Posted on 11/15/2002 5:16:55 AM PST by advocate10
By Morgan Strong
A UPI Outside view commentary
From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk
Published 11/11/2002 1:40 PM
NEWARK, N.J., Nov. 11 (UPI) -- Every year on Nov. 11, we spend a little part of the day in remembrance of our veterans, before we head to the mall for the sales. We celebrate the sacrifices of those who died in one of our wars, and those who did their duty and came home. Maybe the veterans will put on their old uniforms, or maybe a hat from one of the veterans groups, and parade down Main Street behind the flag. The eleventh of November is their day, and it is their only day.
We are inching toward another war, and we are going to have more veterans, and we are going to have more wounded. The wounded are going to need care, maybe a lifetime of care. We give them the Veterans Administration.
Let us not forget the VA on this day, because a lot of veterans wounded or injured in the military end up dependent on them for their health care.
Nobody really knows much about the VA; it seems to go on in obscurity. There is never much attention paid to its workings, or is there ever much criticism of the VA. There is no great scrutiny because every politician in the country is loath to raise the ire of the veterans groups.
The veterans groups will rally to the defense of the VA because it is in their interest to. They will protect the VA when it is clearly in the interests of the veterans that the VA needs reform. In truth, the VA is a national scandal, but no one has the stomach to say so.
When our veterans come back from our next adventure they will be thrown into the terrible chaos of a hopelessly mismanaged federal agency.
The Department of Veterans' Affairs, with a budget this year of $50 billion is the second-largest Cabinet level department behind only the Department of Defense. It operates 171 medical centers, with 80,000 beds, 362 outpatient clinics, 128 nursing homes, and 35 domiciliary facilities. It employs nearly 300,000 people, including 7,000 who receive salaries of over $100,000 a year.
There are 5,000 well paid doctors who no longer practice medicine, but work as administrators. There are more than 400 lawyers.
A disabled veteran will wait, on average, three months for an appointment to see a general practitioner at a VA facility. [I have been waiting over a year!]If that doctor recommends a specialist, the veteran will wait an additional three months for that appointment. If surgery is required, the veteran may wait another three months.
On average, it takes 200 days for a veteran to obtain a preliminary ruling from the VA for a service-related injury claim. It may take up to two years for the final ruling.
The majority of veterans -- two thirds -- who use the VA healthcare facilities have incomes of less than $20,000 a year.
The American taxpayer, in the years 1983 through 1992, paid more than $200 million in damages for medical malpractice claims against VA medical personnel. The doctors who are responsible are immune from lawsuits under federal law.
The VA hospitals, there is a least one in each state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, are huge buildings with hundreds of beds. Most of the beds in these facilities are unused. They are building new VA medical centers in Palm Beach, Fla., Honolulu, Anchorage, Alaska, Fairfield, Calif. They do not need these facilities, but they build them any because the political structure does not want to offend the powerful veterans groups.
There have been attempts to close underutilized VA medical centers but the veterans groups resist, even though the closures would mean better service for veterans. Chicago has four VA medical centers, each hospital uses only one quarter of its available space. There was a plan proposed to close two of the hospitals and combine the services in the remaining two. The government would have saved a billion dollars a year.
The idea created panic within the veterans groups, who regarded the proposed closings as an intrusion on their turf. They staged rallies and marches and intimidated the politicians. The idea was dropped.
There are 28 million veterans in this country. Eight percent, or 2 million use the VA healthcare system. More than half of those were not wounded in combat, but qualify free medical because they have incomes that fall under the federal poverty level.
Many dedicated employees of the VA do wonderful work. But they are faced with an overwhelming burden of red tape. In fact, the very term "red tape" originated with the VA following the civil war.
There are miles of arcane regulations governing every step of VA medical care and what determines eligibility for care. Ninety-seven pages of Title 38, Part four of the code of Federal regulations. And there are thousands of internal VA rules and regulations making it extraordinarily difficult to run a health care system.
The problem is the veterans are given too much, which in the end is too little. The politicians automatically give the VA more money each fiscal year because they are afraid to raise questions as to how the money is spent, or even to examine the VA healthcare system to see if it works.
The veterans groups are more interested in maintaining control over the VA then they are in controlling the VA.
When Johnny comes marching home this next time he or she are going to be sent to the VA health care system to tend their wounds. They had better be prepared for a little let down. And somebody should tell the president that we know there is something he is not telling him or her, or us.
-0-
-- Morgan Strong is a former U.S. diplomat and adviser to the CBS news program "60 Minutes. A former Marine, Strong was wounded in Vietnam.
-- "Outside View" commentaries are written for UPI by outside writers who specialize in a variety of important global issues.Copyright © 2002 United Press International
Last time I checked, we were already at war ... resulting in more veterans ... and having more wounded. *&^%$ is going on in Afghanistan and elsewhere continuously. Please remember the men and women involved in ongoing operations ... as our press seems to think the war in Afghanistan is over. It's not ...
... and sorry to bust your bubble, Tommy (D), but we have kicked some serious Taliban butt.
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