The history to the VA is kinda interesting. After WW I...there was this rushed-up political game of giving a pension deal to all those who served in WW I. The average deal was $500 to $1000, depending on the number of months that you were in the war, and if you were overseas. The amazing part of the story is that it was all rigged to pay off....around 1944 (twenty years after it was passed). No one discussed how they’d pay the sum of money, and frankly, they didn’t care (it’d be a problem for later generations of Republicans and Democrats to pay).
So, when the crash of 1929 came....the vets wanted to get their money ahead of the schedule. What Congress basically came to offer early on, was this VA deal...free health care. They figured they could achieve happiness with these guys with free medical care. Naturally, when 1932 came around with the election...the pay-off stirred up vets and become another mess to deal with.
The VA of the 1930s? Mostly a failure because the clinics/hospitals were few in number and mostly around urban areas. Senators and Congressmen used it as a gimmick by promising to bring a new hospital to some rural area for the VA....like a gift situation and you needed to honor them by voting again for them. It was always (Republican and Democratic era)...a tool used to simply funnel money from one pocket to another.
We’d all be better off to just give a voucher to each qualified vet to buy GS-type health insurance, and let them buy it to fit their local situation. The eighty billion they currently spend? It’d easily pay for it, and we could downsize the VA to forty guys...all sitting out in Oklahoma (nice cheap area to base them, in my humble opinion).
Thanks for the history lesson. Very interesting.
They ain’t no right, nowhere.