Category Archives: Veterans Affairs

Because, Veterans

Posted on by
Reply

President Obama’s 2016 budget blueprint proposes rolling back a program that gives veterans the right to receive faster care outside of the long waitlists at the troubled Veterans Affairs medical system.

Obama signed the Veterans Choice Program into law in August following months of partisan wrangling on Capitol Hill….

His 2016 budget “proposal” doesn’t zero out the program; instead, it achieves elimination of the funding by allowing the VA to reallocate that part of its budget to other purposes

to support essential investments in VA system priorities in a fiscally responsible, budget-neutral manner.

Apparently, veteran choice isn’t an essential investment, or it’s not a fiscally responsible use of the money, or both.

Because veterans are another group of Americans whom Obama and his Democrat minions don’t think are capable of making their own decisions.

On the other hand, it was a Republican addition to last year’s compromise and interim bill for reforming the Veterans Administration. Maybe because, Republicans.

The Veterans Administration Revisited

Posted on by
Reply

To repeat: the VA needs to be disbanded, its employees returned to the private sector, and its budget distributed to our veterans as vouchers with which they can get the care they need from the doctors and facilities they choose.

The latest example of the VA’s fatal dysfunctionality is a hospital in Aurora, CO—rather, a hospital shell, since the VA has been mismanaging this project to the tune of claiming to “need” $1 billion (yes, that’s with a “b”) to finish—finish, mind you—building this building.

Those billion dollars are three times the original construction cost estimate in 2005, just nine short years ago. Accounting for inflation, that original estimate of $328 million would be a bit over $400 million today. Assuming it really would have needed all nine years to build the thing. Apparently, though, including VA incompetence, 18 years will be needed; the “hospital” is only half done. And just to saucer and blow it: the VA “is in arrears” with the payments it owes its current contractor.

Hoover Dam was built in five years (yes, yes, the dam wasn’t hindered by other government claptrap that also is in the VA’s way, but still…).

VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson has conceded VA fault, and he’s actually apologized (to his credit, it wasn’t one of those 21st century pap statements being masqueraded as an apology).

I apologize to veterans here in Colorado. I apologize to the taxpayers. We have let you down[.]

Sorry, though. It’s a fine apology (I’ll assume sincerity), but words don’t get the hospital built. Words don’t recover those hundreds of millions of lost dollars. Coming as they do in the midst of ongoing VA failure, words of apology are entirely worthless.

Get rid of the VA.

Another VA Problem

Posted on by
1

This one, though, isn’t primarily the Veterans Affair’s doing.

Veterans at the Shreveport, LA, Veterans Administration hospital have been going without toothbrushes, toothpaste, pajamas, sheets, and blankets while department officials spend money on new Canadian-made furniture, televisions to run public service announcements and solar panels….

Some specifics:

According to the VA, the department spent $74,412 on 24 flat screen TVs for “patient/employee information”—one 50 inches wide and the others 42 inches. The furniture cost $134,082, and the solar project was approximately $3 million.

This is shameful, but this falls on Congress. Under Federal funding rules, capital equipment—the TVs, solar, etc—fall into one funding category, and supplies—toothbrushes and paste, blankets, etc—fall into a separate category. Under those same rules, the VA (and any other agency whose funding falls into different categories) cannot take funds from, say, capital equipment, and spend it on, say, supplies. It gets even more bureaucratic than that. Agencies can’t reallocate capital expenses from one capital item to another: the VA can’t, for instance, take some of those $3 million from solar and buy more TVs with it. Only Congress can authorize such reallocations.

No, Congress must answer for this misallocation. That it’s what the VA asked for in its budget request may be true, but Congress—that collection of our directly elected representatives—isn’t supposed to be a rubber stamp for every request for money that wanders by. It’s our money Congress is allocating, not Congress’ and not the VA’s.

It’s true enough that the VA could have—should have—gone to Congress and asked for a reallocation on recognition of the supply funding shortfall. That it seems not to have is an internal VA problem that supports my argument for disbanding the VA and using the budget to fund vouchers sent directly to our veterans.

There are other problems described at the Watchdog.org link above that are entirely within the VA’s ability to correct, but this one is not.

This Needs to get Moving

Posted on by
Reply

Fort McClellan, Anniston, AL, housed among other units the Army’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Corps. This Corps was responsible for the containment and disposal of chemical weapons, and it carried out this function, primarily, at Ft McClellan, a task it had done since before WWII. The base was closed 15 years ago due to failures in containment and leaching of the toxins into the soil and local water supply.

Monsanto also had been leaking toxins into the area’s water supply and soil from its own herbicide manufactory. Locals suffering from the effects of these contaminants successfully sued Monsanto in 2003, four years after McClellan’s closure, but for reasons that aren’t particularly important to this post Army personnel and their families who had been stationed at the base were blocked from joining the suit.

In January of last year, the Fort McClellan Health Act was introduced to fill the resulting gap in these veterans’ ability to get coverage and medical treatment for the effects of their own and their families’ exposure to the toxins handled at the base. It’s been languishing in committee (first in the House’s Committee on Veterans Affairs, then the Subcommittee on Health) since then.

This is an unacceptable bureaucratic delay (because I don’t think the Congressmen themselves don’t care about our veterans’ or families’ health), and it must stop. This bill needs to be promptly debated and brought to fruition, properly paid for, and moved along to House passage, following which the Senate needs to move it to a vote and the President sign it into law.

Write your Representatives and Senators. Call them. Email them. Social media. There’s been enough delay, not just for the last 21 months, but since this problem first came to light over a decade ago.

Continued VA Cover-Up

Posted on by
Reply

This time with the VA’s IG participating. It’s an unfortunate side effect of having an organization’s inspection/watchdog function be an internal one, even if it works for the organization’s boss and not for anyone further down the totem pole.

Crucial language that the Department of Veterans Affairs Inspector General could not “conclusively” prove that delays in care caused patient deaths at a Phoenix hospital was added to its final report after a draft version was sent to agency administrators for comment….

The single most compelling sentence in the inspector general’s 143-page final report on fraudulent scheduling practices at the Phoenix veterans’ hospital did not appear in the draft version, according to a staff analysis by the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

It was inserted into the final version, the only one that was released to the public, after agency officials had a chance to comment and recommend revisions.

It’s certainly legitimate for IG draft reports to be run by the group just inspected and about whom the report is being written, but that’s to give the inspectees an opportunity to check facts and to suggest corrections to factual errors. Giving the inspectees the ability to “correct” the conclusions themselves is entirely illegitimate.

A separate report, written by the inspectee, is a normal part of the proceeding. Here, the inspectee indicates its concurrence with IG conclusions and its plan of corrective action regarding those conclusions. It’s also in this separate inspectee response report that the inspectee indicates its disagreement with a conclusion and the reasons for that disagreement.

Then the IG responds, again in a separate report, indicating its acceptance of the inspectee’s disagreement or the IG’s overruling of the inspectee, with the original conclusion standing and the inspectee required to take corrective action. All three of these reports are part of the official record.

Notice that: the legitimate course is to disagree with an IG conclusion, in writing, in a separate report, not to rewrite the IG conclusion itself.

And the cover-up of the cover-up:

The House committee obtained the draft version of the report late Thursday, after the [Washington] Examiner published a story that IG had been refusing its release.

Again, I say, it’s time to disband the VA altogether and send the VA’s existing budget and what would have been its future budgets directly to our veterans as voucher checks with which they can be free to seek out their own doctors and their own medical facilities.