3M settlement shows how little we care if veterans come home whole

3M Earplugs

Members of the armed forces for the United States military set a standard for performance unlike any the world has ever known. For those who serve in theaters of war, it often costs them the maximum. All give some; few come home the same.

Our country has taken great strides to improve how we care for and provide to those who return from war with very visible injuries. The resources that are made available to our veterans who are maimed, dismembered and disfigured are immeasurably greater than what was available to servicemen and women of past generations. Prosthetics post 1993 Somalia come to mind as a great accomplishment. However, we continue as a society to fail those who come home with non-visible wounds. Worse, we

Contractor Settles for $9.1M after Providing Defective Earplugs for Troops

3M Earplugs

A contractor has agreed to pay $9.1 million to the U.S. government for selling defective earplugs issued to thousands of servicemembers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to 2015.

Known as “selective attenuation earplugs,” 3M’s Combat Arms earplugs would “loosen in the wearers ear, imperceptibly to the wearer and even trained audiologists visually observing a wearer, thereby permitting damaging sounds to enter the ear canal by traveling around outside of the earplug,” according to the whistleblower lawsuit complaint, which was settled Thursday.

The earplugs were designed to be worn in two ways. The wearer could insert the plugs one way if they needed to hear speech and another way if they needed greater noise protection. The plugs looked like two inverted cones connected at