Uproar over VA has no teeth if we forget again

Paul Rieckhoff said ”People knew this was going on. If you weren’t outraged, you weren’t paying attention.” and he is right however he failed to mention how long it has been going on. Rieckhoff said that he thinks an OEF or OIF veteran should run the VA in other articles. Disabled veterans have headed the VA before, including Ret. General Eric Shinseki. The problem does not just fall on the shoulders of the head of the VA or any given President. The problem is with all of the members of all the Congresses responsible "To care for him who shall of borne the battle and for his widows and orphans" which is the motto of the VA based on what President Lincoln had to say.

Afghanistan and Iraq veterans have made the news lately however the majority of the veterans in the claim backlog, waiting for promised care, have been Vietnam veterans. They're suffering, waiting and fighting but they are also the majority of the suicides. That says a lot. It says that after all these years, after decades of fighting for all veterans, no matter which party was in control, they were not cared for enough.

Another factor left out of all of this is the care veterans receives actually depends more on where they live than anything else.

Could a Post 9/11 Veteran Revolutionize the VA?
ABC News
By Erin Dooley
Jun 2, 2014

President Obama should choose a post-9/11 vet, or at least someone “extremely familiar” with the community, to replace Eric Shinseki as Veterans Affairs Secretary, a veterans advocacy group insisted today.

“We are the growing need. We are the future,” Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) CEO Paul Rieckhoff said. “We’re not a problem, we are the solution.”

A post-9/11 vet with a thorough understanding of technology could “turn the VA from Borders into Amazon,” better serving the growing number of vets struggling with complex injuries such as traumatic brain injury, he said.

The 200,000-member organization in its 10th year outlined an 8-point plan today to help get the beleaguered VA back on track.

In addition to seeking leadership, Rieckhoff said the VA’s current IT system — which includes the scandal-plagued scheduling system that left veterans waiting months for appointments — is “woefully outdated.”

“And the backlog itself is scandalous,” he continued. “The fact that it got that bad and took that much to get the country to act is, in our opinion, scandalous as well.”

Rieckhoff, himself a veteran of the Iraq war, called for increased presidential leadership, and criticized Obama for his “slow response” to the wait time scandal, which surfaced weeks ago when a whistleblower alleged that hospital executives had been cooking the books to maintain a façade of efficiency.

“It shouldn’t have taken four weeks for the president to respond,” Rieckhoff said. ”People knew this was going on. If you weren’t outraged, you weren’t paying attention.”
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In 2013 they knew there were problems.

Internal Veterans Affairs Department documents show that at least two veterans died last year waiting to see a doctor while others couldn’t get primary care appointments for up to eight months, members of a House oversight and investigations panel said Thursday.

Addressing the ongoing problem of vets who suffer through long waits for appointments at VA hospitals and clinics, House lawmakers joined federal investigators and veterans service organizations in castigating VA on an issue that has endured for more than a decade.

“Evidence shows that many VA facilities, when faced with a backlog of thousands of outstanding or unresolved consultations, decided to administratively close out these requests. Some reasons given included that the request was years old, too much time had elapsed, or the veteran had died,” said Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., chairman of the House Veterans Oversight and Investigations panel.

“This is unacceptable,” said Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz., the panel’s ranking Democrat. “Veterans deserve timely, accessible health care.”