This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Veteran Health Care

  • One veteran’s battle with the VA

    Fox News tells the story of a wounded veteran who lost his leg in an IED attack and now does his battle with the VA;

    Iraq War veteran Joel Klobnak is waiting. It’s how he spends his time these days after the Department of Veterans Affairs slashed his disability pay two years ago, the Des Moines Register reports.

    Klobnak, 24, a former Marine who lost his leg in Iraq in 2006, says the cut in disability pay is a misunderstanding, but he still feels forgotten.

    He’s trying to support a family of four on $1,557 per month while he waits to hear whether the government will reinstate full disability pay for his injury and the mental anguish that accompanied it, according to the paper.

    His appeal is trapped in a paperwork backlog that is delaying payments to injured veterans across the country.

    The story goes that he his payments were slashed when he missed an appointment with a VA doctor that he wasn’t aware of, then he got a hearing with an administrative law judge who told him she’d make a decision about his benefits in three months…more than a year ago.

    But we can all take comfort in the fact that people like Tammy Duckworth still get their checks and take time off from their duties at the VA to use their own VA benefits. Did Duckworth have anything to do with Klobnak’s claim…no, probably not, but she didn’t help either.

    Shinseki and his band of leftist nitwits went to head the VA because he is a disabled veteran and was supposed to bring personal perspective to the job…so why is the VA still on it’s bloated ass, doing nothing for veterans except kicking the can down the road while they’re tearing apart real lives and real veterans?

    And who are the first to pay for the national debt out of our COLA and medical benefits?

  • Duckworth resigns. Meh, so what?

    The Chicago Sun-Times reports that double amputee veteran Tammy Duckworth has resigned;

    Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki told the Chicago Sun-Times in a statement, “Assistant Secretary Duckworth has submitted her resignation. She has served the Department of Veterans Affairs with distinction. Her unwavering dedication to Veterans and their families has strengthened VA’s ability to perform our mission–providing Veterans the healthcare and benefits they have earned.

    “Tammy Duckworth uniquely understands the needs of today’s Veterans and their families, and her commitment to serving Veterans and increasing VA’s outreach has helped the department serve more Veterans and serve them well. We will miss her advocacy and leadership, but wish her the very best in the years to come.”

    What a load of horseshit. Duckworth’s time at the Department of Veterans Affairs has been about Duckworth, not about veterans. Remember when she defended death panels for veterans? Remember when she “bravely” went back to school during the time she was supposed to be fixing the new GI Bill? Remember when she deflected blame for her own incompetence on veterans healthcare?

    The DVA can only improve with her absence – but that boob Shinseki will screw that up, too.

    The Sun Times speculates that Duckworth will run for Congress in Illinois and that sounds about right. She realizes that she’s a failure at the VA, so she’ll go to Congress where she doesn’t have to be accountable to taxpayers.

    I hope there’s a veteran in Illinois who’ll challenge the brainless twit. I can think of one…hint, hint.

  • 284 sexual assaults at VA facilities in three years

    USAToday reports that there were 284 sexual assaults in Department of Veterans’ Affairs facilities during a three year period which ended last July. Both men and women were victims and the perpetrators were both patients and employees of the DVA.

    Investigators blamed the assaults on a host of problems, including haphazard security measures, too few VA police and no program for assessing potentially dangerous patients. There was also a failure to report crimes to higher leadership for corrective systemwide action and to the VA inspector general.

    Yeah, well, if they can’t ferret out potentially dangerous employees, how can they be expected to find equally dangerous patients?

    The VA is reviewing the study and taking corrective steps, said Josh Taylor, VA press secretary. An operations center established in 2009 has improved the tracking of crime, he said.

    “We are taking steps to expand and improve our reporting of allegations and to provide more secure facilities,” Taylor said. “We take all allegations seriously and investigate them thoroughly.”

    Somehow, i just don’t trust VA’s new programs after watching them screw the pooch on the New GI Bill and dick up the support for family members to treat their long term wounded at home.

    Knowing Shinseki like I do, he probably put a known sex-offender in charge of the program.

  • Doing The Right Thing

    Via The Sniper:

    VA trauma center treats most grievously wounded troops

    The centers have become a key element in caring for the wounded as the war in Afghanistan enters its second decade and the injured from Iraq continue to need care. They are the result of important medical insights gleaned from the long wars in the Middle East — that modern battlefield injuries, particularly those from bomb blasts, require a team approach from physicians and therapists.

    Sometimes The System works, this appears to be one of those times.

  • Mullen tosses servicemembers under the bus

    Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen just tossed us all under the bus. In a link from Adirondack Patriot, Mullens warned that “everything is on the table” including pay and health benefits for active duty and retired servicemembers;

    Mullen went further, saying savings should be found in pay and benefits costs before cuts to programs and personnel.

    “We need to avoid just making the relatively easy decision [to] just cash in force structure,” Mullen said. “We have to go through everything else — and ‘force structure’ are platforms and people — before we get to that point, because that’s why we’re here.”

    The military has been tasked with finding a $half-trillion in savings over the next 12 years – not like the EPA or the Commerce Department or Health and Human Services…or any other federal agency which have only cut back minimally on increases in spending. Certainly not in cutting back on their current or retired employees’ benefits.

    I always thought I could count on the military leadership to stand up for the troops they command. I guess that’s not an option in this climate – Mullen seems almost eager to toss us all aside to please his political masters.

    Are there reasonable cuts that can be made? Sure. My favorite example is the pharmacy at Walter Reed. A year ago, you walked up to a machine and took a number to get in line for service.

    Now they employ a series of three women that you have to stand in line to see and the last woman tears your ticket from that machine for you. Do they ask you questions about your prescriptions? Nope. You show them your ID and they tap away at a computer – they each have one, and you have to show each of them your ID and they each tap at their computer.

    I figure each computer costs about $3000 and they probably pay each of those women more than $30k/year to do what we used to do without them. How many jobs are there like those in the military? That’s where I’d start if I was at all serious about saving money.

  • As useless as a shrimp on a treadmill

    Senator Tommy Colburn, the guy who brought to light the baby-man on Social Security, sets his sights on the National Science Foundation, who is involved in such important research as jello-wrestling at the South Pole, checking the recovery rates of sick shrimp when they work out on a treadmill (how does that even work?). From The Washington Times;

    At a time when the federal government is struggling with record deficits and bumping up against its borrowing limit, Mr. Coburn said the agency is a prime example of the kinds of spending taxpayers should no longer tolerate.

    “There is little, if any, obvious scientific benefit to some NSF projects, such as a YouTube rap video, a review of event ticket prices on stubhub.com, a ‘robot hoedown and rodeo,’ or a virtual recreation of the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair,” Mr. Coburn said in a letter to taxpayers he wrote introducing the 73-page report, documented by more than 350 footnotes.

    What’s worse is that NSF isn’t even apologetic about the abuse of their funding;

    said Dana Topousis, the spokeswoman. “We believe that no other funding agency in the world comes close to NSF for giving taxpayers the best return on their investment.”

    Yes, shrimp on a treadmill are absolutely essential to the rest of my life – and it creates jobs and lowers the cost of gasoline to consumers.

    So this is to all of you who keep telling me that veterans have to sacrifice along with everyone else and take our loss of COLA increases and hikes in health care costs for the good of the economy. While this shit is going on? Is “baby man” going to get his SSI payments cut? Is NSF going to take a cut in their ridiculous “studies” of shit that doesn’t matter?

    Bite me.

  • Your “free health care” will get more expensive

    Well, those douche bags in Congress fell for the Obama Administration’s plan to raise TriCare fees on retired veterans who were promised free health care for life when they enlisted and reenlisted. By the way, they called it “sensible rate hikes” so because you expect the military to keep the promises they made, you’re senseless;

    The committee voted early Thursday to allow the first bump in TRICARE Prime enrollment fees in more than 15 years. Retirees not yet eligible for Medicare would see a $30-a-year fee increase, to $260, for individual coverage and a $60 hike, to $520, for family coverage.

    The committee’s bill also would allow these fees for retirees to be adjusted each year to keep pace with inflation. But while the Department of Defense wanted the fees indexed to medical inflation nationwide, the committee language would cap any increase to the percentage rise in retired pay made through by the annual COLA or cost-of-living adjustment.

    Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.), the new committee chairman, called it a “sensible” approach to TRICARE fees. The committee’s final version of the defense authorization bill for fiscal 2012 also would allow co-pays to rise, by $2 or $3, on prescriptions filled in the TRICARE network of retail pharmacies, a move to encourage greater use of TRICARE mail order.

    Yeah, go ahead and argue that it’s a pittance…but, tell me what part of “promise of free health care for life” you don’t understand and I’ll try to draw you a crayon picture that you’ll understand. I fulfilled my promise to the country and I can’t get that back.

    Let’s wait and see what everyone else is giving up to balance the budget.

  • Do you have a “moral injury”?

    Stars & Stripes and Military.com report that the new buzz word in the mental health vocabulary is “moral injury” to describe combat stress;

    In the mental health community, moral injury is defined as stress arising from witnessing, perpetrating or failing to stop actions that violate a person’s deeply held belief system. In combat, this could be the killing of a woman or child, the inability to save a fellow Marine, or the failure of leadership to live up to a moral code.

    For the struggles that Marines have with combat stress from actions in war, the Corps likes the term “inner conflict.” Brett Litz, who is with the National Center for PTSD and presented at the conference, says he prefers “moral injury” over “inner conflict” because it is evocative and specific.

    Marines don’t like the term because it makes them appear immoral. I have to agree. In the world of mental health professionals who usually twist themselves into knots to keep from making moral judgments on certain classes of people and illnesses, this one seems rather poorly considered. Of course, they’d like to make it a moral judgment on the people who kill for a living, people who mental health professionals consider inferior in the first place.

    I absolutely dare the mental health professional community to say serial killers or sexual predators suffer from “moral injuries”. It’ll never happen because those people need to be sheltered from moral judgements, whereas soldiers and Marines don’t in their tiny, obtuse world.

    Thanks to Mew for the link.