While health care for all Americans has been a major topic of discussion this presidential election season, one group has gone largely ignored. Some Iraqi interpreters, who served alongside U.S. troops in Iraq, have made their way to this country as refugees with a plight about as dire as could be imagined.
 
They risked their lives to help U.S. soldiers in a hostile environment, yet many of them who have been maimed in the process are now left wondering whether the United States will help them.
 
One of those former interpreters, Diyar al-Bayati, 22, is now adjusting, more like coping, with life in Salt Lake City. Having lost both of his legs in Iraq after a roadside bomb detonated, movement is difficult. His motorized wheelchair was destroyed on the flight to the United States, and he now relies on a manual one to get him around. A steel-and-foam set of prosthetic legs given to him at a hospital in Jordan are too painful to use.
 
"I can wear them three, four minutes, and then I fall down," he told the Deseret News.
 
Al-Bayati longs for a better pair of prosthetic legs through Medicaid, but he's still awaiting the official outcome of that request, as government bureaucrats try to determine what his contractor, which formerly employed him, will do first.
 
He told The Salt Lake Tribune that dealing with U.S. government officials in trying to get health care needs met has been incredibly difficult.
 
"They say that I can only get limited help" as a regular refugee, he said. "In Iraq, when they wanted my help, I didn't tell them that it was limited. I didn't tell them, 'No, I'm just an interpreter and my services are limited."
 
The Iraqi interpreters that aided U.S. forces are almost always in danger of remaining in their homeland--viewed as collaborating with the enemy. Al-Bayati, for instance, accompanied U.S. soldiers on more than 200 combat missions in Iraq.
 
But despite their service--some like al-Bayati even took up arms at some points--just getting inside the United States has been a severe struggle. In 2006, the U.S. government gave a mere 50 special immigrant visas, reported Matthew D. LaPlante in The Salt Lake Tribune. He noted that the Bush administration increased the number to 500 for 2007 and 2008 in the wake of pressure from U.S. service members.
 
LaPlante writes that officials at the National Visa Center in Portsmouth, N.H. "say they won't even bother to interview anyone else until next year, when--barring further changes--the number of visas designated specifically for interpreters will revert to 50."
 
Ali al-Kana'an, 26, a former interpreter now living in Denver, must wait a year to even apply for a residency permit before attempting to rescue family members from Iraq, reports Bruce Finley in the Denver Post.
 
Also in 2006, al-Kana'an went beyond his duties as an interpreter and suffered serious injuries as a result of a suicide bomb attack. Third-degree burns affected 60 percent of his body, and he underwent 21 skin-graft surgeries in Jordan. Now, he works at a restaurant in the Denver area picking cleaning up grease from the grills.
 
Finley writes that "his health insurance as a government employee expired, his eardrum is ruptured, and shrapnel remains lodged in his neck."
 
If he's able to recuperate successfully, al-Kana'an wants to serve in an official capacity with the U.S. Marine Corps.
 
As for al-Bayati, he found out Wednesday that Medicaid will provide him with a motorized wheelchair. He's not sure, however, when it will arrive.