“Let’s Not Be Misled”: In VA Scandal, Let’s Have Accountability For All — Including Congress
While Congress eagerly prepares its latest political stunt – a resolution to oust Gen. Eric Shinseki as Veterans Affairs Secretary – members might want to consider their own responsibility for the scandalous inadequacy of veterans’ health care. Unlike most of them, especially on the Republican side, Shinseki opposed the incompetent war plans of the Bush administration that left so many American service men and women grievously wounded. And unlike most of them, especially on the Republican side, Shinseki has done much to reduce the backlog of veterans seeking care, despite the congressional failure to provide sufficient funding.
Anyone paying attention knows by now that those secret waiting lists at VA facilities – which may have led to the premature deaths of scores of injured veterans – are a direct consequence of policy decisions made in the White House years before Barack Obama got there. The misguided invasion of Iraq, carried out with insufficient numbers of troops shielded by insufficient armor, led directly to thousands of new cases of traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other physical and mental illnesses requiring speedy treatment.
A substantial portion of the estimated three-trillion-dollar price of that war is represented by the cost of decent care for veterans. But even as that war raged on, the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress repeatedly refused to appropriate sufficient funding for VA health care. This financial stinginess toward vets was consistent with Bush’s refusal to take any steps to pay for his expensive war (and to protect his skewed tax cuts instead). As Alec McGillis explained in The New Republic, legislators who voted for war while opposing expansion of the VA are hypocrites, particularly when they claim to care about veterans. So are the Republican governors who claim to care about vets but refuse to expand Medicaid, which would provide coverage for more than 250,000 impoverished veterans.
Breaking down the voting record, year after year, the pattern along party lines is clear: Republicans regularly seek cuts in VA funding and oppose Democratic efforts to increase that funding – a pattern that extends back to the first years of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts and continues to this day. As recently as last February, Senate Republicans filibustered a Democratic bill that would have added $20 billion in VA funding over the next decade, which would have built at least 26 new VA health care facilities. The Republicans killed that bill because Democratic leaders refused to add an amendment on Iran sanctions – designed to scuttle the ongoing nuclear negotiations – and because they just don’t want to spend more money on vets. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who chairs the Veterans Affairs Committee, said the costs of the expansion bill would be covered by savings from the end of troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. But with cruel irony, according to The Washington Post, “Republicans indicated that they prefer to dedicate the savings toward deficit reduction” rather than improved services.
What those who have served should get is the kind of care that has made the VA among the most successful health systems in the world (for those who can access its services). Instead they will get political swaggering, as members of Congress seek to score points against President Obama by attacking Shinseki, and dogmatic opportunism, as right-wing ideologues insist the VA is just another big government program to cut or even abolish. The Republicans who are susceptible to such proposals should be very careful, lest they arouse the anger of the normally conservative American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, whose leaders react with anger and outrage to the idea of privatization. As American Legion commander Dan Dellinger said in congressional testimony last week, his organization overwhelmingly “finds that veterans are extremely satisfied with their health care team and medical providers.”
So let’s not be misled about the VA by Washington’s loudmouths and poseurs – the warmongers who never face up to the price of their enthusiasm in lives and treasure. When politicians demand accountability from their betters, including a war hero like Eric Shinseki, let’s remember that they should be held accountable, too.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, NationalMemo.com; Featured Post, The National Memo, May 23, 2014
“What The VA Scandal Is Not About”: Conservative’s Desire To Privatize All Health Care
While the media furor over revelations of potentially death-dealing delays in eligibility determinations and care scheduling at the Veterans Administration is leading to all sorts of promiscuous talk by conservatives about the inherent incompetence of government and/or the need to privatize all government health-related services (presumably including the provision of insurance by Medicare), let’s be clear what the scandal is not about, as noted by CBS’ Rebecca Kaplan:
There…doesn’t appear to be a major quality problem among the agency’s doctors and nurses either, even though it appears that not enough veterans can get through the door to see them. Veterans’ advocates who appeared before Congress last week agreed that once veterans get access to care within the VA system, it is high-quality care. The problem is getting access to that care in the first place.
The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the nation’s only cross-industry measure of customer satisfaction, ranks VA customer satisfaction among the best in the nation — equal to or better than ratings for private sector hospitals. When asked if they would use a VA medical center the next time they need inpatient or outpatient care, veterans in the 2013 ACSI survey overwhelmingly indicated that they would (96 and 95 percent, respectively).
Backlogs in eligibility determinations would exist whether veterans were being sent to VA hospitals for care, or to private hospitals with a voucher in their hands. And physician shortages and scheduling backlogs are hardly an unfamiliar phenomenon at private health care facilities.
Of course conservatives will try to use the issues at VA to undermine any and all public involvement in health care. But the only way to make absolutely sure veterans aren’t placed at risk by inefficient eligibility or scheduling systems is to deny them care altogether. Replacing public health care bureaucracies with private health care bureaucracies won’t fix the problems, and could make the care itself a lot worse and a lot more expensive.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 23, 2014
“Red Flags In His Closet”: Jindal Repudiates His Communist Past
The shamelessness of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is not a topic I have arbitrarily chosen to emphasize at this blog. It’s just that the man provides so many fresh outrages so often.
It’s old news by now that in the course of this year’s Louisiana legislative session, Jindal has flip-flopped entirely on the Common Core education initiative that he and his state once championed. But rather than quietly checking a box on the subject for his vetting by conservative activists once he formally launches his 2016 presidential campaign, Bobby’s now howling at the moon, per this report from the Times-Pic‘s Julia O’Donoghue:
After weeks of ratcheting up the anti-Common Core rhetoric, Gov. Bobby Jindal issued some of his most blistering remarks on the academic standards yet Wednesday night (May 21).
“We support higher standards and rigor in the classroom, but every day, concern among parents is growing over Common Core. The feds are taking over and rushing this. Let’s face it: centralized planning didn’t work in Russia, it’s not working with our health care system and it won’t work in education. Education is best left to local control,” said Jindal through a written statement.
Russia? Russia?
This is so over the top that even Louisiana Republicans who have long supported Jindal are protesting, like his staunch ally as head of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, Chas Roemer:
Common Core backers say Jindal’s remarks about the academic standards have become more about national politics than local education policy. The governor is expected to launch a 2016 presidential campaign and he has his eye on Iowa caucus goers more than Louisiana citizens, said Chas Roemer, president of state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
“This is presidential politics,” said Roemer, a Common Core supporter, about the governor’s statement. “This is the politics of our governor, who is running for president.”
Jindal was a Common Core backer as recently as a year ago. Louisiana became one of over 40 states to officially adopt Common Core back in 2010. The academic benchmarks were developed through a collaboration of governors and education officials from states across the country, including Jindal.
So if Common Core is indeed part of a commie plot, Jindal has some red flags in his own closet, along with an exorcism.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 23, 2014
“Dooming Itself”: Focused On The Present, The GOP Has No Future
The vast majority of Republicans have bought into the quick hit, short-term strategy and catered to the right wing. Maybe they believe that Republicans can do a quick pivot, plug in the smoke machine and gloss over the actions of the party after November.
But, right now, Republicans believe that deep-sixing immigration reform, decrying climate change, angering women by ignoring equal pay for equal work and keeping the tea party happy by fighting equal rights for gays and lesbians, will all be forgotten in the coming years. Instead, they believe that by focusing on high profile hearings on Benghazi and the IRS they can motivate their base, ride to victory in November and not pay the consequences down the road.
Their biggest ploy, of course, is the ideologically rigid opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Many Republicans believe that this law will actually work in the long run, be tweaked and improved, and widely accepted by Americans – not unlike Medicare, which was initially opposed, and then became one of the most important and popular reforms of the 20th century. It is my view that Republicans will rue the day when they termed ACA Obamacare. Can you imagine if the Republicans had called Medicare, Johnsoncare? What a boon for Lyndon Johnson that would have been! The difference, of course, was that by 1965 many Republicans had come to their senses and supported Medicare.
My basic point is that the short-term strategy of the Republican Party is going to harm them in the long run, particularly by 2016. They have succeeded over the last three elections at being perceived as anti-black, anti-Hispanic, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-young people. Not to mention anti-middle class. By allowing the extreme right to make their political tent smaller and smaller they risk being a serious minority party in future elections, especially in presidential years.
The simple demographics should allow reasonable Republicans to convince their party that this strategy is short-sighted and will come back to bite them. When President Clinton was elected in 1992, the electorate was 87 percent white, in 2012 the electorate was 72 percent white. States like Texas will be in play in the future unless Republicans change their tune. Young people, women, the LGBT community, as well as minorities, who have been voting overwhelmingly Democratic, will continue to do so because of Republicans’ positions on the issues and their seeming insensitivity to their concerns.
I hate to give advice to my Republican friends but their current strategy may sound good for a few months but you will pay the price big time down the road. The sooner you break with the Limbaughs and the Coulters the better off you will be.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, May 23, 2014
“The GOP Won’t Be Happy”: Preparing For The Great Republican Freak-Out Over Obama’s Environmental Regulations
On June 2, President Obama is expected to announce his new EPA rules on extant coal-fired power plants. As Jonathan Chait points out in an excellent background piece on the legal issues, this will be the centerpiece of his second-term agenda. How strong these rules are, and whether or not his administration manages to guide them successfully through the bureaucratic gauntlet, may well outstrip ObamaCare in historical importance.
In another good piece, Chait outlines why the political blowback from these rules is likely to be very bad:
Republicans are likely to have the better of the debate politically. Support for regulating carbon emissions may be broad, but it’s tissue-thin — Americans rank climate change near or at the bottom of their priorities. A 2011 survey found the amount an average American would pay in higher electricity costs for the sake of clean energy to be a pitiably low $162 a year. The absence of an extended, ObamaCare-style legislative slog will help Obama’s case, but years of lengthy court battles won’t. Opponents may manage to sustain state-level challenges and overwhelming red-state resistance. [New York]
It’s an all too convincing argument. However, I think the political forecast is not quite so dire as he makes out, for two reasons: El Niño, and the fact that the weakened coal industry is already teetering. Knowing Republicans, there is probably nothing that will forestall an enraged GOP backlash, but these two facts might take some of the wind out of their turbines.
First: El Niño. It’s a deeply complex and still not fully understood phenomenon (Brad Plumer has a nice explanation here), but the bumper sticker idea is that the surface of the tropical Pacific gets much warmer than usual. Scientists are now giving it about a 75 percent chance that El Niño will develop over the next few months. This matters for the politics, because it means it will get hot.
El Niño is strongly correlated with high surface temperatures — both 2010 and 1998, the first- and second-hottest years ever measured, respectively, were El Niño years. Last month tied for the hottest April of all time, and this summer could be even hotter. (And down the road, 2015 will almost certainly break the record for hottest year ever recorded, possibly by a lot.)
As Nate Cohn explains, extreme heat tends to shift belief in climate change, especially when combined with El Niño’s typical bouts of extreme weather. This is a bit silly, scientifically speaking (a cold winter doesn’t disprove global warming), but it does seem to have a robust political effect.
Second is the weak position of the coal industry. Though it has made a small comeback in the last year or so, its long-term decline is almost certainly unstoppable. For most of the Obama era, it has been hammered by cheap natural gas and regulations on heavy metals, resulting in dozens of plant closures.
Solar is now so cheap that it is becoming a legitimate threat. Almost one-third of all new electricity generation was solar last year. The carbon barons are fighting a desperate rearguard action to legislate solar out of the market, but if prices continue to fall (as they are predicted to do) these kinds of actions will be ever more unjustifiable. Increasingly, coal is simply an antiquated and crummy way to generate electricity.
Of course, these trends don’t guarantee that the EPA regulations will come out unscathed. But they will shift the political terrain. Just like it’s hard to argue in favor of deregulation during a financial crisis, it will be harder to argue against climate regulations during record-smashing heat waves. And while Republicans would dearly love to burn every single gram of coal on the planet, they’ll have a harder time time doing it if Big Coal is simply losing in the market.
By: Ryan Cooper, National Correspondent, The Week, May 22, 2014
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