{"id":47830,"date":"2014-05-18T10:38:50","date_gmt":"2014-05-18T14:38:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=47830"},"modified":"2014-05-18T12:50:11","modified_gmt":"2014-05-18T16:50:11","slug":"comgress-moves-in-wrong-direction-to-correct-va-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=47830","title":{"rendered":"Congress moves in wrong direction to correct VA problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stars & Stripes says that “Obama and Congress move to address VA firestorm<\/a>” but it’s more like a bowel movement than meaningful reform (emphasis is mine);<\/p>\n

The top official for veterans’ health care resigned Friday, and House Republicans scheduled a vote for Wednesday on legislation that would give Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki greater authority to fire or demote senior executives and administrators<\/strong> at the agency and its 152 medical centers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, but what about removing Shinseki? When everything about the agency stinks, who removes the rotting head? <\/p>\n

The Veterans Affairs Department has failed at absolutely everything that it’s done from the days that it couldn’t pay college benefits in a timely manner under the new Post 9-11 GI Bill. The agency had more than a year to figure that out before folks started getting kicked out of college and defaulting on their rent and food bills. The only thing they could come up was excuses. <\/p>\n

That was a failure of leadership and that failure has continued for years, through the million-dollar conferences, the over-priced satire videos, the ridiculously large backlog of benefits claims and the more recent, but years-long healthcare issues. <\/p>\n

Now even Congress is making excuses for Shinseki’s incompetence. Veterans and tax payers are awaiting some sort of accountability, but it looks like we’ll get none. Even the overseers won’t admit that Shinseki is the problem.<\/p>\n

I even remember when Senator Murray asked for accountability from the VA in regards to the number of former POWs receiving benefits from the agency in stark contrast to the actual list at the the Department of Defense and the VA responded that they had only discovered two phony POWs, while we continue to find more every month. There are only a score of Desert Storm POWs, but the VA is paying benefits to hundreds and won’t admit to it. Who knows how many Vietnam and Korean War scams are being run against the agency? We even offered to do the work for the VA and they refused. I guess because they have such a stellar record of doing the stuff they should.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stars & Stripes says that “Obama and Congress move to address VA firestorm” but it’s more … Congress moves in wrong direction to correct VA problems<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41955,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-veterans-affairs-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47830","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}