{"id":8793,"date":"2009-03-17T06:31:04","date_gmt":"2009-03-17T11:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=8793"},"modified":"2009-03-17T06:31:04","modified_gmt":"2009-03-17T11:31:04","slug":"buying-political-patronage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=8793","title":{"rendered":"Buying political patronage"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I’m still on this Obama-Shinseki thing. It pisses me off to no end, and here’s the main reason; If you go back to the Stars and Stripes<\/a> article I referenced last week, it touts the Administration’s plan to enroll a half-million Priority 8 veterans;<\/p>\n

The plan allows the VA health care system to enroll up to 550,000 new Priority Group 8 veterans by 2013. These are veterans who have no service-connected ailments and have incomes deemed adequate based on family size and geographic location. The total for new enrollees includes 266,000 Group 8 veterans already slated to enroll in VA health system starting this summer under a funding initiative Congress passed last fall.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, when those 10 veterans groups met with Obama and Emanuel yesterday and they protested his plan to force third-party payers on service connected disabled veterans, the response was “Find the money for us” or words to that effect. Well, there’s the money. They plan on saving $554 million by inflicting this third-party payer plan on veterans, and they also want to enroll 550 million veterans who don’t need VA care – if it costs more than a dollar to enroll each of those priority 8 veterans and they don’t do it, they saved the money they need. Right?<\/p>\n

Now, I’m no budget expert and I saw that right away. So, why does the Administration insist on doing the exactly wrong thing? Political patronage. They think that by giving VA care to people who don’t need it builds some loyalty among a half-million voters. Just like SCHIP gives health care to people who don’t need it buys political patronage in the civilian sector.<\/p>\n

The decision to go ahead with this stupid proposal is purely political. It’s not about what is good for the country or what’s good for veterans. It’s about what’s best for the Democrat Party. And where is the media on this today. The story has been out there for more than 12 hours and the only mention of it is in a tiny McClatchy newswire piece<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Shinseki should see that he’s being used, as a disabled veteran, to inflict this plan on veterans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m still on this Obama-Shinseki thing. It pisses me off to no end, and here’s the … Buying political patronage<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,47,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-liberals-suck","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8793","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=8793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}