{"id":60248,"date":"2015-06-06T10:00:36","date_gmt":"2015-06-06T14:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=60248"},"modified":"2015-06-06T08:43:34","modified_gmt":"2015-06-06T12:43:34","slug":"seth-moulton-goes-to-the-va","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=60248","title":{"rendered":"Seth Moulton goes to the VA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Congressman Seth Moulton<\/a>, a Democrat from Massachusetts, experienced first-hand treatment of veterans at the DC VA hospital when, a few days before he was to swear in to his new office, he got a hernia from lifting weights. According to the Boston Globe<\/a>, a congressional physician tried to steer the Congressman-elect away from the VA facility, for good reason.<\/p>\n

Moulton spent hours waiting and, of course, the staff that stood between him and the doctor that would treat him, couldn’t figure out if he was eligible for treatment or not.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll consider taking you as a humanitarian case,\u201d a hospital staffer told Moulton, unaware that the would-be hernia patient was also a newly elected Massachusetts congressman.<\/p>\n

Thus began Moulton\u2019s frustrating experience with the Veterans Affairs health system, a personal sampling of a chronically troubled medical bureaucracy that has drawn complaints from veterans, demands for improvements from Congress, and multiple investigations.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it wasn\u2019t so sad, it would have been comical,\u201d Moulton said in an interview as he recounted his VA odyssey.<\/p>\n

In addition to enduring missing records and computer glitches, Moulton said, he was prescribed the wrong medicine, which in his case did not imperil his health but is in the category of a medical error that can be extremely dangerous in some cases, even fatal. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Moulton, an Iraq war Marine veteran of some renown, comes away from the experience with the same sense that most of us have; the doctors at the VA are some of the best in the country, but the bureaucracy between the patients and the doctors is the worst in government. <\/p>\n

The VA refused to discuss Moulton\u2019s case, citing patient privacy laws, even after Moulton gave the administration written and verbal authorization to do so.<\/p>\n

Moulton\u2019s encounter with the VA health system led to his first legislative initiative \u2014 a package of bills designed to strengthen training and recruitment of VA health care professionals. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s a culture at the VA that needs to change and it won’t change with more training. It will only change when the bureaucrats who only have excuses why they can’t do their jobs instead of solutions to patients’ problems start finding themselves out on the streets.<\/p>\n

You should read the whole story at the Boston Globe<\/a> link, you’ll recognize your own experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Congressman Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, experienced first-hand treatment of veterans at the DC VA … Seth Moulton goes to the VA<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60248","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\/60248","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=60248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/60249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}