Skip to the content
As many of our honored veterans languish on fake waiting lists or are denied needed medical care, one must ask if the VA is properly using its funding provided by taxpayer money. Just like any business, expenditures should be evaluated on a regular basis to ensure solvency of the company. Unfortunately, unlike private businesses, the government is not accountable for its taxpayer dollar spending and has little accountability. However, when our veterans are suffering as a result, I think that it should be of the utmost priority to ensure that every taxpayer dollar allocated to veterans go directly to their health and wellbeing.
Recently, I read an analysis by Free Bacon about frivolous VA spending which is both an affront to our veterans and all those legally paying taxes in the United States. On the government’s official spending website, it showed the VA spent $1.3 billion in the past five years for “support” and “professional services.” When you read further and find out what these services are, you will be dumbfounded by the wastefulness of these programs.
First, millions were spent on PR for the VA to make them look more positive in the public eye. For example, in a series of 10 transactions, the VA awarded Woodpile Studios $5 million on 9/29/10, $1.7 million on 7/15/10, $1.7 million on 7/14/11 and another $1.8 million on 6/27/12 for the message campaign; while another contract for $2.9 million was awarded in 2010 for “marketing and advertising” to another company. The commercials ran in major cities during 2011 ESPN College bowl games and the Country Music Awards. They were designed to “increase awareness and confidence among the U.S. veteran population of the value and extent of VA services available to them.” It urged “family members to send their warriors to the VA.”
Plus millions of millions of dollars were spend for bureaucratic peer reviews. For example, a $6.3 million contract awarded in 2011, another $5.9 million contract in 2013, and another $1.7million contract in 2013, all of which were awarded to Ascellon Corp. during the past five years to conduct surveys to ensure Compliance. And these examples were just the tip of the iceberg.
Plus, costly “peer reviewed” programs included such monetary tallies as one for $15.3 million, one for $11.7 million, another for $12.5million, and still another for $12.2 million. Other contracts awarded during the current administration under “office support/professional service” included millions spent on “energy program development.” Due to an executive order signed by Obama in October 2009, the VA is required to make its facilities more energy efficient and sustainable.
By 2020, the VA’s goal is to increase its renewable energy consumption to 20 percent; a total of 183 green energy projects were awarded for VA facilities across the country. One such contract was for a Washington D.C.-based VA facility for nearly $1 million.
When you look at these expenditures, it makes you sick to learn that a recent VA audit showed over 100,000 Veterans are experiencing long wait times over 3 months for their healthcare. Obama once boasted the VA a triumph for government-run healthcare and used it as a model for Obamacare. If this is what we should expect from Obamacare, our health system is doomed.
Many are calling for VA Secretary Eric Shinseki’s resignation due to recent, unflattering revelations about the care they are providing our veterans and their cover-ups. Though Pelosi blamed Bush for the incompetence, the problem is much more widespread– especially, when you carefully look at the numbers.
While only 7 percent of the veterans in the system are from current wars, the cost of these veterans is only 4 percent of the total VA budget. What Pelosi does not truthfully tell us is that the VA budget has increased under Obama from 97.7 billion to 153.8 billion dollars.
Where is this money going? It’s like throwing good money onto bad. Unfortunately, that’s how the government works. There is not the same accountability for financial decisions in governmental agencies as there is in the private business world. If there were, our government would be out of business in a day with everyone in Washington DC sent to jail for criminal charges. Plus, the solution Pelosi and the other progressives are calling for in greater funding to the VA.
However, where has greater funding got us thus far? Numbers, unlike Pelosi, don’t lie. Many call Eric Shinseki incompetent. Nevertheless, he has announced the most intelligent statement I’ve heard out of a government agency in years. To sum it up, he will let more veterans obtain healthcare at private hospitals. He said, “(we are) increasing the care we acquire in the community through non-VA care.”
In other words, he is taking the only intelligent option and letting more veterans receive healthcare from a proven, functioning, system—a system Obama is actively tearing down and turning into the new VA.
Don’t let our healthcare system turn into the VA. We have all now seen what government care gets us: long lines, inefficient care, rationing and death. Is that what America is all about?
As the Obama administration continued to be bogged dogged down in a disastrous foreign policy, mounting economic debt, an anemic economy, multiple scandals and complete disarray, the administration is left with only excuses and class warfare to hide their deplorable record. Now, with the indignities to our vets coming to light, they are without answers or solutions to another American crisis.
Instead of properly addressing the problem, Obama’s crony Nancy Pelosi, house minority leader, lashes out at former president Bush as the reason for the VA scandal. Yes, it does sound like a broken record. However, the lack of responsibility the Obama administration takes have reached new and unfathomable highs.
Pelosi cackled at a recent press conference, “He (Obama) sees the ramifications of some seeds that were sown a long time ago, when you have two wars over a long period of time and many, many more, millions more veterans. And so, I know that he is upset about it.”
The Democratic leader never mentioned Bush by name, but she alluded to him early and often in the press briefing.
“Maybe when we go into war, we should be thinking about its consequences and its ramifications,” Pelosi scandalously continued. “You would think that would be a given, but maybe it wasn’t. And so, we go in a war in Afghanistan, leave Afghanistan for Iraq with unfinished business in Afghanistan. Ten years later, we have all of these additional veterans. In the past five years, two million more veterans needing benefits from the VA. That’s a huge, huge increase.”
However the facts how that only 7% of the vets are from our modern wars, costing the VA only 4% of its total budget. So, where does Pelosi get her facts?
She suggested also delusionary stated that Obamacare is the key to solving the problem. “We have the Affordable Care Act that is out there that is providing resources for more federally-qualified health clinics around the country. Maybe we should take a look at how we deal with our veterans’ needs in a way that says let’s help them closer to home, whether that’s a federally qualified health clinic or in some other institution that provides health care closer to home. [It’s] especially important for our veterans who live in rural areas.”
The thought of using Obamacare to solve the VA problem is like throwing gasoline onto a fire. The sad thing is that she believes that more government is the solution to failing governmental programs. That’s like throwing good money onto bad. The outcome will be the same.
Plus, isn’t it Obama’s job, no duty, as president to combat and solve any current problem. It does not matter when the issue started, the issue now is that it has to be solved. That is what a real president does.
Our country is in desperate need of leadership. Can we endure a few more years of Obama’s incompetent governance?
Will the entire US healthcare system look like the current VA system in a few years? Unfortunately, the trend is going that way, and there is absolutely no indication that there is any signs of improvement.
The first, real question each American should ask is why would the US government try to institute a massive medical overhaul with Obamacare when its track record in healthcare delivery is deplorable? The VA system has always had problems, but now under the Obama administration the situation has turned critical.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is facing mounting evidence that some of the hospitals it runs have been keeping two sets of books to make it look as if they were reducing waiting times to see a doctor. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is facing mounting evidence that some of the hospitals it runs have been keeping two sets of books to make it look as if they were reducing waiting times to see a doctor. More damning, the department is investigating the claims of a whistleblower doctor in Arizona that dozens of patients at one hospital died while they were languishing on a hidden waiting list without ever being given an appointment.
Richard Griffin, the department’s acting inspector general, admitted on Thursday that its review could lead to criminal charges. In the first political casualty of the scandal, Robert Petzel, the department’s undersecretary for heath, resigned on Friday.
The budget for the VA has risen from $73.1bn in 2006 to $153.8bn this year. However, the number of outpatient visits at its facilities has increased from 46.5m in 2002 to 83.6m in 2012.
While there have been reports for several years that the new waiting line system was being abused, the subject really began to gather steam three weeks ago when CNN interviewed Sam Foote, who had recently retired as a doctor after working for 24 years for VA hospitals in Phoenix, Arizona.
He said that as many as 40 patients had died after being placed on a hidden waiting list that could last for up to a year, while officials at the hospital shredded documents and faked evidence to make it seem as if waiting times were under control.
Since then, whistleblowers have alleged similar practices at least seven other VA hospitals around the country and claimed that officials at the hospitals were sometimes paid bonuses for reducing declared waiting times.
This is what the US government delivers to the nation’s finest—long waits and insufficient care. Unfortunately, this is what awaits the rest of America under Obama.
