children of active-duty service members experience symptoms of depression, one in two report trouble sleeping, and about one in three children of active-duty military personnel experience excessive worrying.”

Unfortunately, accessing adequate care is difficult for military families. The AAP study finds that over 50 percent of military children receive their mental health care outside of the military health system — and the American private mental health system is decidedly broken.

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Adding to the extensive body of evidence that participating in Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion is both smart fiscal policy and the right move for securing poor Americans’ health care, a new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Urban Institute study concludes that states refusing to expand Medicaid will leave over 200,000 low-income, uninsured veterans and two-thirds of uninsured veterans’ spouses without access to affordable health coverage.

According to the report, out of America’s 1.3 million uninsured veterans, 40 percent could qualify for expanded Medicaid benefits under Obamacare, but “of the half-million uninsured veterans who would be potentially Medicaid eligible under the ACA, three-quarters—414,000 people—have incomes below 100 percent of FPL and would not qualify for exchange subsidies if their state does not expand Medicaid. Likewise, two-thirds of veterans’ spouses who could qualify for expanded Medicaid under the ACA would not be eligible for exchange subsidies should their state not expand Medicaid.”

That’s bad news considering that the majority of those veterans live in states whose governors have either chosen not to expand Medicaid or have not yet decided whether to expand. That presents a massive burden for veterans — and veterans’ families — who don’t have health insurance, pricing them out of the medical system and forcing them to forgo or delay care due to its associated costs.

And this study doesn’t even take into account the tens of thousands of veterans who have yet to return home from the waning Afghanistan war. Those veterans are mostly young Americans who will be forced to confront the widespread economic inequality, record homelessness, and unprecedented levels of PTSD and suicide that are plaguing veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Faced with a Veterans’ Affairs Department (VA) overwhelmed by medical claims and more and more American soldiers returning from the war in Afghanistan, the state of New Mexico has decided to provide recently-discharged veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with a critical resource: one year of free mental health services.

As per New Mexico Department of Veterans’ Services Secretary Timothy Hale, “This is the first collaborative effort between private and state agencies in the country to provide statewide pro-bono mental health counseling for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. This means nearly 500 veterans in the state can receive the immediate help they need now rather than waiting for any veterans’ benefits paperwork to be filled out and processed – which can take awhile to be completed.”

That’s crucial for the soldiers returning home from recent conflicts, considering that the VA has a backlog of over 900,000 unprocessed medical claims — and that’s just from current veterans. As the war in Afghanistan winds down, that problem will be exacerbated further, particularly for mental health care claims. By the VA’s own estimates, at least 15 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) — and that number could potentially be much higher considering the sky-high rates of suicide and homelessness among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

The program is being sponsored by a combination of state and federal Access To Recovery (ATR) programs, as well as local providers and nonprofits. On the webpage for the new program, New Mexico ATR specifically cites VA backlogs and waiting periods associated with claims-processing as a major reason that New Mexican veterans might want to consider the program, along with “previous failures accessing and navigating the system,” transportation barriers, and “the stigma related with mental health care.”

While the collaborative public-private partnership will relieve a major burden for New Mexican veterans by enhancing access to care and shielding them from the high costs of mental health treatment, such efforts aren’t necessarily fiscally feasible in other states. New Mexico’s ATR program — which is funded substantially through the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) — is one of the best in the nation, and therefore receives enhanced federal funding. So while New Mexico may be shielded from the effects of looming federal budget cuts to departments such as the SAMHSA and the VA, veterans in other states might not be so lucky.

Say goodbye to the doctor’s office, and hello to your personal computer. According to a new report released by the Commonwealth Fund, “telehealth” — programs in which doctors and nurses use electronic medical data to remotely monitor and check in with their patients — has led to significant reductions in hospital re-admissions and bed days among early adopters such as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

The study’s authors emphasized that effective telehealth programs “take time” to implement, citing the training needed to familiarize care providers with the new technology. But by improving patient monitoring, telehealth has the potential to keep Americans healthier by making sure they’re complying with their treatment regimens:

Followers also are counseled to be patient. “Successful programs can take time to scale successfully,” the authors said. “It takes time to integrate technology into care delivery and allow staff to adapt.” The VA’s Care Coordination/Home Telehealth program targeting chronically ill veterans, for example, was launched in 2003. Now, with 70,000 veterans receiving home telehealth care, the program boasts patient satisfaction levels greater than 85%.

In a data sample from 2004 through 2007, the VA reported reductions in bed days of care across all eight targeted chronic conditions, ranging from a 20% drop for the nearly 9,000 enrolled diabetes patients to a 56% decrease for the nearly 340 patients then receiving home health monitoring for depression, and a 45% drop for nearly 140 patients with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Partners [HealthCare] has had 1,200 patients enrolled thus far in its Connected Cardiac Care Program since its launch as a pilot study in 2006. It has “consistently experienced an approximate 50% reduction in health failure-related readmission rates for enrolled patients,” according to the Commonwealth reporters, with an estimated savings in utilization of about $10 million.

In recent months, an increasing number of hospitals and government institutions have turned to technology in an effort to reduce health costs while improving patient care. Minnesota recently established an online “bulletin board” tracking the available flu shots in the state; studies have shown that telemedical procedures for women taking abortion-inducing medication are just as effective as having a doctor physically present; and a large part of the way that Obamacare seeks to reduce national health expenditures is through the institutionalization of electronic medical records.

But telehealth procedures targeted towards patient monitoring hold particular promise for improving patients’ health by curbing unnecessary hospitalizations — particularly for elderly Americans. That’s because studies have shown that a large portion of excessive medical spending stems from patients taking their medications incorrectly or not following their treatment regimens. By allowing health workers to have up-to-the minute access to their patients, telehealth could go a long way towards reversing that trend.

The New York Times reports that the Department of Veterans Affairs today will propose new rules and regulations aimed at expanding health care benefits for current and former service members suffering from a traumatic brain injury.

The new regulations will include certain forms of “Parkinsonism, unprovoked seizures, certain dementias, depression, and hormone deficiency diseases related to the hypothalamus, pituitary or adrenal glands” as medical conditions eligible for benefits to any veteran with a brain injury — without burdening veterans to prove that their condition is directly caused by military service:

Since 2000, more than 250,000 service members — some still on active duty — have received diagnoses of traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I., according to the Defense Department. Though T.B.I. is commonly viewed as resulting from blast exposure, the vast majority of those injuries were diagnosed in nondeployed troops who were involved in vehicle crashes, training accidents or sports injuries.

The Department of Veterans Affairs says that a much smaller number of veterans — about 51,000 — are currently receiving benefits for service-connected traumatic brain injuries. However the department acknowledges that thousands more troops with T.B.I. may be eligible for the expanded benefits.

Veterans of prior wars will also be eligible for the benefits, if they can demonstrate that a traumatic brain injury was connected to their military service.

Under current rules, a veteran with one of the five illnesses has to provide medical evidence that the disease is the result of military service in order to receive veterans’ benefits.

The new rule would potentially speed up and simplify their cases, provided a veteran could first demonstrate a service-connected traumatic brain injury. Once that is established, the department will accept without further evidence that any of those five diseases was caused by the T.B.I., making the veteran eligible for additional compensation and health care for that particular disease.

While the expanded benefits will give America’s veterans some much-needed peace of mind, the rules will still place certain limitations related to the severity of the diseases being treated. And service members face many physical and mental health risks not necessarily associated with a traumatic brain injury. The number of suicides in the armed forces is on the rise, and retired military leaders have called on Congress to address the epidemic.

Rick Santorum claims that the expansion of government health care in Obamacare inspired him to run for president and regularly condemns the government’s involvement in the Medicare program. “We should not have a government-run health care system on Medicare or anything else, because it completely distorts the market,” he explained at a town hall in South Carolina on January 12. “It’s top down. It’s not the way America works best.”

But this morning, during an appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, the former Pennsylvania senator embraced the most government-centric health care system of them all: veterans health care — a fully integrated structure of government payers and providers. Santorum said his parents met on a government veterans base and said his father worked as a government health care provider:

SANTORUM: The answer is [veterans health care] should be excluded from any kind of reduction. These are people, men and women, who stepped forward to defend this count country. The country has a special obligation to them as a result of that. these are heroic people. [...] I grew up on VA grounds, my mom and dad met at a VA after World War II. [...] And I got a chance to meet veterans and work with them and volunteer at the hospital. And i can tell you that there problems in the VA health care system. There’s a lot of problems with quote government-run medicine. [...] The one thing we can’t do is cut those benefits.

Watch it:

The veterans’ health care structure of doctors and hospitals is not without its problems, but it actually provides veterans with benefits that are the envy of the rest of the health care system — including private payers and providers. A study by the RAND Corporation found that “VA patients were more likely to receive recommended care” and “received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow up.”

Mitt Romney pledged to increase funding for the government-run Veterans Health Administration during a town hall at Gilchrist Metal Fabricating, in Hudson, New Hampshire this afternoon. Without specifically mentioning the highly efficient veterans health care system, Romney told an attendee, “I want to be able to support our veterans with the care they deserve. I want to take our savings from waste and inefficiency and care for our veterans and make sure in our hospitals, in our clinics, to make sure they get the care they need. I will not cut our defense budget so we can in part take care of our veterans.” Watch his remarks:

The fully integrated veterans’ health care structure of doctors and hospitals actually provides veterans with benefits that are the envy of the rest of the health care system — including private payers and providers (which Romney regularly touts as a better alternative to government programs). A study by the RAND Corporation found that “VA patients were more likely to receive recommended care” and “received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow up.”

Romney has previously floated the idea of partially privatizing the veterans health care system, but eventually backed away from the idea. “We have a VA system that needs to be improved and I’ve got no plans to change that other than to make it better and to invest more money in providing for our veterans,” he said.