{"id":20963,"date":"2010-10-25T19:44:20","date_gmt":"2010-10-25T23:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=20963"},"modified":"2010-10-25T19:44:20","modified_gmt":"2010-10-25T23:44:20","slug":"privatize-the-va","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=20963","title":{"rendered":"Privatize the VA?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cato.org\/pub_display.php?pub_id=12491\">CATO Institute<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>If you listen to Democratic campaign ads in Colorado, Nevada, or Delaware, among other places, you will discover yet another perfidious plot by evil Republicans \u2014 they want to &#8220;privatize the VA.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Which makes one respond, &#8220;This is a horrible thing because &#8230; why?&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I know that even the mention of privatizing certain functions of the VA causes heads to explode at VoteVets and IAVA, which means the idea must have some merit. Personally, I am open to the idea. Jonn, myself, and others frequently post horror stories about the VA healthcare system in addition to using VA benefits ourselves. Despite a 11 percent increase in demand as a result of the GWOT and 95 percent budget increase, wait times are actually getting longer, quality of care isn&#8217;t improving, and almost every veteran I know who is attending college has to battle with the GI Bill office over something every semester. At least trying a pilot program where certain health benefits are paid for using debit cards like the ones they use for Health Savings Account is worth a shot.<\/p>\n<p>For those of you who use VA benefits, what are your thoughts about this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the CATO Institute: If you listen to Democratic campaign ads in Colorado, Nevada, or Delaware, &hellip; <a title=\"Privatize the VA?\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=20963\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Privatize the VA?<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":607,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,122,118,143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iava","category-veterans-in-politics","category-veterans-issues","category-veterans-affairs-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}