“The Comforting Feeling Of Rolling Heads”: It May Make You Feel Better, But Will The Issue Be Solved?
Since the firing of Health and Human Services Director Katherine Sebelius you no longer hear as much about repealing the Affordable Care Act (although certain candidates, most recently Scott Brown, continue to bring it up). But when her head rolled a lot of people seemed to feel better. Now the call is for the head of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, after dozens of stories cited deaths allegedly related to delayed care for veterans at many of the nation’s 1700 veterans hospitals and treatment centers. If he is let go people may feel better. But will the issue be solved?
The so-called secret lists of veterans waiting for care is troubling, but if it is true then the system as a whole needs an overhaul. This has been apparent for some time and was previously highlighted by the conditions at Walter Reed Hospital and the delay in computerizing records. But these things most likely won’t follow merely by firing the secretary. And although Congress is calling for another investigation, at the same time recent budget proposals by the GOP reduce money for veterans, including cutting health benefits for veterans.
VA hospitals and clinics served 8.76 million veterans last year. In 2008, 37 percent of veterans sought treatment for PTSD and depression. But it is thought that at least half of all veterans suffer from these. Those who report PTSD usually also suffer from many other conditions, some of which do not manifest themselves until more than 5 years after service.
The VA is a huge bureaucracy which serves as the largest single health care system in the country. Along with men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, it still serves veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Today’s veterans survive injuries that would have quickly killed veterans of earlier wars, including burns, amputations and traumatic brain injuries. And in the past ten years the numbers of vets seeking care has increased exponentially due to our most recent wars, with almost half of those veterans seeking disability compensation for their injuries.
For some perspective: In 2010 the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services reported that bad care contributed to 180,000 deaths of patients in Medicare alone. As many as 440,000 people nationwide suffer from some sort of preventable harm which could have contributed to their death. And that is in our civilian hospitals. Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US.
Average wait time in hospital emergency rooms has risen. It can take two to four weeks to get an appointment with a specialist (In 2009 people waited an average of 20 days. In 2010 fifty percent of our population felt they could have avoided a trip to the ER if they had been able to get an appointment with their regular doctor People without insurance have received little or no care until recent changes with the implantation of the ACA. Before the passage of the ACA, as many as 45,000 uninsured died each year.
In many small towns, including Savannah, Georgia, waiting times to see a mental health specialist can be at least a month for a psychologist and three to six months for a psychiatrist. At the local VA clinic in Savannah, veterans wait no more than three weeks, and often less, for mental health care and walk-ins who are in crisis are treated immediately.
According to the Associated Press yesterday, a recent report indicated that the department’s internal watchdog found no evidence that delays have caused patient deaths. President Obama has appointed deputy White House chief of staff to review VA policies and procedures.
Further inquiries will be held and outrage will continue to mount until something concrete is done. This is not a new issue. But firing Shinseki is like providing palliative care for end-of-life patients: the patient will be more comfortable but he will still die. Any investigation into the VA has to result in major changes to the system as a whole which will not be possible if the problem is “solved” by yet another head rolling.
By: Lisa Solod, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 17, 2014
“Senate GOP Blocks Veterans’ Bill”: Shame On Republicans For Bringing Base Politics Into A Bill To Help Veterans
As a rule, legislation related to veterans’ benefits tends to garner bipartisan support, but as we were reminded this afternoon, there are exceptions.
Senate Republicans stopped Democrats from advancing a bill that would have expanded healthcare and education programs for veterans.
In a 56-41 vote Thursday, the motion to waive a budget point of order against the bill failed. Democrats didn’t have the 60 votes needed to overcome the Republican roadblock.
Only two of the Senate’s 45 Republicans – Sens. Dean Heller (Nev.) and Jerry Moran (Kan.) – voted with the Democratic majority. That was obviously not enough to end the GOP’s obstruction.
The bill, the Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits and Military Pay Restoration Act, was quite expansive. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a co-sponsor, posted an overview of the legislation, highlighting its expanded VA health care access, tuition assistance, and job training. These certainly sound like the sort of things GOP lawmakers could go for.
So why did Senate Republicans block it?
Some GOP senators said they were unsure of the pay-for provisions – helping veterans matters, but making sure the deficit isn’t slightly larger really matters – but perhaps the biggest complaint had to do with Iran.
Senate Republicans demanded a vote on their own alternative legislation, which included a provision to impose new sanctions on Iran, and which would imperil the delicate international nuclear talks that are still ongoing.
GOP senators want a vote on the sanctions, regardless of the consequences; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) won’t go along; so the Republican minority blocked the bill on veterans’ benefits.
“I hope all the veterans groups have witnessed all the contortions the Republicans have done to defeat this bill,” Reid said this afternoon. “Shame on Republicans for bringing base politics into a bill to help veterans.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 27, 2014
“Pitting The Poor Against The Other Poor”: America Should Treat All Poor People As Well As It Treats Poor Veterans
The message about American soldiers is almost always the same across partisan lines: They are hard-working, courageous, brave heroes, the essence of upstanding, wholesome, and industrious citizenry.
This picture may well be true. But there’s a troubling underbelly to this ideal: Our culture’s respect and admiration for the troops is matched in extremity by its disrespect for the poor.
The poor in this country are often described in polar opposite terms of those employed to exalt soldiers. The poor are takers, morally degenerate, lazy, and so welfare-addicted that they can’t even have life dreams and projects. In our depictions of soldiers and veterans, we construct paragons of virtue. In our depictions of the poor and downtrodden, we construct paragons of vice.
However, lurking behind this contrast is an uncomfortable reality: The two groups substantially overlap.
In 2011, nearly 1 in 7 of our country’s homeless were veterans, nearly 1 in 3 veterans between the ages 18 and 24 were unemployed, and veterans lived in 1 in 5 households poor enough to qualify for low-income heating assistance. Last year, nearly 1 million veterans were on food stamps, and many more doubtlessly received low-income transfer payments like the Earned Income Tax Credit, the kinds of transfers being pilloried by those who decry the “47 percent.”
The poor are often veterans, and veterans are often poor.
This fact occasionally puts conservative lawmakers and commentators who heap disdain on the poor in very tough spots. After all, how do you level rhetorical attacks on the poor and the programs that serve them without also attacking the poor veterans whom we lionize in their capacity as former soldiers?
One way conservatives deal with this tension is to just flatly exclude veterans from their welfare bashing. So for instance, when Senate Republicans sought an accounting of all of the means-tested benefits paid out by the federal government each year, they directed the Congressional Research Service to specifically exclude means-tested welfare programs for veterans. After all, if you are going to construct a list of programs that you intend to trash as wasteful, you can’t have it include means-tested veterans’ health care and means-tested veterans’ pensions. That would be far too disrespectful and intolerably dissonant with pro-troop messaging.
On the liberal side of the aisle, the existence of poor and economically suffering veterans presents a huge rhetorical opportunity, but one that the left constantly manages to bungle. Right now, big name Democrats talk about poor veterans in ways that tend to preserve the notion that they are particularly special. So for instance, when Cory Booker discussed the impact of cutting unemployment insurance on veterans, he emphasized that this was a special crime because “these men and women who fought for our country … are not lazy.” Instead of using this opportunity to defend the poor at large, we get special pleading based on the notion that poor and struggling veterans are somehow different from and more virtuous than the other program beneficiaries.
The more sensible move here, both on the merits and politically, is not to sequester poor veterans off into their own special category of poor people. Such hiving off only reinforces the toxic and illegitimate distinction we make between the deserving and undeserving poor. Instead of separating veterans out, they should be depicted as being very much like most people who find themselves in economic trouble.
The reason why veterans — people who in prior years proved themselves capable of adhering to extreme discipline and undertaking grueling amounts of difficult labor — wind up poor or unemployed is because poverty and unemployment are mainstream conditions that affect huge swaths of our population, not just some mythical class of degenerate scum. Four out of five Americans spend at least one year of their adult life in or near poverty, jobless, or reliant on welfare. Over half of American adults spend at least one year of their life in poverty and nearly 1 in 7 Americans report having been homeless at some point in their life.
As the the President’s Commission on Income Maintenance Programs pointed out in 1969, “our economic and social structure virtually guarantees poverty for millions of Americans. Unemployment and underemployment are basic facts of American life.”
It’s time to reform mainstream understanding of the poor. Ask yourself: If the exemplars of greatness in our society can fall into poverty and unemployment, then who else might be in those ranks alongside them?
By: Matt Bruenig, The Week, February 6, 2014
“The Vets We Reject And Ignore”: Leave No Fallen Comrade Behind Applies At Home And To All Veterans, Regardless Of “Bad Paper”
Today, we honor the nation’s 22 million veterans, including more than 2.5 million who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and other fronts in the war against Al Qaeda. But we are turning our backs on hundreds of thousands of veterans who were discharged “under conditions other than honorable” and so do not qualify as veterans under federal law.
Their discharges, which include overly broad categories encompassing everything from administrative discharges for minor misconduct to dishonorable discharges following a court-martial, nevertheless make them ineligible for the health care, employment, housing and education benefits offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Because of the “bad paper” they carry in the form of their discharge certificates, many of these veterans struggle upon leaving the military. And when they falter, the burden for supporting them falls heavily on their local communities because federal agencies cannot, by law, help them.
No federal agency publishes the numbers of bad paper discharges. But historical studies suggest that at least several hundred thousand veterans fall into this category. Approximately 260,000 of the 8.7 million Vietnam-era veterans were pushed out of the service with bad paper. More recently, according to documents separately obtained by the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Army discharged 76,165 soldiers between 2006 and 2012 with bad paper. Of these recent Army discharges, only one in seven were kicked out following a criminal conviction for a serious offense. The rest were discharged for smaller breaches of military discipline like missing duty or abusing alcohol or drugs. For many of them, their misconduct was likely related to the stresses of war.
Instead of showing compassion for these troops who were carrying the invisible wounds of war, their commanders kicked them out. These troops’ getting pushed out under such circumstances would be enough of a blow, but these commanders compounded the injury by giving them bad paper, instead of merely administratively separating them from the service.
While assessing the needs of veterans in the Western United States, my research team met with community leaders and nonprofit agency staff members in seven cities with the largest populations of veterans, and interviewed others in outlying cities and rural areas as well. Across these communities, veterans with bad paper were believed to be significantly overrepresented in the at-risk veterans populations. All too frequently these veterans become part of the nation’s chronically homeless or incarcerated populations.
When they end up in distress or on the streets, their communities must bear this burden alone.
We have a moral obligation to those who serve, especially those who serve us in combat. At times, the military must discharge those who can’t perform or conform. However, commanders should exercise far greater discretion and compassion in trimming the ranks. Bad discharges indelibly mark veterans as damaged goods and cost society a great deal too.
Congress should also allow the V.A. to more broadly provide mental health care, homelessness support and other forms of crisis intervention to veterans with bad paper. The V.A. has case-by-case authority to do so now, but that does not help veterans with bad paper who have acute needs. A more compassionate policy would not diminish the military’s ability to maintain discipline, nor would it cheapen the valor of those who have served honorably.
The military has a process to fix bad paper, but that process takes too much time, and veterans often need legal help to prevail in an incredibly bureaucratic and difficult process.
The story of John Shepherd Jr., who earned a Bronze Star for valor in Vietnam but was kicked out after disobeying an order to return to combat after developing severe post-traumatic stress disorder, shows how difficult these cases can be. Mr. Shepherd went without V.A. support for 40 years until a team of students and lawyers at Yale Law School helped him correct his record this month.
Excellent programs exist to help veterans in such cases, but they deserve more resources. Small investments in pro bono legal services can help unlock a lifetime of access to the V.A. and help the neediest veterans with bad paper move on with their lives.
Finally, the veterans community should do more to lift up those veterans who have been discharged with bad paper, particularly in those cases where combat experience lies at the heart of the bad discharge. The American military ethos calls on all of us to leave no fallen comrade behind. That applies at home, too, and to all veterans, regardless of whether they carry bad paper.
By: Phillip Carter, Op-Ed Contributor, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, November 10, 2013
“Thank You For Your Service, Or Not”: Republicans Thank Veterans By Cutting Food Stamps
The next time I hear a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives thank a veteran for his or her service, I’ll hurl.
Veterans Day is on Monday. This year the holiday will come 10 days after cuts in federal food aid demanded by House Republicans go into effect. The cuts mean that 47 million hungry Americans, including almost 1 million veterans, will be even hungrier and more malnourished than they were last Veterans Day.
Mother’s Day won’t be much better because 80 percent, or 37 million, of the food aid recipients are women and children. And for the record, 10 percent or almost 5 million of the recipients are senior citizens.
I hope the House Republican budget guru, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is proud of his handiwork because it’s a callous way of thanking vets for their service. Before the cuts, the average veteran received a little more than $4 a day for food from the feds. Now vets will have to get by on even less. Don’t try this at home, because if you try to eat on $4 a day, you will be malnourished pretty quickly. The GOP went to the mat to get these cuts and now they want even more.
The Republican hostility towards vets is just the latest episode in the sad saga of vets under the GOP. George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney both avoided serving in Vietnam when they were of draft age in the 1960’s. But that didn’t stop the deadly duo from sending more than 4,000 brave young Americans to their deaths in Iraq based on a lie about the existence of weapons of mass destruction there.
If wounded soldiers were lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive, things didn’t get much better back home. During the Bush/Cheney administration, hospitals administered by the Veterans Administration were poorly staffed and inadequately equipped. The corridors of the “crown jewel” of the military hospital system, Walter Reed Hospital, were plagued with garbage and rats.
The tea party caucus in Congress forced $5 million a year in cuts for food aid. Why? Because the GOP shot down President Obama’s proposal to eliminate $6 billion in federal tax freebies to oil companies and firms that own corporate jets. While millionaires, billionaires and oil company executives fly the friendly federal skies, almost 1 million veterans are still in the desert, fighting hard. This time they struggle in a fight for food in the land of plenty.
Thank you for your service!
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, November 8, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 