Memorial Day: For Vets, Too Many Delays and Not Enough Parades

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/michael-winship/56080/memorial-day-for-vets-too-many-delays-and-not-enough-parades

Memorial Day: For Vets, Too Many Delays and Not Enough Parades
by Michael Winship | May 25, 2014 - 8:33am

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All of these memories make this Memorial Day weekend even more poignant as news continues to break of abuses and preventable deaths in the veterans medical system — allegations that data was manipulated to cover up long waits for diagnosis and treatment. Just one recent example: delays for 52 patients at a VA hospital in Columbia, South Carolina, suffering from colon cancer.

President Obama says he will not stand for it. And to be fair, problems go back decades. “Looking for a lone villain in the VA debacle… is a fool’s errand,” write Jordain Carney and Stacy Kaper at National Journal. The “sheen of shame over the VA’s failures spreads across time and party affiliation. It stains the legacies of presidents as far back as John F. Kennedy and condemns past Congresses whose poor oversight allowed the problem to fester. The VA itself is also not without fault, as bureaucracy and intransigence let the department deteriorate to the point the problem became nearly impossible to fix.”

That’s putting it mildly. An enormous surge in claims, as Iraq and Afghanistan vets enter the system, has complicated the problem, as has expanded coverage under Obama for PTSD patients and Vietnam-era victims of Agent Orange. Once veterans get into the system properly, they highly rate the care they receive. The New York Times quotes Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation: “Overwhelmingly, the failures of the V.A. in recent years have not been about the quality of health care for those who get covered. Instead, they’ve mostly been about the excessive waiting times, and excessive red tape that vets must go through to establish eligibility.”

So let the hearings, inspections and investigations proceed. Fire those at fault, including Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki if culpable. Modernize and streamline an antiquated system to get rid of massive paper files that create all the confusion and that excessive red tape. Reach the stated goal of eliminating all the delays by the end of 2015.

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In spite of all the problems reported at the VA, the care we receive up heah in Boston is magnificent (this camper's opinion).

Here's a thumbsup for all of the women and men of the Veterans Administration who do their best on a daily basis: