At IVAWActions, members of IVAW outline their goals that they think Barack Obama should work on. I’ll admit that they appear pretty realistic, but, like most of the Left, they tend to inflate their numbers mostly to make the Bush Administration look bad and when Obama is in office, they’ll cite the actual numbers to prove Obama has improved veterans’ conditions. So this is my attempt to set the record straight.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Allow All Veterans Back into the VA<\/strong>
\nWhen troops serve, they are not divided by income class or priority groups. Yet today the VA is picking and choosing which veterans to serve. Barack Obama is committed to ending the unfair ban on healthcare enrollment of certain groups of veterans, including \u201cPriority 8\u201d veterans who often earn modest incomes. He has voted to end this unfair policy, which has resulted in the VA turning away nearly one million veterans since 2003. As president, one of Barack Obama\u2019s first acts will be signing an executive order reversing this ban.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nOK, who are these “modest income”veterans who should gain immediate access to VA benefits according to IVAW? Well, priority category 8 veterans are the lowest priority and the VA has stopped enrolling them in the system. They have no service-connected disability and they’re higher income veterans who can afford their own health insurance. They have a net worth of greater than $80,000.<\/p>\n
So I guess my question to the IVAW is; if you want to end backlogs and you want the VA fully-funded, why would you want to waste resources on admitting people into the system who don’t need it? Not every single veteran needs to be admitted to the system – if they wanted to be in the system, they’d have done 20 years. The attempt to get access for category 8 vets is just an attempt to drain the system of dollars that are needed for other more critical expenditures.<\/p>\n
In the next paragraph, the IVAW claims that there are over 800,000 claims backlogged at the VA – I just can’t find a number to support that. The closest I can find is a statistic from a year ago that admits to 400,000 backlogged claims at The Navy Times<\/a>. It’s still a lot and should be reduced, but inflating numbers isn’t the way to do it. As I quoted the other day, the VA had over 250,000 new claims last year and 89% of those have already been processed.<\/p>\n
Speaking of inflating numbers, IVAW claims that there over 200,000 homeless veterans on any given night. The VA admits to 154,000<\/a> – again 154,000 too many, but faking the numbers doesn’t help the IVAW message.<\/p>\n
Veterans issues are important, especially in the coming four years when Democrats traditionally scrutinize veterans benefits before they look at any other spending for the axe. Doubling the numbers doesn’t help veterans at all since we’re always held to a higher standard than the K Street lobbyists who scrambling to scoop up veterans’ money for their own useless benefit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"