Veterans Secretary Eric Shinseki resigns

The General served honorably and courageously while in the military. Clearly he was out of his element as head of the VA, although I'm not sure any one person could have solved the many systemic problems that have plagued the VA for decades, and no one person will solve them now.
First thing needs to be done is a wholesale head chopping of the obviously guilty executives who put their bonuses ahead of veterans care. They also need to be prosecuted criminally. Secondly, we need to make sure the person in power will actually have some power to make decisions, hire and fire, without having to go through the idiotic bureaucracy of government. Finally and most importantly, we need to give veterans top shelf service when it comes to healthcare. That means if the line at the VA is too slow, or too long, they can then walk into any hospital in the land and receive immediate treatment. We're long past time to put up or shut up when it comes to how we treat our veterans. Veterans are a select group who have earned preferential treatment, or they're not. Which is it?
 
Guess Who Tried to Prevent the VA Crisis -- and Who Stood in Their Way!

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.

"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 the Washington 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.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-w-orlando/va-scandal-funding_b_5414685.html
 
Spike Trader said:
Guess Who Tried to Prevent the VA Crisis -- and Who Stood in Their Way!

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.

"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 the Washington 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.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-w-orlando/va-scandal-funding_b_5414685.html
More...

Dang it Spike you're only allowed to post negative facts and made up shit on democrats. Republicans represent Jesus and are holy to the ET flock.
 
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