Tag Archives: Veterans Affairs

Accused Means Guilty?

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The Department of Veterans Affairs has failed again. Kenneth Harrelson, a US Army veteran, medically retired after a bit under five years in, and his family are getting their VA benefits cut off because they’ve been accused of a crime. Conviction be damned; the VA don’t need no stinkin’ conviction.

The federal government plans to suspends or terminate benefits to a military veteran and his family as a result of him being charged in connection with the January 6 Capitol riot.
The Department of Veterans Affairs informed the veteran, Kenneth Harrelson, and his wife in a June 13 correspondence that such actions are the result of the Justice Department telling the agency that Harrelson has been charged with “indicted and charged with Seditious Conspiracy….”

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Another VA Failure

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…in image form:

Each bureaucrat with some form of a medical certificate more interested in her checklist than in the patient in front of her.

This is yet another reason to disband the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, the VA, and return all personnel to the private sector (not reassign them elsewhere in government). Instead, use the current and putative future VA budgets to provide vouchers for our veterans so they can seek their own care with the hospitals, clinics, and doctors of their choice and with far more responsive attention in a far more timely manner.

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It Just Never Stops

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Now a Veterans Administration nurse is charged with stealing and selling Wuhan Virus proof of vaccination cards, along with vaccine lot numbers, from a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital. She’s been, allegedly, peddling them to non-veterans, and even more despicably, to veterans.

The failures of the VA just never seem to stop.

Until they are stopped. This sort of dishonesty isn’t unique to the VA, but this is an agency with a deep and broad range of dishonesty and failures to perform, and it can be dealt with.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

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The Failure of the Department of Veterans Affairs

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It’s gotten even worse, astoundingly.

The Department of Veterans Affairs wants to hear from its customers, so to speak, but check your skin color before raising your hand. The VA is holding dozens of “listening sessions” for patients at its medical facilities. Eight cities are being virtually canvassed, with hearings for “racial/ethnic minorities,” “LGBTQ+ veterans,” and so forth.

For instance:

At a session on race last week in Augusta, Ga., a woman who described herself as white spoke in favor of inclusive language and safe spaces. “I appreciate your being upfront about the fact that you’re not a person of color yourself,” the VA’s facilitator chided, “because this listening session is for those from racial and ethnic minorities, to give them that kind of safe space.”

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The VA Fails Again

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Just when you thought maybe it was getting better, too. Nope.

Not only did one of our veterans die in a VA facility, in a stairwell 60 feet from the door to his residential room, the Bedford, MA, VA hospital in which he was resident couldn’t be bothered even to search for him. His

decomposing body wasn’t found until a month after his disappearance in an emergency stairwell just 60 feet from the door of his residential room at the facility.

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Another VA Failure

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…in a too-long string of failures.

A body found in a stairwell at the Bedford Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Massachusetts is a veteran who lived at the facility and disappeared more than a month ago.

He was missing, too, for five days before anyone cared enough to notice and report him missing.

It’s long past time to stop throwing taxpayer money into this hole. Disband the Veterans Administration entirely and use its budget and putative future budgets as vouchers for our veterans so they can get decent health care and shelter at quality facilities of their choice.

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Protections through Cuts

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That’s how President Donald Trump’s budget proposal represents support for his campaign commitment to protect programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

[The proposal] targets $2 trillion in savings from mandatory spending programs, including $130 billion from changes to Medicare prescription-drug pricing, $292 billion from safety-net cuts—such as work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps—and $70 billion from tightening eligibility access to federal disability benefits.

Medicare is threatened with bankruptcy nearly as badly as is Social Security, but that doesn’t mean Medicare would disappear—only that benefit payouts would be reduced to what payroll tax revenues could support, rather than what’s currently available from those tax revenues plus earnings and principle from its trust funds.

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The VA Strikes Again

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Several times.

First up is this petty (and more) move by the Veterans Administration.

Congressman Brian Mast (R, FL)a retired Army Ranger, spoke out on Thursday after he was evicted from his congressional office space in the West Palm Beach Veteran Affairs Medical Center.
The move came after Mast, who lost his legs in an explosion in Afghanistan in 2010, grilled a Department of Veteran Affairs official at a hearing earlier this year.

After a spate of veteran suicides in VA facilities, Mast questioned a number of VA officials last April.  Now the VA wants him out of that office space:

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The VA Fails Again

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Now we learn that the Veterans Administration owes our disabled veterans a ton of money for something other than their health: some 53,000 of them have been charged home loan fees that they didn’t have to pay, to the tune of $189 million in aggregate. Those 53,000 are over half of our veterans who were allowed the fee waiver.  VA auditors have discovered that, for 2012 through 2017

[V]eterans were charged the fees under the VA’s Home Loan Guaranty Program and now may be entitled to refunds ranging from $5,000 to $20,000….

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Veterans Administration Fails Again

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Recall the VA’s failure regarding paying our veterans all of the funds they’re due under the GI Bill; those student veterans are being shorted the money they’re owed.  That shortchanging will continue next year due to a “software glitch” that the VA isn’t fixing any time soon.

Now we get the VA’s Undersecretary of Benefits, Paul Lawrence, saying that the agency has no plans to retroactively pay shortchanged GI Bill recipients or to make next year’s VA victims whole.  He didn’t even have the integrity to admit this to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee before which he was testifying—under oath, mind you, as is typical for witnesses before Congressional hearings—until he’d been pressed on the matter by several Congressmen.

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