Tag Archives: Veterans Affairs

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.”

The woman was a member of a VA- and Government-disfavored group of Americans, and so she was told to shut up and sit down.

Now the VA has gone openly racist and sexist, and that’s not only damaging to our nation, it’s despicably harming those who defend and have defended our nation.

The VA is long past reparability; it must be eliminated entirely and all personnel returned to the private sector, not merely reallocated to other government sectors.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

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.

The VA didn’t even take care of routine business—which likely would have led to locating the man sooner, even if maybe not in time to save his life. That lack even of the routine

prevented anyone at VA from encountering [the deceased veteran] during the month after he was reported missing through routine patrols or cleaning of the emergency exit stairwell in which his body was found.

The VA’s IG report can be read here.

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

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.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

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.

By tightening eligibility requirements and by requiring actual work, efforts toward being able to gain work, or doing forms of community service benefits those who actually need the benefits would be preserved.

The same situation exists for Medicaid: these State-run programs threaten the fiscal health of those States, and Federal transfers to those States, far from helping them, do nothing but reduce the States to dependencies of the Federal government.

One item in the proposed budget with which I disagree with Trump concerns the VA.

Winners in Mr Trump’s budget include the Department of Veterans Affairs, with a 13% increase next year….

This is a waste of money. The VA has repeatedly shown itself incapable of taking care of our veterans with any generality or reliability.  The VA needs to be completely disbanded and its budget (this year with that 13% increase) and putative future budgets converted to vouchers for our veterans so they can get the medical care and financial support they need at the time they need it from doctors, clinics, and hospitals that suit them.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

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:

The department will use the space previously dedicated to 6 members of congress for the provision of medical care services.

Which might actually be plausible, except for the timing of the move. And the fact that, were the office space actually needed, the facility could have declined to lease the space to Mast in the first place.

 

Next is this, even more egregious, item. It seems the VA has been refusing to reimburse veterans who go to an emergency medical facility that’s not a VA hospital.  Never mind the “emergency” part of that.  It took a judge’s order in a lawsuit to force the VA to pay the bills.  And this isn’t the first time on this specific matter.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been ordered to reimburse veterans for the cost of their emergency care at non-VA hospitals—something the agency has actively told veterans they are not entitled to, an appeals court ruled this week.
The VA has wrongfully been denying veterans’ claims while also misrepresenting a regulation that entitles them to reimbursement, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims said Monday.

The appellate court was not impressed with this deliberate misbehavior [emphasis added].

A previous regulation ended up excluding “nearly every type of expense a veteran could have incurred if he or she had insurance covering the non-emergency VA medical service at issue” from reimbursement, the court said, which violates a 2010 federal law.
“The Agency has effectively rolled back the clock and, with no transparency, essentially readopted a position we have authoritatively held inconsistent with Congress’s command,” the judges said, according to court documents. “Recognizing this is what has happened is—quite frankly—startling enough.
“It’s difficult to conceive how an agency could believe that adopting a regulation that mimics the result a federal court held to be unlawful is somehow appropriate when the statute at issue has not changed[.]”

That deliberate illegality ought to get some VA folks into jail.

 

And this, the worst of the lot.

…a Vietnam War veteran was reportedly found last week covered in ants and ant bites before he died at a Georgia VA nursing home.
Joel Marrable, who served in the Air Force, had more than 100 ant bites when his daughter visited him at the Eagle’s Nest Community Living Center in Decatur, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Laquna Moss said her father died shortly after being bitten in two incidents while battling cancer.

The VA still is actively killing through neglect our veterans.

The VA apologized, though. Like that makes everything all better.

Actions, not pretty words, and after all this time since the VA was first discovered falsifying appointment records and veterans were dying while on those fake appointment lists, nothing has changed.  Not a single item.

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.