{"id":61675,"date":"2015-09-02T10:01:10","date_gmt":"2015-09-02T14:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=61675"},"modified":"2015-09-02T10:02:07","modified_gmt":"2015-09-02T14:02:07","slug":"mcdonald-blames-congress-for-vas-failures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=61675","title":{"rendered":"McDonald blames Congress for VA&#8217;s failures"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Department of Veterans&#8217; Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald spoke to the American Legion convention yesterday and according to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.militarytimes.com\/story\/veterans\/2015\/09\/01\/mcdonald-carter-legion\/71528570\/\">Military Times<\/a>, he blamed Congress for the Department&#8217;s dysfunctional operations;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[McDonald] pushed back against the idea that VA\u2019s problems are beyond repair, and also refuted recent suggestions from politicians about dismantling the $160 billion-plus agency.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSome people in Washington are questioning the need for VA. Others have attempted to squeeze the needs of veterans within a \u2018sequester&#8217; budget that artificially constrains the budget,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAll of this \u2026  leads to the same place: A place where the needs of veterans are secondary to ideology, scoring political points, and shortsighted budget policies. A place where VA is set up to fail.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>No one is saying that the VA&#8217;s problems can&#8217;t be fixed. What we&#8217;re saying is that this administration won&#8217;t do what needs to be done to fix it. But, that thing that McDonald said about the needs of veterans are subjugated to politics applies more to him and the White House than Congress. For example the Vet Choice program which was designed to alleviate the crush of medical treatment for veterans on the VA system by farming it out to the private sector was defunded by this administration before it even had a chance to begin, and the White House tried to divert funds into other things.<\/p>\n<p>While I don&#8217;t believe that completely privatizing the VA is a good idea, Vet Choice was a good stop-gap measure when the VA wasn&#8217;t meeting the needs of veterans, and bureaucrats were taking shortcuts that cost vets their health and their lives in some cases. By the way, none of the bureaucrats suffered for those shortcuts &#8211; and therein lies the problem. The problem that McDonald won&#8217;t address publicly or privately. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Department of Veterans&#8217; Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald spoke to the American Legion convention yesterday and according &hellip; <a title=\"McDonald blames Congress for VA&#8217;s failures\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=61675\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">McDonald blames Congress for VA&#8217;s failures<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52627,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61675","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\/61675","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=61675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}