Raymond Settle Daily Journal Letter To Editor,Veterans Admin. Scandal 5-27-14:
"Monday was Memorial Day. We can only remember and appreciate those who have passed on but there is another group that we can show our appreciation for – living veterans. They especially need our support as we learn more about the Veterans Administration scandal."
"These veterans were promised medical care and they have earned it with their sacrifices for us. However, that has turned out to be a broken promise for many of them. Candidate Obama promised in August 2007, 'Caring for those who serve and for their families is a fundamental responsibility of the commander-in-chief. … It’s time for comprehensive reform. When I am President, building a 21st century VA to serve our veterans will be an equal priority to building a 21st century military to fight our wars.'”--Raymond Settle
"Six years later President Obama reported, 'And today I can report, we are not where we need to be, but we are making progress. After years when the backlog kept growing, finally the backlog is shrinking.'”--Obama
Raymond Settle: Now we know how that backlog was shrinking. Those who could not be seen within the required 14 days for new patients or 30 days for returning patients had their names moved from the main list to hidden lists to give the appearance the hospital was meeting the goals. Some of those veterans o n the hidden lists have been waiting over a year to see a doctor. Some names were removed from the lists without receiving care after a year. Even worse we know some veterans died waiting on the medical care they were entitled to. We provide much better care for the terrorists at Guantanamo Bay than we do for our veterans. The ratio of terrorists to healthcare providers is 1.5 – 1 with no waiting while the ratio for veterans hospitals is 35 – 1. This situation is beyond inexcusable, it is [criminal.]Raymond Settle, Emphasis ABratt's
I suggest the best tribute we can pay to our dead veterans is demand our promise be kept to our living veterans. No more excuses. It is a matter of honor for each of us. The veterans have done their part and it is our responsibility to fulfill our commitments to them.
Raymond Settle
Blue Mountain, MS
**********
Back in 2008, the eminent researchers -- one a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, the other a Nobel laureate in economics -- published a book called The Three Trillion Dollar War, where they argued that most Americans were drastically underestimating the cost of the Iraq War. They didn't specifically describe the events that have unfolded in recent weeks, but they did point out the enormous burden that would be placed on the VA system as veterans returned from Iraq -- a burden that we were not preparing for.
And that was before the surge in Afghanistan.
Upon taking the oath of office, Barack Obama tripled U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, sending over 60,000 troops into combat. Only now, five years later, have troop levels reverted to the level they were at when he took office. So you can add 60,000 troops for five years on top of the costs projected by Bilmes and Stiglitz -- projections that were verified and replicated by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, as well as Nobel laureate Lawrence Klein, the father of modern economic forecasting.
And yet, Congress refused to boost the VA budget.
For years, discretionary funding for the VA health care system had been growing at approximately 6 percent per year, slightly less than health care costs for the average American family, making it the most cost-efficient system in the country. Meanwhile, it ranked at the top of quality rankings, better than all its private competitors, year after year. It was the best medical care system in America.
That is, until the troops came home.
"Republicans beat back a Democratic attempt to provide almost $2 billion in additional health care funding for veterans," reported the Washington Post in 2005, "rejecting claims that Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals are in crisis."
The following year, Bilmes told ABC News, "In 2004, the VA had a backlog of 400,000 cases. Last year it was 500,000 cases. Now the backlog is 600,000 cases. That's just in two years. And the big wave of returning Iraqi veterans has not even hit yet."
And yet, the VA budget kept growing by 6 percent per year, as if the war didn't exist at all.
As if that wasn't a big enough problem... "Proposed cuts in Department of Veterans Affairs spending on major construction and non-recurring maintenance threaten to derail efforts to update the department's aging infrastructure," reported theWashington Post in 2012. And so, Democratic Senator Patty Murray led the charge to boost the VA's construction funding, only to have it beat down by Republicans.
Later that year, Paul Ryan, the Republican chair of the House Budget Committee, released the party's annual budget proposal. Had it become law, the VA would've sustained billions of dollars in budget cuts, forcing smaller facilities to shut down in rural areas.
So it wasn't surprising to Senator Murray when allegations surfaced of VA hospitals lying about the number of veterans on their waiting lists because they didn't want the world to know that they were unable to give their patients lifesaving treatments. "In an environment where everybody is told, 'Keep the cost down. Don't tell me anything costs more.' -- it creates a culture out there for people to cook the books,"she said in a recent interview.
Who would've ever thought, after years of relentless cost-cutting in the halls of Washington, that the federal government actually spends our money on important stuff? Who would've thought that wars cost money, and tax cuts cost money, and maintaining our infrastructure costs money? Not the Republicans, that's for sure. While the Bush administration plunged us into two wars and cut taxes on the rich, who were already taking a bigger piece of the pie than they had since the Roaring Twenties, Republicans in Congress were blocking every Democratic attempt to give the VA the funding they needed to give our veterans the medical care they were promised. And then, when the Obama administration tried to correct this funding crisis, Republicans responded by proposing deeper spending cuts.
Let this be a warning to every politician and every voter who thinks we can cut our way to prosperity: Those dollar figures represent real services that the government provides to real people. Every cut has a cost, and not just in money. In lives.
This op-ed was published in today's South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Follow Anthony W. Orlando on Twitter: www.twitter.com/AnthonyWOrlando
No comments:
Post a Comment