What the hell did talking heads do about the VA all these years?

Give me a break and veterans too! No one is telling the truth or blaming who needs to be blamed for what has been happening to veterans for decades! This is all political bullshit. Take a look over the last few days on Wounded Times to read what reporters have been uncovering for years. When you hear people talk about how bad it is now, there is a reason for it. Obama has had since 2009 to fix this and Bush had 8 years and Clinton had 8 years and Bush had 4 years and Reagan had 8 years but the kicker is, the Congress is the one responsible for all of it! Holding hearings, oversight and paying for all of it so don't let them even start to pretend it isn't their fault.

Crisis in VA? Think it is new?

If you do then you've trusted the wrong people to tell you the wrong information so you won't blame Congress.

Executive director Hal Dulle of the state veterans commission says too many veterans have to wait too long to be accepted in the Veterans Administration system and then have to wait too long to get the medical help they need.

He says, his office works to get veterans to file for their benefits but the VA lacks the personnel to handle the paperwork efficiently. Dulle says the system isn't broken. He says it just doesn't have enough people to handle the increased number of veterans applying for services. The heavy burden is caused by an influx of Gulf war veterans seeking benefits at the same time many Vietnam veterans have decided after 40 years of not being involved...to sign up.

But once the paperwork is processed and the veteran is in the system----there's a lack of doctors. Dulle says part of that problem is that the VA has limited funds...and in a competitive world, the VA has trouble paying enough to keep the specialists the veterans want to see from going into private practice.

VA in crisis again, Tuesday, December 25, 2007 in when that report came out.

A Redmond veteran says he was refused medical treatment at the Bend VA Clinic, red-flagged and now can't get the treatment he needs for advanced cancer.

Now he's pleading with officials to fix the system, while they say he was a disturbance.

Pill bottles in the dozens line the bedside 52-year-old Jeffery Severns sleeps in in his Redmond living room.

The veteran was a combat nurse all over the world and served in Operation Desert Storm.

But cancer has spread into his shoulder, tailbone, spine, ribs and gall bladder.

Last spring, it was his throat that hurt him the most, so he went to the VA Clinic in Bend without an appointment and begged to be seen, but it didn't happen.

"Since [my vocal cords] were paralyzed, there was too much air going in and out," Severns explained Thursday. "I couldn't speak, so I would have to take in huge amounts of air to take in a few words. So they thought I was weird. They thought because I was anxious, because I thought I was going to die, they thought I was a threat."

Severns says he was red-flagged, a process the Department of Veterans Affairs uses when someone is disruptive, threatening or violent.

He says the Bend clinic refused him service, so he got a ride to Portland's VA Medical Center. He says doctors there were ready to help - until they looked at his file and saw the red flag.

He says he was escorted right out of the building and continues to be banned from the Bend office.

These are some from 2008
29 Patients at Marion VA died because of substandard and questionable care. Dallas VA closes psych unit after 4th suicide of year. 500,000 Rocky Mountain Veterans get shafted Hospital cutbacks spark outrage among veterans.

The planned Aurora medical center would treat 500,000 in the Rocky Mountain region.

But they also blamed VA staff too A mixture of fear and distrust has replaced the pride and pleasure of serving veterans that employees of the Jonathan M. Wainwright Memorial Veterans Affairs Medical Center once had, according to at least one former VA employee. "It's toxic. That's how I would say it. People who have been there for 20 years are getting notices of 30 days," said James Bernasconi.

This is from 2009
A 2004 GAO report stated that though VA had implemented policies and procedures that required medical centers to purchase medical products and services through VA’s contract programs, a VA IG report found that the medical centers continued to make many less cost efficient purchases from local suppliers. The VA IG estimated that, with improved procurement practices at medical centers, VA could have saved, in 2004, about $1.4 billion over 5 years.

Check the facts the next time someone opens their mouth now and ask them where their outrage has been all these years and what they did about it.

Here's one more

Less than three months after Obama took office, this piece of news came out.

A new report about Veterans Affairs Department employees squirreling away tens of thousands of unopened letters related to benefits claims is sparking fresh concerns that veterans and their survivors are being cheated out of money.

VA officials acknowledge further credibility problems based on a new report of a previously undisclosed 2007 incident in which workers at a Detroit regional office turned in 16,000 pieces of unprocessed mail and 717 documents turned up in New York in December during amnesty periods in which workers were promised no one would be penalized.

“Veterans have lost trust in VA,” Michael Walcoff, VA’s under secretary for benefits, said at a hearing Tuesday. “That loss of trust is understandable, and winning back that trust will not be easy.”

Unprocessed and unopened mail was just one problem in VA claims processing mentioned by Belinda Finn, VA’s assistant inspector general for auditing, in testimony before the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee.