Austerity Threatens Veterans, Too

VCS in the News: Austerity Threatens Veterans, Too
Carl Osgood


Executive Intelligence Review

Feb 28, 2008

Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, added that there is a surge of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, "and not only are they being denied medical care but their requests for help are being delayed unnecessarily." There are cases of veterans committing suicide, turning up homeless, turning to drug and alcohol abuse (euphemistically called "self-medicating") as a result of the long delays, "and the Department of Veterans Affairs is doing little or nothing, and in some cases, violating the law." Sullivan said that the only option left to address this situation was to file a lawsuit.

February 29, 2008 - When the austerity mongers among Republicans and the "post-partisan Bloomberg crowd talk about "entitlement reform," they usually mean slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits. Hardly anybody talks about veterans' benefits in the same vein, saying openly that they must come under the budget axe as well.

However, veterans have been under attack, in fact, just as much as the elderly, the sick, and the poor have been. In its first budget submission after winning re-election in 2004, the Bush Administration proposed that those in the Veterans Administration (VA) health-care system should pay higher enrollment fees and prescription drug co-pays than they were already being charged, a move the Department of Veterans Affairs calculated would result in 213,000 fewer veterans in the system than otherwise would be the case.

At about the same time, Undersecretary of Defense David Chu was quoted by the Wall Street Journal complaining that veterans' benefits had grown so much, that "they are taking away from the nation's ability to defend itself."
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http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/ArticleID/9438