58% of Afghanistan/Iraq vets, 25% or so of vets overall. ALthough what you’re referring to is eligibility, which takes a stroke of a pen, which costs 20 cents.
What I want to know is what they did with their big funding increases. How many more doctors are there today vs. before 2009? How many administrators?
Well, if there’s one thing I’m learning here, it’s empathy. LIke the President, I’m surrounded by fools.
No, that’s the number of people who’ve actually used VA healthcare, per John Stamos’ cite.
OK, turn your head to the right, and cough again…
House Republicans readied legislation that would send veterans who have waited for care for 30 days or more to private physicians, at the V.A.’s expense.
Sounds about as common sense as it gets.
Wow, this common sense stuff is pretty cool! Who told them about it?
It would be nice if you could find a cite more recent than 2007, first of all; i.e., one that has statistics that consider the fact that all veterans are now eligible to receive care through the VA, something that happened after President Obama took office. Prior to that, all vets were means-tested and some were shunted into groups that left them with no health care benefits at all, either privatized health insurance or at VA medical centers. What Obama said is that all vets can receive care regardless of income, although some who have relatively high incomes have to pay a co-pay for at least some of it; for example, although I don’t have a co-pay for visits, I do have to pay for prescriptions at eight bucks a pop. (This created a problem when my provider ordered a prescription for something I can get at the drugstore for half that price. But I digress.)
Frankly, your cited study is crap even if it wasn’t you citing it. Of course people with lower income were going to use the VA for all or some of their care; they got it for free or for very cheap, while people with higher incomes weren’t even eligible. And of course people with lower incomes are going to have less education; that’s pretty much a truism. So it was basically conducted by Professor N.S. Sherlock, Department of Duh, University of the Obvious.
And the truth of the matter is that I’d like to see the VA expand the CHAMPVA program to any eligible VA beneficiary who wants to enroll. There is no reason for me to see a VA provider for all of my care since I’m basically healthy, aside from some military-related behavioral health issues, and my family isn’t eligible for VA care at all, but they would be covered under CHAMPVA. (Airman had limited access because he’s a combat veteran, but Guard service isn’t considered active duty.)
The real problem here is that, as far as VA care goes, the solutions proposed are all-or-nothing: All through the VA or outright privatization when there should be options available; e.g., all care through the VA; a VA-funded traditional insurance program; or a mix of the two. That would really be common sense and free up access.
Large family?
Fun house mirrors.
Stolen! Mine! Everybody else, back off!
U of O, home of the Fighting Mascots[sup]TM[/sup].
These are not trivial matters. Health care is the signature legislative achievement of the administration, and a botched rollout made it smell bad at the start. Fixing the VA—and aiding veterans—is a cornerstone of the Obama presidency. And yet, it all looks as if somehow the bureaucracy has beaten the boss.
It’s a management issue. So far as I can tell, the governing style of this administration has two extremes: issues singled out for micromanagement (as in, foreign policy, from the West Wing) and issues completely delegated (as in, VA management). What seems to be missing is the in-between: the continual monitoring and early warning system that avoids presidential blindsiding. That’s the area in which most of the business of government actually gets done.
And it can get done. The apparatus to do the nation’s business in a competent way is there. Use it, and manage it. That’s what chief executives are hired to do.
Government is unwieldy and difficult and hard to tame, sure. But if your presidency is based, in large part, on telling Americans that government can work for them–which it can–you need to make it work.
Now we know where some of the extra money went:
Manhattan Institute scholar Diana Furchtgott-Roth recently detailed Office of Personnel Management numbers obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Rep. Phil Gingrey (R., Ga.). On May 25, Ms. Furchtgott-Roth reported on MarketWatch that the VA in 2012 paid 258 employees to be 100% “full-time,” receiving full pay and benefits to do only union work. Seventeen had six-figure salaries, up to $132,000. According to the Office of Personnel Management, the VA paid for 988,000 hours of “official” time in fiscal 2011, a 23% increase from 2010.
Moreover, as Sens. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) noted in a 2013 letter to Mr. Shinseki, the vast majority of these “official” timers were nurses, instrument technicians pharmacists, dental assistants and therapists, who were being paid to do union work even as the VA tried to fill hundreds of jobs and paid overtime to other staff
Excellent job demonstrating your ability to cut-and-paste. Solid cutting and decent pasting.
Just showing how the narrative is spreading and not limited to Obama haters. Plus its endlessly amusing all the different ways that columnists are finding to describe his incompetence.
From “outraged at his administration” to “defeated by his bureaucracy”, to “won’t tolerate what he’s been tolerating”, it’s the kind of diverse descriptiveness that is going to kill his Presidency through sheer derision from the mainstream media.
If you are looking for strict, non-partisan candor, look no further than the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. You could, I suppose, look to the Manhattan Institute for even more non-partisan candor. For those of you unfamiliar with the sterling work of said institute, you could start here, with a wiki…(natch)…
A brief overview of their policy proscriptions, as offered therein, reveals nothing if not a strictly non-partisan approach to America’s problems and clear, common sense observations. Such as those offered by such renowned scholars as the pre-eminient Charles Murray, who will be remembered by so many for his startlingly original work in The Bell Curve, who currently draws his paycheck from the renowned temple of non-partisan truth, the American Enterprise Institute.
But enough: lets get down to the hard tacks here. Unions. Unions are the problem. Not an administration that baldly lied us into disastrous wars. Not the utter lack of any real planning for the human results of those debacles. Not a Party that never saw a war it didn’t like, not a party that cannot wait to shovel blood and treasure into a disaster, and then suddenly gets fiscal religion when it comes to dealing with the consequences.
No, no, none of those distractions from the true cause of our grief: unions. Yes, of course, how can anyone doubt that?
And the money quote, the editorial equivalent of the “cum shot”, that classic staple of the porno film.
“… Odds are it will echo the unions’ call to simply throw more money at the problem. Any such bill should be viewed as Democrats once again putting the interests of their union allies ahead of veterans…”
Remember how the WSJ railed against the march to war, the lies and misinformation? Remember how they fulminated furiously against the Bushivik decisions to hide the costs and keep the entire ghastly enterprise “off the books”? 'Struth, neither do I, perhaps friend adaher can refresh our memories.
No matter. The Democrats are pimps, but I didn’t know until this day that it was the unions, all along.
“Diverse descriptiveness”… excellent use of sophisticated-sounding language to say absolutely nothing.
The 2016 election will give us the first indication of how the country will, in the long term, view the Obama Presidency. If the Democratic candidate wins, Obama’s legacy, long-term, will be equivalent to Reagan’s in his party (and possibly in the nation at large). The ACA will be permanent and will continue to increase in both popularity and in effectiveness (as it’s tweaked by a forced-into-reality Congress). If the Republican wins a close election, then it will be much closer to Bill Clinton’s, at least in the short term. If the Republican wins somehow in a landslide, then Obama will probably be seen as much closer to Jimmy Carter.
But your efforts to declare his Presidency a failure at this point (which you’ve been doing for years, now) are transparent and pathetic.
You really need to do something else besides pore through editorials to find phrases that you can cherry-pick that seem to put Obama in a bad light. It’s just sad… and further, it’s boring. Really, really boring. You’ve already given up on so many things – you’ve abandoned your silly lines of attack on the ACA, you fled from (and never really addressed) your pathetic failure on the 2012 election predictions, and eventually this VA thing will be gone too. Try something new.
Seems to me that the latter would be a whistling sound.