But this is not all his fault.
Democrats and Republicans in Congress...and previous Presidents...have been giving the short end of the stick to the VA for decades now.
There is PLENTY of blame to go around. Plenty.
Very true.
I have a dog in this fight as a Vet, and as an MD who occasionally has to pick up the pieces after the VA has rendered their “care.”
I’ve written elsewhere here about my opinion that the problems are two-fold - VA is a Federal Bureaucracy, and an entitlement - and that a voucher system for private-sector care is the obvious solution (educational and home loan benies are both voucher-like: you don’t have to go to a VA university, nor buy a VA home).
In researching a letter I am drafting to all concerned, I noted one interesting fact: Of all the senators and congress-critters on the Veterans’ Affairs committees, only one currently on each committee is a vet. The Congress is rife with vets, although not nearly as many as before, but none seem to want to serve on that committee. This is probably connected to the power and money games that dominate Washington, DC, as were well outlined in Peter Schweizer’s book, Extortion.
Quite frankly, no one in power cares a lick about the Vets (or anyone else) except as they can use them and their cause to personal advantage. That’s who these people are.
If they want to do the Vets a real favor, apologize for sending them into undeclared wars in the first place, wars that, since WWII, had nothing to do with national security, wars that we never meant to win anyway, wars that benefitted only politicians and industrialists and the CIA drug trade - and then they need to promise to never do it again, and stick by that promise.
It’ll never happen, of course. The people in power are incapable of it.