{"id":49882,"date":"2014-06-06T09:00:44","date_gmt":"2014-06-06T13:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=49882"},"modified":"2014-06-05T17:20:21","modified_gmt":"2014-06-05T21:20:21","slug":"senate-announces-new-va-bill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=49882","title":{"rendered":"Senate announces new VA bill"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtontimes.com\/news\/2014\/jun\/5\/senators-bipartisan-vets-bill-reduce-wait-times\/\">The Washington Times<\/a> reports that a bill with bipartisan support is being presented in Senate by Bernie Sanders and John McCain.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The bill would allow veterans more than 40 miles from a VA facility, or who experienced a long wait for an appointment, to see a doctor of their choosing, which was a key component of the Republican plan.<\/p>\n<p>The bipartisan plan also would give the next VA secretary more power to fire incompetent senior officials. The secretary would have the ability take an employee off the payroll immediately, but the employee would have a week to appeal the decision if he or she feels it was made unfairly. Mr. Sanders said this gives employees due process and prevents firings for political or other inappropriate reasons like race, age or gender.<\/p>\n<p>The organization would then have three weeks to make an expedited decision on the appeal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The bill also adds 500 million bucks for more doctors and nurses at 26 locations. I&#8217;m waiting for the other shoe to drop, because it sounds too good.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Sen. Chuck Schumer, New York Democrat, took the floor following the announcement and warned senators not to selfishly blow up the deal with extraneous, unrelated amendments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>See, what I mean? It sounds too good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Washington Times reports that a bill with bipartisan support is being presented in Senate by &hellip; <a title=\"Senate announces new VA bill\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=49882\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Senate announces new VA bill<\/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-49882","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\/49882","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=49882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49882\/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=49882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}